A cool sensation bathed her brow as Angeline regained consciousness. She had no idea where she was and barely remembered how she had arrived in the first place. She heard muffled voices coming from another room and thought that she recognized the sound of Terri in the throng. But the sound grew fainter as she focused on the cold and glanced towards a bedside table. It held a simple lamp and a digital alarm clock endlessly flashing 12:00am: the break of a new day to infinity. Was this dawn? Or was this midnight, the end of everything?
“So you’re up.”
Angeline’s eyes came into focus, and she realized that a damp cloth was swabbing her sweat away.
Then she saw Kane.
He hovered over her, expressionless, but his hand still worked its way down her face. Angeline’s first instinct was to meet his hand, but then she was slammed back to the space of his rage. Noel had gotten to him, and she feared that he would never believe any other truth that she might speak.
His Blood Brother had that power over him.
“You okay?” he asked.
Somehow she was. She was with him again, and she stretched forward to touch him when a buzz hit her brain.
“I…”
Unable to finish her thought, Angeline sank back to the pillow, and everything came back. Noel’s half-truth, her desperate need to tell him the whole story.
And Kane’s rejection.
“Kane, I have to tell you…”
Her speech was slurred as she struggled to sit up.
“Take it easy,” Kane said. “You almost fell hard.”
It was hazy. Angeline remembered him, miserable, when she tried to confront him with the way in which everything had really gone down. Kane wasn’t having it, and she recalled reaching for something that she might have already lost.
But…
“Guess you caught me,” Angeline said. Kane’s face came into focus. His familiar stubble lingered below his dark eyes, and she tried to touch his face. Remembering how he had flinched at the slightest threat of her touch, she drew back and expected him to bolt with cold words. Something along the lines of she’s fine. Get her out of my sight.
That would be for Terri, and Angeline took some comfort in the fact that her friend was still nearby.
“I’m not a total jerk,” Kane said.
He obviously thought that she was, but she moved past it.
Taking in his face by the pale light of the lone lamp, she saw the subtle ways in which he had changed. Little lines here and there, circles that were probably ever-present under his eyes now. Five years never seemed that long, but when she saw his face, Angeline choked on a sob at the thought of how much time they had lost.
But maybe she could still…
“You don’t have to hate me,” she whispered.
Kane started to speak but simply sighed. Silently, he ran the cool cloth down her face. His fingers just grazed her cheeks, and Angeline welcomed any return of his touch. Still, she needed his voice. She loved listening to the ragged lilt. As hard as he tried, sometimes he sounded like the little boy who had run away from home instead of the biker that brought her to new heights. It was hard to reconcile the two, but Angeline knew that his heart was somewhere in the middle.
“I could never hate you,” Kane said slowly.
And there it was.
Angeline’s heart came to a quiet rest. He had seemed so cold, so brutal when they met in the moonlight. She was sure that he would curse her memory and run so far away that she could never hope to hold him again.
Now, even in her dazed state, she took a chance.
“Thank you,” Angeline whispered. She ran her hands through his wild hair, and her heart flipped when she thought she saw him smile at the return of her hands. The feel of him throbbing inside her was one thing, nearly the best of things. But the quiet moments after, when she could linger around other parts of him, had brought her the most joy. Sometimes she fought to stay awake just to watch him sleep. If he stayed in the place of a blissful dream, Angeline delighted at that sight. Every so often he bolted awake, in the throes of some terror. And she was grateful to be there, ready to hold him. Smoothing her hands down his broad back, Angeline would bring a whisper to his ear and assure him that he was safe.
“I… I kind of missed this,” Kane said.
Hoping that he would remember more, give her a chance to talk without rushing away, she strained toward his lips. Kane nearly let her meet his mouth, when he turned his head from her eyes.
He was already on his feet, starting towards the door.
“Kane… wait.”
Angeline grew more and more awake at the sight of him slipping away. If she let him out the door, Kane would collect Terri, probably ask her to see that she made it home okay, and the last words she would ever hear from him would be his want to never see her again.
“Kane!”
The knob of the cracked door was in his hand, but Kane still turned to face her. Frantically scanning his eyes for something to hold onto, Kane’s stare was simply sad, and Angeline worked fast.
“I did it,” she confessed. “I… I was with Noel.”
For a solid second, Kane gave her no indication of the hurt that had to be hitting his heart. But she had to explain. She just needed one more—
“At least you’re still kind of honest,” Kane said, sadness surrounding his voice. Gathering her strength, Angeline crawled to the edge of the bed and reached for him. He was nearly under her hands when Kane flinched.
“Don’t go,” she said, her head still spinning. “I just have to—”
“Angeline…”
Still not Angel. Would she ever be his Angel again?
“Look,” Kane said. “Don’t try to spin it. Noel told me.”
Angeline had a pretty good idea of what Noel must have said. She had needed it, wanted it. But there was always more to the story.
“So let me just get your… your friend, and let’s call it—”
“I thought that that I had lost you,” she muttered. “Forever.”
Looking into his eyes, she saw his gaze shift into a mix of confusion and, possibly, hope on the wind of her words.
