“Niall is human,” she said, listening to the sound of her voice as if it belonged to another woman. “How can he understand?”
“Understand what? That you cannot be collared like a dog? That he does not own you?”
His contempt might as well have been aimed at her. He expected her to spurn the world she had always known, pretend it didn’t matter. In that she had failed. Failed his expectation, failed herself, and failed him.
She would have preferred any other way, any other time and place, to tell him. But there was no escaping it. He would stand there, naked to her eyes, his body fluent as his tongue was not, and hear her make her choice.
Feel nothing. Cut off your senses. Pretend you have no need, no wanting, no heart.
“Morgan,” she said, “I am going with Niall, back to Denver. I will never see you again.”
Morgan heard the words. They were clear, precise, dispassionate, as if Athena were reciting a lesson from the McGuffey’s Reader Morgan remembered from childhood.
He heard the words, but they made no sense. The only thing that did was the clamoring of his body, the hot yearning for Athena, the need to finish what he had begun in her room. Finish it completely, and to hell with Niall Munroe and all the scruples of human society.
She sat there, so prim in her gown buttoned up to the neck, hands clasped in her lap. He might have been a supplicant before a queen, as he had once thought of the society women who fluttered about her chair.
But she had not been a queen when he had caressed her. She had been helpless with need, prepared to surrender everything… yes, even the maidenhood her kind valued so highly. If he had chosen to take it. But he had been undecided, torn between his desire and freedom, between the life he thought he wanted and the bonds her surrender would wind about his neck.
If he listened to his body now, the decision was simple. If Athena made a single welcoming gesture, gave him one sweet look of yearning…
“I am going with Niall,” she had said. “I will never see you again.”
Stupid words. Meaningless, born of habitual fear of her brother, the habit of obedience. And fear, too, of him and what he made her become.
Very well. He would decide, here and now. Every instant they had spent together, every memory of her when they were apart, led to this.
He held out his hand. “Come,” he said. “We will leave now. Tonight. Your brother will never find us.”
She stared at his hand. “What?”
“Put away your fear.” He took a step toward her. “You are not a human. You will heal quickly, now that you know your injuries are in your mind and not your body. Soon you will be able to run. And before that—now—you can Change.”
Stark terror crossed her face. “Change… I… No, Morgan. It’s been too long—”
“Stop.” He stared down at her, willing her all the courage he knew she had. “Stop believing what you can’t do. Believe in what you are. Take off your clothes and come with me.”
As quickly as it had come, her fear was gone. “Come where, Morgan?”
Her question sent ice trickling down the length of his spine. He had asked her to come with him. To become—yes, to become his mate, to remain with him until death. He had offered to another person the thing he had thought long dead in himself. And she asked “where.”
“With me,” he said. “Into the woods. The mountains. We’ll run, you and I, as we did in dreams. We will hunt and breathe clean air and drink water that has never tasted the metal of man. You will be free, Athena.”
“Free?” She dropped her head, and her shoulders rose and fell in a shudder. “What is freedom?”
He heard the tears in her voice and closed the space between them, reached for her, clasped her shoulder and felt it tense in his gentle grip.
“You created your own cage, and let your brother make the bars too strong to break,” he said. “But I can break them. I will teach you everything you need to know. I will protect you until you can protect yourself. I will never leave your side.”