Page 14 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

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“Nguyen,” I said, keeping my eyes on Emerson, silently daring him to disappear like his brother in arms. “The Jeep is around the corner. Take Shay and get the hell out of here.”

She tried to argue again, but she was cut off by some not so gentle coaxing before her irritated yell echoed off the grime covered walls lining the alley. “Put me down you big dumb bear!”

In another situation, that would have made me smile. Now, I was just grateful he’d followed my orders without questioning me.

Nguyen knew better than anyone what I could do, even if he didn’t know the full extent of my abilities or where my power came from. That secret was part of the reason I rarely worked with a team out in the field. If something ever did go wrong with my magic, I didn’t want anyone I cared about anywhere near me when it happened.

The staring contest between Emerson and I went on for gods only knew how long before my phone buzzed in my pocket. I answered without looking. “Yeah? ”

“We’re on the road.” It was Nguyen.

A sliver of the tension keeping me in place melted away.

“Good. Be evasive, and call HQ and let them know what’s happening. I’ll contact you when I wrap things up here.” I ended the call and pocketed my phone again.

“Why are you still here?” Emerson asked, looking as irritated as he did curious.

“I told you I would give you the director if you let them go. I’m holding up my end of that deal.”

Jabiah shifted at his side. “Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”

Emerson shook his head, but I spoke up before he got the chance. “What does it look like to you? Like maybe it was a member of the Brethren who found a way to exile Theloneus to the Alius? And maybe he tried to pin it on me because he didn’t have a fucking clue who I really was? And maybe you killed two members of my team and kidnapped and tortured two more for nothing?”

“Easy, Senna,” Emerson said calmly.

“She is eighteen years old!”

He put his hands out like he was trying to calm a wild animal. “We should go inside and talk, rather than hashing out our issues in an alley where anyone can see.”

Gritting my teeth, I cast my magic out around us but didn’t pick up any other living creatures larger than a rat. Still, he was right. It was the kind of conversation that should probably be handled with a little more care.

Ice slid through my veins when I thought of going into the same room where they’d held Shay and Nguyen. I was barely hanging on as it was. If I saw their blood splattered across the floor, all bets would be off.

“Not here,” I said, grinding out the words .

“Senna, we didn’t know.” He reached out one of his big hands to touch me, and my anger flared at the thought of what those hands might have done to Shay.

I yanked back and punched him as hard as I could. His head snapped back. When he straightened, blood dribbled from his lower lip for just a second before the split healed itself. As it did, an eerie red glow returned to his eyes, but just for a blink. There and gone.

“Feel better?”

He knew I didn’t, and with how quickly the red faded back to that signature blue—so dark now that it rivaled the night sky—he also knew I’d hit him without magic. An emotion a fool might mistake for regret flickered across his face, but I didn’t care.

I swung again. Then again, and I reveled in the sensation of his jaw cracking under the force of my third punch.

He didn’t howl in pain or hit me back. The bastard wasn’t even defending himself. It was like he wanted me to beat the shit out of him, and now that my fury was unleashed, hot and sharp, I was more than happy to oblige.

I didn’t hold back. His face, his chest, his stomach—I kept swinging until my knuckles were a bloody mess and he was on his knees, holding his hands down at his sides like a man waiting for absolution.

It took me entirely too long to figure out that was exactly what I was giving him. By absorbing my anger and my hurt, he was absolving himself of the pain he’d caused.

I stepped back, breathing hard, barely registering the sting of the fractured bones in my hands.

“Don’t stop now.” He sounded strange, resigned in a way that hurt more than it should have. “Get it all out of your system.”

“Why aren’t you fighting back,” I breathed, flexing my fingers and sending a thread of healing magic through the nerves to repair the damage.

He lifted his head, looking up at me with an unreadable expression. “Why aren’t you using magic?”

I didn’t answer, but he knew. I wanted to hurt him with my bare hands. To inflict pain on a purely personal level.

Pulling in an unsteady breath, I took another step back, but Emerson stayed as he was, on his knees on the asphalt, with Jabiah looking on like a man lost.

“We didn’t know who she was to you,” Emerson finally said.

Yeah, he’d said that before. It still didn’t change anything. “She’s just a girl.”

“She’s more than that.”

I knew what he meant, but it hardly mattered. “Get up,” I snarled.

“Are you done, Sai? Have you had your fill of vengeance?”

I flinched at the name. Sai. It had been his pet name for me—an intimate name—and hearing it brought back a flood of memories that threatened to drown me.

Passion burned in his hot gaze, and I slammed my eyes shut. “Get up, Emerson.”

I heard him move, then heard his partner in crime murmur something.

“Leave, Jabiah,” I said, opening my eyes and focusing my attention on the other man.

He glanced between us, his brow pinched, then nodded once and disappeared. Poof. Gone in a blink. That was one handy little trick that I still hadn’t learned, even after all these years.

