Page 18 of A Shot in the Dark (Fated Mates Collection | Triple Threat #1)

W aking, I find Boots twitching again. His upper lip lifts, quivers. He growls out another string of strange words and begins to shake.

I seldom watch Boots sleep, but this seems stranger than normal…

I think back to one of the many conversations he’s cut short.

Is this the result of some nightmare or some psychic scar resulting from PTSD?

My heart aches at the idea that Boots lies within arm’s reach, beside me, and suffering.

Stretching out tentatively to stroke his cheek, his hair, to soothe him, his eyes fly open, flashing silver, and his hand is around my neck?—

—squeezing—

lifting me off the mattress.

My hands fly to his, fingers grappling, prying, desperate to release his grip on my throat, but he stares straight through me with unseeing eyes, his mouth set like stone.

Killing me.

“Boooootsss—” I wheeze, but he doesn’t hear me. I kick out with all my strength and nail him in the gut, severing his grip and sending him sprawling to the floor.

He’s up at once, a wildness in his eyes, a savage snarl on his lips. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear his teeth sharpen, growing longer?—

I need a strategy… Scrambling backwards, I press my body to the bed’s cheap headboard and the wall behind it as I crouch, teetering on the mattress. I roll my fingers into fists and shout, “BOOTS!” It comes out not as a scream but a battlecry.

Those silver eyes flicker and flash and then he launches toward me, exclaiming “Fuck-fuck-fuck! Baby … I’m so sorry.

” He reaches for me with the same hand that was just around my throat and I can’t help but flinch.

“I…” He leaps back, away from the bed, away from me, hands in his hair, silver eyes wide as saucers, horror etched in the freshly forming lines marring his face. “I—I have to go.”

He pulls on his khakis, grabs his flannel, his cigarettes, sunglasses, and bursts out the door.

It takes me a moment to unwind myself from where I’m barely holding myself together.

The man who brings me such pleasure with his body, easily wields equal measures of pain.

Did all of my needling and teasing—my asking for more and more information—trigger something inside him?

What have I really pressed him for? His name?

What sort of life is it when asking for a name is too much?

“He’s tired,” I tell myself as I unfold my arms, my legs, and cautiously pad to the room’s phone. That’s all it is, he’s still exhausted. His defenses are down. He simply needs to recoup some more rest. I dial the front desk. “We need another night.”

“Another night, huh? Okay. What’ll that be? Cash or card?”

“Uhh…I have cash.”

“Great. Bring it to the front desk now and I’ll get everything set up for you.”

“I—” I can’t take money and head across the parking lot to pay the man… Boots would kill me… The thought makes my hand fly protectively to my neck again.

“We’re a popular place and—between you and me? We don’t often have rooms blocked off for more than a couple hours. I currently only have your room and one other available for an…extended stay. So whatever you’re gonna do, make it fast.”

“Card,” I murmur. “I have a card.”

The deal done, I try to keep my sense of growing anxiety at bay.

I straighten the room, fluff the pillows, make the bed, hungry to regain some sense of control.

No matter how I rearrange things, nothing feels right about this except the feeling of Boots wrapped around me, Boots’ breath in my ears, Boots between my legs—the physical reassurance of the metaphysical bond we now share.

Watching the door, I realize I’m chewing my fingernails—and I never chew my fingernails. They cost too much to maintain. With a sigh, I decide to go in search of Boots. The bond lets me know he’s still near, but I can’t quite place him exactly. How near is near?

I find him on the walkway outside our room, smoking, his hand trembling. “Shhh,” I soothe, moving into his hesitant embrace to take the cigarette and crush it underfoot.

“I…”

“Shhh.” I lead him back inside, seat him on the bed and take off his glasses to wipe at the tears I’m startled to find glinting on his lashes.

“If it hadn’t been for your kick and the bond….” He shakes his head, looks away, and I feel his pain like it’s my own. “I could have really hurt you.”

A sigh slips out of me. “You would never hurt me—not intentionally,” I whisper. “You didn’t mean it. I know that. I can feel the truth of you. Here.” I set his hand to my heart. “The bond… I know the truth that’s in your heart, too.”

“Then you know that?—”

“—you hate yourself right now.”

His gaze drops in agreement, in admission.

“Then you can feel this in me…” I shift his hand, lifting it higher so it rests at the base of my throat.