“He… Noel said that you were never coming back,” Angeline continued. “And I… I don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” Kane said.
Angeline held her tongue as he stepped back to the bed. Tentatively, he sat on the edge, just inches from her touch, and she ducked her head.
“Angel?”
At the sound of that, she glanced up. Kane’s eyes were fixed on her face, intense. Yet she relaxed for the first time in years around his stare.
“Why did you think that?” Kane asked.
Angeline drifted back to place where Noel had given her the worst news imaginable. And in that moment, she couldn’t feel anything. Not even Noel’s hands.
“Why, Angel?”
It sounded better the second time around, and Angeline grew bolder.
“He said that you’d were dead to me,” Angeline managed. “I never thought that he would lie about that. And I… I…”
Kane’s eyes were full of fury, but somehow she continued.
“I was not unfaithful,” she said.
“Why the hell would Noel—?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was to punish me. Or to keep you in line. But…”
Rape. She had told Noel as much, and there was no other word for it. He had taken her on the back of a lie, and the thought of it infuriated her.
“But he said that you were never coming back,” she said.
Kane struggled around the truth and didn’t seem to believe it.
“Why would he—?”
“You tell me?” she asked.
Kane bristled at her tone and started to shift away from her. She should have reached for him, but he was still locked in the lie. Only her words would make him understand.
If he believed them…
“You tell me why your fucking friend told me that I was never going to see you again?” she asked. “I… I cried when he said that. I didn’t know where the hell I was or what I was doing.”
“I…”
He was struggling to make sense of it. In another life, she might have stretched forward to calm him, soothe the bad thoughts away from his tense back. But now, seeing him on the verge of believing her, Angeline just kept talking.
“So I let him take me,” she said. “And I…”
Biting on her lip, she tried hard not to cry. It was a battle that she knew she was losing, and a part of her thought that he would accuse her of trying to soften his heart.
But she had to tell him everything before he went back.
“And I hated it while it was happening,” she said. “I hated myself even more when it was done. But do you really think…?”
She couldn’t go on. He had to get the picture now. And if he didn’t, if he still believed in Noel above all else, then—
Kane gathered her in his arms. His eyes were firm but warm as he stroked her cheek.
“And that’s the only reason?” he asked.
Angeline fought to speak as she saw the tenderness that she had missed return to his face.
“Do you… I never would have let him touch me if I thought that you… That you…”
She couldn’t finish the thought. Noel had made him dead, and now he was here.
“No,” Kane finally said.
He was holding her, caressing her. Five years. So long. Too long. Maybe she should have hit Noel then, rushed to the prison in spite of Kane’s order and seen for herself. Kane deserved better, and she choked on the thought that she might lose him all over—
“You… you had to be really scared, right?”
And he finally understood.
Exhausted by the day and her memory of the night, Angeline rested her weary head against his broad chest and sighed, the scent of his sweet sweat seeping into her veins.
“Terrified,” she whispered. “I tried to say no, but…”
Her voice trailed off at the memory of Noel’s rough hands ripping her blouse from her anguished body. And then the words, the words that she was too weak to resist. Angeline was still new to Kane’s world, his code, and maybe it was expected. Maybe she was supposed to serve his brother, his mentor once the love of her life was seemingly lost.
“But what?” Kane asked.
Snapping out of her reverie, Angeline slowly looked into his dark eyes, suddenly brimming with a lethal cocktail of sorrow and rage, and she was tempted to spin some story that might keep Kane safe. She could say that Noel had seemed kind, that she wanted and even enjoyed his comfort. But now, seeing Kane resurrected, feeling his hands tracing tender lines down her back even as his jaw clenched, Angeline could be nothing but totally, brutally honest.
“He said that it was what you would want,” Angeline said. “So I… So I didn’t fight him.”
Unable to face the prospect of how her words might hit his ears, Angeline slammed her lids shut and waited. Kane’s hands stopped moving about her body. When she could stand the silence and the stillness no longer, Angeline started to look.
But not before she felt him slipping away.
“Kane, please don’t—”
He turned in the doorway, cutting her off, and Angeline moved back to the edge of the bed. As she reached for him, Kane held up his palm, freezing her where she knelt.
“It should never have happened,” he said.
Angeline started to nod, when he pounded his fist into his hand.
“So now I have to deal with it.”
She waited less than a second before bolting from the bed, catching his arm on the landing. She could see Terri and his family looking up with a mixture of shock and scorn as she desperately tried to wrestle him back to the room.
“No,” she begged. “We’re together. It doesn’t matter now.”
“How the hell can you say that?”
Kane’s strength was too much for her to contain. As Kane broke away, he started running down the stairs. Angeline chased him to main floor, pleading the entire way.
“Angie! You okay?” Terri asked.
Not hearing her, trying to ignore the derision in Jeremy’s eyes, Angeline forced her way to his side just in time to see him mounting his bike.
“Kane!” she screamed. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me again!”
But before she could touch him again, his motor revved up and he peeled off into the night, leaving her standing, shaking, as exhaust fumes swirled all around her.