Page 32 of It’s You

He looked up at her, and she was shattered by the pain she saw there.

She had never seen such misery, such anguish, such languid despair.

Her eyes filled with tears of pity and grief, and even grudging compassion, as she stared at him.

At Jack. At the face of this man whom she loved. Had loved? Still loved?

She didn’t know. All she knew was that he held a terrible, terrible secret inside.

“Or we could talk.”

His voice was a whisper, but she heard the glimmer of hope, and it twisted her heart.

“Willow told you what I am?”

Darcy nodded once, drawing her legs against her chest, still leaning back against the headboard, her body tightly coiled, protecting itself.

“I need you to know…everything I said was true, Darcy. Is true. Everything…” He put his head down and ran his fingers through his hair, looking down at his lap as his voice got softer. “Everything.”

“Did you kill somebody in your garage?” She stared at him and felt angry with herself for feeling relief when he shook his head back and forth. But it coursed through her body, warm and comforting.

“No. It was?—”

“It was what ?” she demanded in a whisper, relief cooling back to fear.

He looked up at her, his face twisted. “Fresh dead.”

“What?” she demanded with a sob, repelled by this new, gruesome language. “What is that ?”

“It was a buck I hunted on Sunday night.”

“Deer. Willow said?—”

He nodded. “Deer is… atypical for someone like me. Most of my kind prefers…”

Darcy swallowed. Control.

“This is what you meant? What you learned while you were away from me? You learned?—”

“Yes. And more. So we could…So we could be toge…”

His voice trailed off in a tortured whisper. He didn’t bother finishing the word, let alone the thought. He must have suspected how absurd it would sound to her right now.

Darcy looked down. She was having trouble understanding.

Part of her didn’t want to understand at all.

Just wanted to walk out of Jack’s house, out of Jack’s life forever.

But while they’d been apart over the last few days, she’d felt a ceaseless, throbbing yearning to be with him again.

She owed it to herself to understand who and what he was before making the decision to leave.

“Do you know I love you?” he whispered, his eyes entreating hers.

“Tell me everything,” she murmured, looking away from him, ignoring his words.

He didn’t speak immediately, and she sensed he was trying to figure out what to say.

She had the insane urge to laugh at him.

He’d had two decades, a veritable lifetime, to figure out how to tell her everything, and now he was stalling.

She hugged her shivering body. A moment later, he placed a blanket next to her feet.

She stared at it and tears rolled down her face.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“I didn’t think that,” she said quietly in a small, broken voice.

“I know you didn’t,” he said gently, as she knew he would. “You shivered.”

Darcy pulled the blanket around her body as he started talking.

“Willow was right. I’m a blooded Roux-ga-roux, which means by birth.

I wasn’t turned. A Roux-ga-roux, or um…We say a Roug.

It’s, um…It’s a wolf-man hybrid. Also called a skinwalker by the Métis.

My eyes turn yellow when I shift or when I feel intense emotion, but I try to control it as much as possible.

Your skin burned because when we had sex, my body threw off extreme heat.

Not extreme for me or another Roug, but extreme for you, for a human.

You lose time when we’re together because we’re on my time, which feels fast to you.

Soul flight is the way Roux-ga-roux connect over time and distance with their mate.

Except they don’t call it that. They call it Dansmatête, which means inside my head.

Eyespeak is the way they communicate when they hunt together at night.

Only it wouldn’t work with you because your eyes don’t glow.

We can only eyespeak in the light. In the light.

” He said this slowly and wistfully, his voice breaking.

He paused before continuing. “The binding…Darcy, the binding was irreversible.”

Darcy blinked rapidly as more tears pooled in her eyes, spilling onto her cheeks in rushing streams.

“I shift for three days in every lunar cycle. Others of my kind shift more often, but I don’t. I don’t want to. I’ve learned how to control it almost all the time, but I can’t control it when the moon is full. I have tried so many different ways, but I can’t.”

Darcy looked at him and sobbed. “What else?”

“You don’t need to know?—”

“What else?” she persisted in a dead voice.