For a second I think I glimpse fear in his eyes—then I feel it. “It’s okay,” I press my hand more firmly against his, and to my chest. “Feel my heart. I know you hate yourself right now. Now,” I squeeze his hand, “trust that you shouldn’t.”

He closes those unnaturally beautiful eyes of his and focuses a moment as if he’s listening for something in the distance. The muscle in his jaw jumps, and when he opens his eyes again there’s such a sense of wonder in them it’s as if I feel something beautiful and wild blooming in me.

Blooming between us.

But this is only temporary.

And yet, for the next few hours he keeps his distance, painfully careful around me.

Tender and soft. A shadow of the powerhouse I know him to be.

I feel every sad beat of his heart as if it’s my own, and I try to soothe him with sweet words and kind kisses, letting him know I understand him without saying the words he seems not to want to hear.

He returns my affection with slow and tenuous touches of his own, steadily allowing me to help him rebuild the trust I feel which barely faltered for him—a trust I wish he had for himself.

“Maybe this is part of it,” he murmurs, staring at me, his silver eyes filled with emotion, “the reason my kind want to keep yours so firmly leashed—your willingness to forgive us so fucking easily, even if we doubt we deserve it… But that’s just a shot in the dark…”

I merely nuzzle my face along his wrist and palm and soothe him to sleep, thinking that as much as Boots believes I require a protector, maybe the kick I delivered proves that, in time, I can protect myself...

The room is impossibly dark, the strobing flicker of the dying street light outside our window which made our most recent round so glaringly cinematic having finally given up.

No moon illuminates the sky and inside our room everything exists wrapped in black velvet.

The rhythmic ebb and flow of Boots’ breathing warms my bare shoulders and I roll over to face him, only to find eyes bright as twin moons watching me—eyes the unmistakable and luminous color of Boots’… not the shape…not the size…

Everything about them is just the smallest bit wrong and yet, so strangely right…

Dreaming. I’m only dreaming…

I reach out to dispel my wild midnight imaginings, the back of my hand stroking across a strange and softly furry cheek.

With a gasp, I scramble back, out of the bed and across the room, stumbling, flailing, fear thrusting a knot in my throat as my fingers skitter across the wall searching for the lights?—

The glare is nearly blinding and as my eyes focus, I hear a surprised groan erupt from Boots.

Boots.

Lying in the bed, naked and squinting at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

Maybe I have.

“What the ever-loving-fuck are you doing, princess? Turn off the lights and come back to bed.”

It’s only Boots—and something inside me hums and challenges that it’s been Boots all along.

It’s over dinner in our room that I mention the dream. “I think I dreamed about you once.”

“That good, am I?” he chuckles, though the sound is tinny in my ears. He’s trying to return to himself, but every once in a while I catch his eyes on my neck, and feel the shame burning a pit in both of us.

“No—I mean, yes, but no.”

He peers at me a moment, equal parts amused and confused, before dropping his gaze and picking up a hashbrown.

“Before I ever met you.”

His chewing slows and he slides his eyes towards me. His lips flatten briefly, then he refocuses on his breakfast. “Before you met me?”

“Yes. Weird, right? Like, I just realized now.”

He swallows. Nods. Then he says dryly: “You’re a fabulous fuck, Sylva, but you say some weird shit.”

Hearing him quote me, I laugh in spite of myself. And yet… There’s an undercurrent to what he says, and even more so to what he doesn’t, that leaves me wondering what he’s withholding from me now.

We take a catnap and while I doze another dream flows into view…

It’s as if an alternate world has rippled open and I see past everything that has previously blinded me—beyond wealth and power and skyscrapers and cityscapes to a different world in which I ride a rearing horse before a distant castle, decorated with flapping banners bearing the bloody crown of a queen.

A voice in my head suggests, “Time stretches differently here—a membrane to puncture—a world with a war yet to be won.” Knights fall in behind me and we ready for rescue, because although our target lies on a cold stone floor, beaten and bloody and barely alive, I will destroy everything to save him, and set him back on his feet—in the shiny black boots he wears. How strange…

How disturbing.

I wake with a gasp to find Boots packing up. “Oh, don’t bother. I got us another night.”

“What?” He looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. “How did you do that?” he rumbles softly, his tone vacillating between excitement and fear.

“I called down to the office and got the room.”

“When?”

“While you were out or sleeping yesterday.”