With a tingle in his upper jaw, his fangs dropped down. It was clear he was going to have to get this going, and that was fine with him. Anything… for her.
Except just as he was going to score his own flesh, as she had done for him in her clinic, something hit the inside of his wrist, a droplet.
A tear.
“Oh, Nadya.”
“We’ll say goodbye after this.” Her voice was firm as she wiped her eyes like she was clearing her emotions away, too. “We go our separate ways.”
He cursed under his breath. “I don’t know why that’s so important to you—”
“Because I know what you’re going to do now.”
“Excuse me?”
She retucked the blanket a little tighter as she looked over at him. “I know what you’re going to do as soon as we’re finished. You’re going to go and find out who killed Cordelhia.”
A cold wash went throughout his body. Was it shock—or something else? “How, ah, how do you know about her?”
“You spoke of her in your delirium. So I’m very aware of what happened after you were drugged by that sherry… I know what you woke up to, and what happened next… I know everything you lost.”
Kane cleared his throat. “I wasn’t aware I was so verbal with all that.”
She nodded. “You told the story over and over again. It was as if your mind was churning over the events, trying to create another outcome from the fact pattern. I’ve done this myself so I know what it’s like, the obsessive rethinking, reimagining. It changes nothing, and yet you do it—”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Oh, I know that.” Her eyes were direct. “Unprovoked violence is not in your nature, not even with a stranger, and much less someone you love as much as you love her. That’s why I need to go my own way, you see.”
Kane shook his head. “No, I don’t see. At all.”
Nadya took a deep breath. Then she smiled in a stiff way, the false expression the kind of thing somebody does when they’re attempting to camouflage a vulnerability with nonchalance. “I can’t watch youahvengeanother, even though it is not only your right, but a sign of how much yourshellanmeant to you.”
“You don’t have to worry about my safety. I’m going to be careful.”
“That’s not the deepest why, I’m afraid.”
As her hand went to her eyes once again, he caught the scent of more tears, fresh as an ocean breeze. He wanted to reach out for her, to ease her in some way, in any way, but he knew she would move out of his reach.
“Nadya—”
She straightened herself and folded her hands in her lap, like she was gathering some kind of physical strength from the composure. “I have come to care for you—and not just as a patient or a friend. I suppose it doesn’t reflect well on my character, professional or otherwise, but we cannot change our emotions. We can only endure them.” Her hand brushed her cheeks with impatience. “So yes, that’s the truth of why I must go. I find being reminded of your love for another an intolerable pain, and how stupid is that.”
Kane just sat there for a moment, his mind replaying her words and trying to make sure he’d heard them right.
“I didn’t imagine it,” he whispered.
“Imagine?”
“I felt the warmth of you. All along. I used to anticipate it. After you would work around the clinic—cleaning and moving things—you’d come sit with me and I focused on you to try to get out of the pain. You were my lighthouse in the darkness. I used to get so impatient for you to finish what you were doing and come back to me.”
“I didn’t know you were so aware.”
“Of you, I was aware of everything.”
Abruptly, he thought of Cordelhia, picturing what he remembered of the way she looked and scented, dressed and spoke. The memories of his blond, waifish betrothed were not as sharp as they had been back in the beginning of his incarceration, the details of her dulled as if his recollections had been worn down by too much examination.
And then he remembered the choice he had made the night before: To stay alive and help Nadya, rather than go unto the Fade to be reunited with his mate.