Chapter Ten

As a child, Ivan had learned to sleep lightly.

During his mother’s worst dark periods, he would awaken at the slightest whisper or creak of floorboards. Sometimes, if he left his room and caught her wandering, he could head off a spiral. He’d lead her back to bed, or to the overstuffed chair in the corner of their tiny sitting room. She’d gather him close and bury her face in his hair and tell him to be like his father, to be good, over and over, until sleep dragged her back down.

Maricela’s nightmare started with a whimper.

Ivan’s eyes shot open at the first sound, and he stared at the darkness above him until he heard it again--soft and terrified, a low noise ripped from an unwilling throat.

He tossed his blanket aside and was over the back of the couch before it came again. In the dim moonlight filtering through the window, he saw movement on the bed--Maricela twisting fitfully, tangled up in her ridiculous duvet.

Her face looked stricken, and his heart clenched.

“Maricela.” No response as he crossed to the bed and slid one knee onto it so he could reach her in the middle of its vast expanse. His fingers encountered a bare shoulder, and her skin felt feverish. He shook her gently. “Maricela, wake up.”

“No.” Her fingernails raked over his upper arm as she clawed at him. “No.”

“Maricela.” He dragged the heavy covers away from her and pulled her upright. “It’s Ivan. Look at me.”

“How--” Her voice, thick with emotion, broke. “How could you?”

She still wasn’t seeing him. He cupped her flushed face, his heart thudding painfully as he choked back panic. He smoothed his thumbs over her tear-streaked cheeks and lowered his voice to a soothing murmur. “Come on, Maricela. Come back to me.”

After what seemed like an eternity, her gaze focused on his face, and she mouthed his name.

“Yes, it’s Ivan.” He stilled his thumbs, but he couldn’t pull his hands away. Not when she looked so lost. “Do you know where you are?”

She nodded. “I’m okay. Just a bad dream.”

Reluctantly, he released her and sat back on the edge of the bed. “It sounded really bad.”

After a moment, she sighed. “Yes. But I don’t know how to talk about it.” She drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “What do you know about the day Gideon was almost assassinated?”

Not a comfortable topic for a Rider. Ivan had been in Sector Three that day, tasked with helping to get the new joint hospital operational. “I know that Eden used the family of one of the kitchen workers to pressure the man into trying to kill Gideon. Donny shot Gideon, but Gideon managed to take him down before he collapsed.”

“And I found them and called for help.” Maricela nodded. “It’s a nice story. Plausible, with no holes. It fits the timeline. It could have happened.”

His heart had been racing. Now it felt frozen in his chest. “It didn’t?”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. “I was working in the solarium when I heard the gun go off. Gideon’s study is just down the hall, so I went to ask him if everything was okay. He was--he was bleeding, but conscious. And Donny had the gun.”

She didn’t say anything else, and Ivan had the sick feeling he knew where this was going. But it was hard to look at her like this--so small in the middle of the huge bed, curled in on herself, fragile in spite of all of her strength, because she never, ever gave herself a break. “What happened?”

“I had to stop him from hurting Gideon again.” She licked her lips, and her eyes lost focus, like she was looking at something very far away. “I tried to disarm him, and he hit me. We struggled. He must have dropped the gun somewhere, because he pulled a knife. I took it, and I stabbed him with it. I stabbed him until he stopped moving.”

The mental image of Maricela lunging at a man with a gun was its own special brand of nightmare fodder. He could see it so vividly, too. She was fearless in defense of the people she loved, reckless with her own safety.

He wanted to shake her. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her until the fear at what might have happened that day stopped eating him up inside.

He wanted to make that lost look in her eyes go away. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“I didn’t,” she mumbled. “At least, that’s what everyone thinks. That God struck Donny down, or Gideon killed him, or the guards or one of the Riders. No one suspects the truth because it’s so unfathomable.”

Of course it was. Who could look at her like this, or when she worked in the gardens or handed out sweets to children or walked among her people, granting blessings, and think that she was capable of taking a knife and plunging it into a man until he bled out?

She hunched further in on herself, and he realized that his shocked silence was only proving her point. That if anyone learned her dark, violent secret, they’d never be able to look at her the same way again, because murder was incompatible with Sector One’s princess.

Ivan shifted more fully onto the bed and opened his arms. “Come here.”

“No.” She started unbuttoning the top of her nightgown, then paused. “Can you keep a secret?”

After all the burning tension that had passed between them, watching her bare the tops of her breasts should have been seductive. But her pain seethed in the air, and the moment felt like it was balanced on the edge of something dangerous, as if one wrong move would send her into a fall he couldn’t protect her from. “Of course.”

Wordlessly, she shrugged her arms free of her gown, then clutched the white fabric to her chest and turned away from him.

The smooth skin over her ribs was interrupted by a splash of black ink so unexpected that he simply stared at it, his mind unable to process the meaning.

Clarity hit him like a knife to the heart.

Maricela had a raven.

She took a deep breath. “Del didn’t want to do it. She tried to set a penance for me instead, but I couldn’t take it. You understand why, don’t you?”

“No.” Surely if anyone deserved leniency, it was Maricela. A year of service to wipe the stain from her soul would have been nothing. Her entire life was service. “I don’t understand.”

“Only through contrition of heart and deed may you find absolution,” she recited woodenly. “You can’t repent unless you regret your actions. You have to be sorry for what you’ve done.” Slowly, she turned to him, her dark eyes burning with intensity. “I’m not sorry. I’d do it again if I had to. Every day.”

Now he was the one balanced precariously on the cliff’s edge. There was nothing fragile about Maricela now. With the weight of the secret gone from her shoulders, she was fierce--less like her gentle mother and more like her aunt, Santa Adriana, the woman who had fought alongside her bodyguard more often than she’d hidden behind him.

Maricela was glorious. She was a little intimidating.

She was waiting for him to say something. “I’m going to make sure you don’t have to do it again.”

The banked fury in her gaze eased, and she smiled as she reached out. “You know what? I believe you.”

Her fingers brushed his cheek, and Ivan remembered something else about Adriana.

She’d fallen in love with her bodyguard.

Warmth spread out from the tips of Maricela’s fingers. He was so damn attuned to her now that his body stirred from that contact alone. She was only using one hand to hold up her nightgown now, and the fabric dipped low, revealing the outer curve of one breast.

It would be so, so easy to fall into this. In the darkness, in silence. If neither of them spoke, neither could say we can’t. Just hands and mouths and finally, finally getting more than stolen, forbidden touches.

His hand flexed in anticipation of stroking her. But her fingers trembled on his cheek, and he knew he couldn’t. Not with the weight of her revelations between them, or with her vulnerability still so close to the surface.

Ivan could survive a lot of sexual frustration. He couldn’t survive being something Maricela regretted.

Moving slowly, he reached out and caught the edges of her nightgown. He coaxed it back up, guiding her arms back into it before carefully refastening each button.

The bed was so big that three more people could have joined them with room to spare. He shoved two pillows up toward the headboard and scooted up. Then he held out his arms. “Come here,” he repeated.

She curled up against him and rested her head on his shoulder. Sweet. Trusting.

His chest hurt again.

Her hair spilled across his arm. He drew his fingers through the silken strands, coaxing them away from her cheek, and she relaxed with a soft noise of pleasure.

It loosened the band in his chest. It tightened other places. But Ivan smiled and let his fingers sink deeper into her hair, until he could drag his fingernails lightly over her scalp. “Want me to talk?”

“No, just...” Her hand clenched in his shirt. “Don’t leave me.”

That was the one promise he could make to her, for as long as he was alive. “I won’t.”