“I want to take you to a safer place, somewhere away from here.” His sweeping gesture took in the charred remains of his once beautiful home.
Raven’s head remained down. She simply breathed in and out. Mikhail touched her mind again. There was no thought of blame or betrayal. Her mind was fragmented, bruised and broken, trying desperately to survive. Her familiar clothes and his presence gave her a measure of comfort. His ice-cold fury, his need for violent retaliation stirred to life.
“Little sister.” Jacques emerged from the edge of the timberline, flanked by Gregori. When Raven didn’t look up, Jacques sat beside her, his hand brushing her shoulder. “The wolves are quiet tonight. Did you hear them before? They were mourning the loss of Mikhail’s home. Now they are silent.”
She blinked, her lost gaze focusing on Jacques’s face. She didn’t speak; his identity didn’t seem to register. She was trembling, her small frame shaking, locked between the three powerful men.
You could remove her memories. Gregori suggested, clearly not understanding why Mikhail did not do the obvious.
She would not like such a thing.
She would not know. Gregori put a small edge in his tone. He sighed when Mikhail did not respond. Allow me to heal her, then. She is important to all of us, Mikhail. She suffers needlessly.
She would want to do this on her own. Mikhail was well aware that Gregori thought he had lost his mind, but he knew Raven. She had her own courage, and her own ideas of right and wrong. She would not thank him when she learned he had removed her memories. There could be no untruths between lifemates, and Mikhail was determined to give her time to come to terms with what they had endured together.
Mikhail found the rose-petal-soft skin of her face, traced her delicate cheekbones with gentle fingers. “You were right, little one. We will build our home together, stronger than ever. We will pick a place, deep within the forest, and fill it with so much love, it will spill over to our wolves.”
Her blue-violet gaze flickered with sudden awareness, jumping to Mikhail’s face. The tip of her tongue touched her full lower lip. She managed a tentative smile. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a Carpathian.” Her voice was a mere thread of sound.
“You are everything a Carpathian woman should be,” Gregori said gallantly, his tone low and melodious, a soothing, healing cadence. Both Mikhail and Jacques found themselves listening intently to the compelling pitch. “You are fit to be the lifemate of our prince, and I give you freely my allegiance and my protection, as I have given it to Mikhail.” His voice deliberately was pitched low, so that it seeped into her fragmented mind like a soothing balm.
Raven’s shattered gaze swung to Gregori. Her long lashes fluttered, her eyes so dark they were nearly purple. “You helped us.” Her fingers sought and found Mikhail’s, entwined with his, yet her gaze never left Gregori’s face. “You were so far away. The sun was out, yet you knew, and you were able to help us. It was difficult for you; I felt it even as you reached for me to take away what I could not endure.”
The silver eyes, pale in Gregori’s dark face, narrowed to a slash of quicksilver. Mesmerizing. Hypnotic. The voice lowered an octave. “Mikhail and I are bound together; we have shared long, dark years of emptiness without hope. Perhaps you represent hope for both of us.”
Raven regarded him steadily, seriously. “That would please me.”
Mikhail felt a surge of love for her wash over him, a surge of pride. Raven had so much compassion in her. Although she was mentally bruised and battered, although Gregori’s mind was firmly closed to them, his harsh features impossible to read, she realized that Gregori was fighting to survive, that he needed to be drawn into the circle of light, of hope. Mikhail could have told her that Gregori was like water flowing through fingers—impossible to hold or control. He was a law unto himself, a dark, dangerous man on the edge of a yawning abyss of madness.