Fate Forgotten (30 page)

“Don’t eat too much, Abby,” Horus said softly. “Your stomach will not thank you for it after living nearly a week on just the broth we spooned down your throat. Had you been anyone else…”

She forced herself to smile. “Had I been anyone else, I would not have suffered a trauma from my brother’s choice to throw himself in front of a bus.”

The humor left the man’s face then. He looked very old when he wasn’t smiling. “You can’t trust him.”

Odd how many people knew Adam. It clearly hadn’t been a well kept secret. “I know my brother, Horus. I know what he wants. I trust that he’ll do everything in his power to achieve it.”

Garrit touched her arm. “
T’as l’air fatiguée.
”

Yes. She felt tired. Drained. And she still ached. Especially her head.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said to the table at large. She smiled at her husband. “I think I’ll go sit in the library in front of the fire.”

Garrit raised her hand to his lips and kissed it before letting her go.

She hated that she found herself wishing it had been Lars’s touch as she walked away.

Eve stared at the journal in her hands and wondered why it was that in a life where she had married for love, she could not stop thinking about other men.

There was Ryam, of course, who haunted her here. Though it only served to make her feel more strongly about her DeLeon family. Intensifying her frustration. Deepening her love. It would have been more unusual if she hadn’t thought of Ryam, looking at his grandchildren. Her grandchildren. Looking at René, who had Ryam’s looks. Certainly though, Ryam had never had René’s sense of humor. He had always been very serious. As if he carried the world on his shoulders.

She could even understand if she thought of Reu. Garrit was incredibly like him, from his habit of running his fingers through his hair, to the way he looked at her, the way he touched her. And all the DeLeon men had Reu’s eyes. But digging up memories of Reu was an effort. She remembered him, remembered her creation and the Garden, but it grew more difficult to bring his face to her mind, and the world was so changed, she could not even imagine how he would have responded to the things she took for granted, now.

Her strongest memories of that life were the terrible parts. Her fear of Adam in the Garden and its burning, the threat of the angels that she had never quite been able to escape. But she remembered clearly the moment when Reu had kissed her and she had known she was meant to be his wife. That much, she did not think she would ever forget.

Thorgrim, though. She sighed and stood up, putting the journal back in its cabinet and moving to the window. The glass was cool, and it felt good against the flush of her cheeks. She forced herself to keep her eyes open, because if she closed them, his face would rise in her mind. Lars’s face, too, and she didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to witness her own betrayal.

She didn’t understand why she kept thinking of Thorgrim. And her memory of that life was astonishingly well preserved. She could revisit each day that they lived together with perfect clarity. In her worst lives, the most difficult ones she had lived, it had been her life with Thorgrim she had returned to, dreamed of, remembered. When she had been hospitalized, it was where she had retreated. She had tricked herself into believing he was present with her, in addition to projecting him to the doctors when she made her escape. She distinctly remembered having conversations with him about the modern world. Telling him stories about the lives they had spent apart. And kissing him.

Oh, kissing him. She trailed her fingers over her lips, and wished she hadn’t remembered that part. As delusions and hallucinations went, she had never achieved anything as real as those moments. She had been able to feel the heat of his body against hers, the soft tickle of his breath against her ear, his lips on her neck. The roughness of his hands on her skin.

She had even, in her insanity, in her desperation, believed that she had made love to him in the night. Her face burned even hotter as she remembered it. Remembered begging him. He had refused her at first. Insisted it wasn’t right. That he shouldn’t. That she wasn’t in her right mind. And she remembered finding it endlessly amusing that her own hallucination should point that out to her. How odd that she had been so aware, and yet so completely caught up in the delusion. Of course she had convinced him. How could she not have convinced her own mind, when she wanted it so badly? And she had so many years of memories of lovemaking with Thorgrim to call upon.

She didn’t think she would ever be able to repeat the experience. The manipulation of her own mind that had allowed her to honestly believe he had been there, that he was touching her, that she was touching him, and that he was inside her.

But that had been a situation she had no desire to ever find herself in again. She never wanted to be so desperate to escape her life that she was forced to manufacture a hallucination so incredible. So real.

The door opened, and she saw the reflection of Thorgrim standing there in the window. No, she reminded herself forcefully as she turned to look at him, not Thorgrim. Lars. He shut the door behind him without a sound, and stared at her. Stared with eyes that devoured her.

She felt as though she were laid bare before him. As though he had known what she was thinking of, what she had been remembering. As if he had been called to her by the memories.

He stepped toward her. Once. Twice.

He crossed the room, and she realized that she wanted him to, and it was as if the thought gave him confidence, because he raised his hand to her face, stroked her cheek and stared into her eyes. He was so tall. She had almost forgotten how tall he was. The top of her head was barely level with his shoulder.

She covered his hand with her own, holding it against her cheek. It had been so long. She had missed Thorgrim so much. His easy confidence. His absolute adoration for her. Like the warmth of a fire in winter. He had made every other man’s love into a mere candle, he had burned so bright and hot.

“This is real,” he said softly, looking into her eyes. “Have no doubt about it.”