“Can we take this inside?” Emerson’s voice made him sound closer than he was. Not in my head, since I still had my barriers up, but the way his words hung in the air, it was like being surrounded by him .

“Not where you took my people.” Aside from that, I didn’t care.

“I know a place.” He held out his hand.

When I didn’t take it, he arched a brow. I could tell he was fighting the urge to order me to do it. Part of me wanted him to try just so he could see how little control he had over me now. But what was the point? We both knew I was going with him, and the sooner we got this conversation over with, the better.

“I’m not apologizing for hitting you,” I said, slapping my hand into his.

His strong fingers wrapped around mine and he squeezed gently. “I wouldn’t want you to, but I do want you to know I didn’t hurt either of them. The girl or your bear. That was all Phineas.”

In the next breath, we were inside. It was warm, dimly lit, and the world was spinning. He eased me down into a soft chair and crouched in front of me with my hand still in his. “Take a deep breath.”

It had been forever since I’d felt traveling sickness, but my memory of it was just as unpleasant as it had always been. I did as Emerson said, closing my eyes and breathing in deep through my nose, letting it escape through my mouth a moment later.

It didn’t take as long as I remembered for the worst of my unease to settle, at least on the physical side. When I opened my eyes, I finally managed to piece his last words back together.

“It wasn’t you?”

He held my questioning gaze. “I didn’t lay a finger on your people. And I didn’t know what Phineas had planned until he already had them. Jabiah and I got there moments before you did, and we’d already put a stop to what he was doing.”

The bitch of it was, I believed him. Was that wrong of me? He easily could have been feeding me a line, but deep down, in the dregs of my soul, I knew he was telling me the truth .

“I guess I do owe you that apology then, don’t I?”

The whisper of a smile ghosted his lips. “No, you don’t.”

The way he looked at me, with the kind of longing that made my entire being want to reach out to him, only made things worse. I was in shambles. I’d lost good people today. The guilt of what happened to Shay and Nguyen was eating me alive. And Emerson… I didn’t even know where to start with him.

Tugging my hand free, I forced myself to look away, searching for anything that wasn’t that big, irresistible demon. Bits and pieces of the room were familiar in a distant way, like I was seeing everything from a strange angle. “This is where you took me before, isn’t it?”

He nodded as he stood and took a step back. “This is where I’m staying while I’m in town.”

I’d only cared enough about the space the first time around to mark my exit points. Now, taking a moment to soak it in, it felt so much like him it made my heart ache.

“How long have you been here?” I asked coldly.

He was silent for a long time before he sat down on his chunky wooden coffee table to face me. “Eight months.”

Did I hear that right? We’d had pings tracing him all over the world over the last several months and nothing to indicate he was hiding in my own city.

His gaze flicked across my face, no doubt reading the flurry of emotions and thoughts that shot through me.

Realization sliced through my confidence as if it were smoke. “How long have you known?”

“That you weren’t dead? A while. That you were here?” He motioned toward his living room windows and to the city hidden behind the heavy curtains. “Eight months.”

Sonofabitch. How could we have missed him coming and going? How the hell had he found me? I’d gone to enormous trouble and spent a small fortune making sure I stayed invisible .

“How?” I couldn’t even manage the rest of the question thanks to the lump of frustration lodged in my throat.

“Which part?” The first thread of anger seeped into his voice, but his eyes were still that deep blue I’d fallen in love with forever ago.

“That I was alive.”

A dark chuckle sent a ripple of heat through me. He stood and moved across the room to the same counter he’d laid me out on the first time he’d brought me here. “Kismet,” he said, leaning back against it and gripping the edge. “I’d taken a few days to myself, traveled to Athlone, and I saw you crossing the street.”

Athlone, Ireland? “I haven’t been there in…”

Over ten years. All the air leaked out of me.

“Like I said, a while.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans, gave me a half-shrug, and looked away. His gaze roamed the room without settling on anything. “I thought I was hallucinating at first. Again. After the fire, you were everywhere. Every street corner, every café. Everywhere I went, I would catch a glimpse of you, but when I tried to find you…”

He shook his head. “Imagine my surprise when, a lifetime later, I saw you again, walking across the street in front of the pub. I wasn’t sure I could trust my own eyes until you stopped in the middle of the road and pressed your hand to your chest.” He mimicked the motion with his own hand, pressing it against the gray fabric of his blood-spattered henley.

My heart lurched at his words and at my own memories of that trip. I remembered that moment. It was tiny, just a fleeting beat of a bird’s wings in the great span of time. I’d been thinking of him, and out of nowhere, I was struck with a bout of homesickness so strong it stole my breath right there in the street.

My hand crept to my chest, just as it had then, trying to calm the storm building within. “Why did you come here, Emerson?” I asked quietly.

“Why else?” He pushed away from the counter and crossed over to me. When he reached out his hands, I shouldn’t have taken them. I knew better, but I was unmoored, raw with grief and guilt, and secretly longing for a lost connection I’d mourned for over a century.