“It’s the stuff of nightmares for your kind. Please?—”

“The truth. Now.”

He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, looking down. She could hear him take two deep breaths before launching into it, cringing as he spoke.

“I have to feed when I turn, but I don’t hunt hum—your kind. I’m bound to you, so I refuse to hunt traditionally. So I eat fresh dead instead. Animals. Big game. And three days a month, I lock myself in a reinforced steel cage, a meat locker, under my garage with a dead?—”

Darcy gagged, then leaped off the bed like a gazelle, springing into his bathroom in time to vomit into the toilet.

She retched and sobbed, holding her hair back with one hand until there was nothing left in her stomach, and she sank down on the bathroom tile, sitting up against the tub where he’d held her hand on Sunday .

I can’t lose you now.

It made her heart clutch to think of his words.

“Are you okay? Can I help you?” he called.

“No!” You s tay away from me.

She pulled a hand towel from the rack beside the sink and wiped her mouth, stalking out of the bathroom and sitting across the room from him on the edge of the rocking chair by the windows where he’d kissed her so tenderly on Sunday morning.

“When were you going to tell me?” she asked, thinking that a lie of omission was just as bad as a bold-faced one.

“Darcy. I wanted you to get to know me. I didn’t want it to…define me.”

“It does define you,” she whispered. “It is you.”

“It’s only a part of who I am.”

“What if you weren’t in the cage?” she demanded.

“I’m always in the cage at the full moon.”

“What if you weren’t?”

He bit his lower lip, shaking his head back and forth.

“Answer me!” she demanded.

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said softly. “I would never hurt you .”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I do. I can’t hurt you. It’s impossible.”

She believed him.

“Okay. But you could hurt someone else. Someone I love. Amory. My mother. Willow. My neighbors. Their children. You don’t hunt because you lock yourself away.

That doesn’t mean you’ve mitigated the impulse.

What if…” She cringed, closing her eyes against the thought that her heart had lured such a creature to her town.

Unintentionally, she had placed her entire town in danger. “You can’t stay here.”

“I can. I’m strong. I can control it.”

Anger welled up inside of Darcy. For the kiss that had changed her world.

For the confused years of soul flight. For the man who walked into her life almost two weeks ago, who she loved more deeply, more completely, than she had ever loved any other being, whom she knew she would love for as long as she lived.

And anger bubbled up inside of her like spewing lava.

Anger for his deception. Anger for his choosing her.

Anger that he wasn’t just a regular human man.

Anger that his nature was so brutal. Anger that she loved him, but was also repulsed by him.

White, hot anger, the type that made people say hurtful, unforgivable things.

Her eyes brimmed with furious tears as she stood broken before him.

“You’re a fool if you believe that,” she said evenly, holding his eyes with hers. “You’re a monster .”

His eyes flashed fire, narrowing at her words. Pain, then fury.

“We’re bound ,” he growled.

“I don’t believe that.” This was a lie. She wished she didn’t believe it, but she did. No matter what he was, her heart belonged to him. She would deal with that later.

“Yes, you do…and you can’t break it, Darcy. It’s for life. We belong?—”

“Maybe.” She got up from her seat and crossed the room, picking up her shoes by the door and stuffing her feet into them.

In her mind, she positioned a knife over her heart, took a deep breath, then pushed it in with all the strength she had.

“But I can let it die inside of me. I can choose never to see you again.”

He winced as if she had taken the knife to his flesh too. To his heart, as she had to her own. He stood to face her, clenching his jaw, and blinking his eyes quickly with emotion.

“Please don’t do this.”

“ You did this,” she lamented bitterly, biting back more tears. “I don’t want any part of it. Leave Carlisle.”

“I love you, Darcy. I’ll love you until I die.”

She swallowed, looking down, her heart bleeding out beside his.

“If that’s true, then leave here. Please leave and never, ever come back.”

“I belong to you, Darcy, and you?—”

She stopped him with her eyes, which were shining with tears, angry and absolute.

“Belong to no one.”

Then she turned and walked away from Jack Beauloup—out of his house, out of his life, away from his heart—without looking back.