She pushed deliberately into his weakness. “If I were to go now, out the door, what would you do to stop me?” The words were flat and almost indifferent. “Would we keep doing this until we both collapse with exhaustion or kill each other?”
Luke blinked, breaking the stare. Her victory. His wordless denial sparked like an electric current, briefly piercing her armor of ice. The thought of killing her, harming her, losing control, profoundly shocked him. The possibility of it made him tremble. For an instant Joey almost lost her grasp on the power that let her fight. His face—his face was nakedly vulnerable, so filled with yearning and desperation that she felt herself begin to shake in sympathy. And she felt what he felt his rage, his fear, his need.
“You can’t leave in the dead of winter.” It was a last desperate argument, there was a flare of hope in Luke’s eyes, and Joey fought to keep from closing hers. “It’s too dangerous, too.”
“Have you forgotten, Luke?” she murmured with infinite sadness. “I’m like you.”
And before she could weaken, before her will could falter and send her into his arms, before he made her forget everything once more, she turned her newfound power on him again and made him understand.
Chapter Twenty-One
She was gone.
Luke came back to consciousness, awakening slowly to that terrible knowledge, feeling it to the core of his being even when bones and muscles were useless things beyond his control, when the world still trembled on the verge of oblivion.
She had left him. Her final words echoed in memory. Like him. She was like him.
Somehow he staggered from the sofa, lurched to his feet. His vision cleared, blurred again with the red haze behind his eyes. She had left him.
How much time had passed? How long had he lain here, insensible, after she had defeated him? His time sense was distorted, for it felt as if she had been gone for a lifetime. Luke felt a dull amazement that the twisted knot of his heart continued to beat.
The bond—the bond between them was there, almost vanished, strangled to a thin trickle of emotion that told him she was alive. No more.
He had faced total defeat only once in his life, nothing within his unawakened power had allowed him to save his mother when he had cried over her in Val Cache. She had gone beyond his reach forever. And now Joey—Joey had done the same, abandoning him to a slow fading death, half of his soul ripped away.
Everything had come crashing down, all the rightness that had been between them, the close and private world they had created, the happiness she refused to accept as real. She regarded it all as a delusion he had forced upon her.
And she had found the surest revenge. The curse that had killed his mother repeated itself, tragically and inevitably.
Luke wandered blindly across the room, vaguely aware of the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the cabin window. The floor was icy under his bare feet. Her assault had left his mind dulled, the brilliant predator’s edge worn down by despair. And yet, somewhere deep within himself, he found pride in her newfound strength, the way she had faced him, stood up to him. Defeated him. They were mated truly. Her stubborn pride and her fear of feeling—of losing herself and all the careful barriers she had built in a lifetime of loneliness—blinded her to that soul-deep understanding.
But that he understood it meant nothing. She had left him.
He moved about the cabin as his strength returned, touching every place she had touched. Her scent lingered, but it was many hours old, and the fires had been carefully extinguished.
An urgency came over him then, some half-forgotten instinct of self-preservation that sparked dormant anger. His muscles contracted, adrenaline charging his body like an electric current.
No. The denial came from the deepest part of himself, refusing acceptance, unable to endure defeat. A growl rumbled in his chest, nothing human in the sound.
It was not rationality that drove him as he flung himself into the kitchen and beyond into the bedroom, the drawers hung open, empty of her things. He found the chemise and held it to his face, drawing in the smell of her, letting the silk slide from his hands to the floor.