“I don’t—I don’t know. Please.” She heaved, and it was only partly deception. “Please—”
“It’s all right, ma’am.” He hesitated. “We can talk to you later if you’ll just stay here where we can reach you. We have other witnesses who heard Kieran Holt threaten the deceased yesterday afternoon.”
Threaten. Kieran had threatened Peter in front of the bar. She had heard it, and Luke Gévaudan, and others.
“Here’s my card, ma’am. If Mr. Holt returns, if you see him, please contact me immediately.”
She took the card automatically and stared at the plain block lettering. Her vision blurred, running white card and black letters into a mass of gray.
“You think,” she said, swallowing the sour taste of sickness. “You think Kieran—”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Warrington. But we have reason to believe it was murder.”
Chapter 12
His mouth tasted foul when he woke.
Kieran brushed the dead leaves from his hair, uncurling from the nest he’d made under the old log. The snow hadn’t reached into this haven; he’d felt almost comfortable here last night, wrapped in ancient memories of a time when he and Alexandra had still been innocent.
But any sense of peace fled the moment he came fully awake. Because then the newer memories returned, un purged by sleep, reinforced by the nightmare that left him tasting the acrid sweetness of blood.
The nightmare. Kieran rolled over onto his back, filling the narrow space. He tried to focus on the fading images that had survived the coming of dawn.
In the dream, he had hunted as a wolf.
Kieran’s stomach twisted, though he knew it had long since emptied its contents. The dream had been so real. Stalking. Glorying in the hunt. Alexandra had been in it, and Peter. There was more, but when Kieran tried to make the images come clear his mind rebelled. He came up against a wall, a cage that held the beast in darkness.
A nightmare. A warning. He’d had all the warnings he needed now, and a surfeit of bitter truth.
He had been… an animal, last night as well as in the dream. Drink and anger and Peter’s words had driven him to ignore Alexandra’s pain over her loss of her father, the problems she faced even without his contributions. He’d been driven by some insanity to prove he was human, to act out what he had never dared believe possible.
That Alexandra could be his. That he could make her want him as a man, when he knew it could never be.
He’d almost succeeded. Alexandra had been in his arms, responding as she’d never responded before, as if she were accepting him as her mate. But in the end…
It was better this way, for both of them. Whatever Alexandra chose to do with her life—with Peter, and with her newfound wealth—she could do it freely. No more obligations. No more promises.
Kieran clenched his fists, welcoming the pain in his hands. They were scraped and raw, though he didn’t remember how they’d come to be so. There’d been little rationality in anything he did last night. He looked out of the hollow, noting the angle of the sun. Already it was after noon, and he remembered nothing of the past hours but running, taking shelter… and the dream.
No. There was something else. Kieran pulled into a crouch, breathing in the late winter air. Something else had come to him this morning, while he slept. Or perhaps last night when he’d run himself into exhaustion with so little conscious thought.
It was not a physical thing he could touch or taste or smell. But it returned to him now: a revelation, memory brilliant as summer lightning.
A goal. A reason to go on.
He remembered feeling this compulsion once before, like a sweet voice calling. But other voices had filled his mind then: Alexandra’s, and that unknown and familiar Voice inside himself that mocked and taunted.
No longer. Now no other purpose distracted him from the summons within him, could prevent him from following where it led. For it gave him a message as clear as speech, or the subtler languages of the forest. If he concentrated on the call, he had no need to think or feel.