And then he drew her against him, lifted her face to his, and kissed her until she couldn’t even remember to breathe, couldn’t remember anything outside of his lips, his mouth, his hands…

“Oh,” she heard herself say, when she could think again enough to talk. His forehead touched hers, allowing the smallest sliver of space between them. “I almost wish you hadn’t done that.”

He chuckled, and his breath tickled her throat as he kissed her jaw. “Only almost?”

He kissed her again, claiming her completely. Long and deep and hard and real. So real she trembled with need, and something dormant inside her bloomed into life—something she had been missing for so long. Too long.

Her heart broke when he let her go, her mind clearing too quickly from the fog of memory, leaving behind the same bone deep certainty that had come with Reu’s kiss.

Because, in this life, she was already married.

Chapter Thirty: Future

Fire and ash and fear, so much fear, bitter on her tongue and souring her stomach. Soot floated from the sky in thick, silver flakes, dusting her hair. The flames hadn’t kept to the Garden itself, the dry grassland outside its gates just so much tinder, encouraging it to spread, burning everything in its path. She could feel the heat on her back as she ran.

The sharp ding of the seatbelt sign jerked her out of the dream, and Eve took a breath of the smoke-free air in the cabin, oddly comforted by the tang of deodorizers and humidifiers. Circulation systems had come a long way, stripping out viruses and bacteria that spread disease on long flights, and somehow, it had only made planes smell worse. But the taint pulled her further from the dream—the memory. Another reminder of how long it had been, how much things had changed. How much Adam had changed, no matter how desperately she tried to cling to the past.

“Prepare for landing,” a woman’s voice chimed, the cadence not quite right, artificial. The seat righted itself into the approved angles, and the table folded itself into the cabin wall. Eve shivered. She’d never quite grown used to that kind of automation. Just like she still hadn’t given up on paper books, or writing things by hand.

She would have preferred to travel by the slower, lower-tech airships, truthfully, but Adam must have gone to a lot of trouble to get her booked on one of the super-sonic high-altitude jets. Normally, someone in her tax bracket wouldn’t come anywhere near the inside of one, never mind on such short notice. She couldn’t fault his generosity, but there was no way she would ever be able to pay him back. Not for this. Not for any of it.

The drop from high-altitude and deceleration pressed her into the cushioning of the seat, and her stomach lurched. What she would have given for a train line across the Atlantic. Something safe and grounded. Compared to wheels, pushed, pulled, on tracks or otherwise, flying was so new. And it had really only been the last two lifetimes that she’d had any experience with it.

Eve closed her eyes, breathing deeply to settle her nerves, and tried to remember. But the flames licking behind her eyelids became the wide, round hearth at the heart of Sparta’s megaron, and Paris—Adam—lifting his cup in silent salute from across the fire, his lips curving with promise and his eyes gathering her in, making her whole body flush. She gripped the armrests and pushed the memory away, counting instead, to distract herself. One-locomotive, two-locomotive, three-locomotive…

The jet landed with another stomach turning jolt and Eve relaxed into the pressure as it slowed. Almost over. Almost there. And soon enough she’d be with her family. Her real family, the DeLeons. She tried to tell herself that was what she wanted most, what she most looked forward to, but she couldn’t stop the twist of her heart when she thought of Adam waiting for her, felt the gentle welcome of his mind against her own. Just the lightest touch, like a butterfly kiss, and a warmth that settled in the pit of her stomach.

Deplaning took another lifetime, and then she was in the terminal, searching eagerly for one dark head among so many. Airports hadn’t changed much in the last century, and the French clung to their liberty. Security officers strolled casually throughout the concourse, sprinkled among the passengers and their families, in plain clothes as well as uniformed, but they didn’t stop husbands from saying goodbye to their wives, or children from clinging to their fathers until the very last boarding call.

Adam stepped forward, his eyes lighting at the sight of her, and her heart picked up speed. This trip wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about whatever they felt for one another, she reminded herself sternly. This trip was about her family. That was all. It sounded hollow even in her own thoughts.

The light died with her lack of response, his forehead furrowing instead, and he took the bag from her shoulder.
After all this time, won’t you forgive me, Evey?

She pressed her lips together and looked away, guilt sitting like lead in her stomach. She’d let him believe she was angry about that kiss, and everything that had come before it, for far too long, and the lie tasted all the more bitter when his pain touched her thoughts.

“How was your flight?” he asked gently.

“I slept most of the way.” She forced a polite smile, but looking at his face only caused her gaze to drift lower. The memory of his kiss, so long ago, bubbled up to the surface of her thoughts, making her flush. She bit the inside of her cheek, but the pain wasn’t enough to distract her. As useless as her memories. “You didn’t have to fly me first class, you know.”

“Nothing but the best for you, Eve. Always.” He smiled back, his eyes searching hers. “Are you all right?”

It had been so much easier when he had been selfish and self-absorbed, too wrapped up in himself and his own needs to notice hers. It had been easier when he had only been her brother-in-law, but the harder she grasped for those feelings from their last life, familial tolerance and safe, sisterly affection, the more they slipped through the cracks of her memory, pushed out by the present. The fit of her hand in his. The bittersweet half-smile when he’d said goodbye. The warmth of his arms, and the scent of his skin, all fresh earth and cinnamon, with just the slightest hint of vanilla. His lips on hers, and the mint of his mouth, feeding the spark of desire.