Heart Of Atlantis

didn’t control his emotions and contain his fury, he would lose her trust forever.
    He locked down, hard, on all of it and simply rested his cheek on the top of her head and held her. Said nothing, did nothing; just held her for a very long time and focused on the scent of her still-damp hair. She smelled like flowers and some kind of fruit.
    She smelled like home.
    Finally, she stirred a little and looked up at him, and he could tell she’d been crying.
    “Thank you,” she said huskily. “That’s exactly what I needed.”
    “I hope I can always do whatever you need, especially when my every instinct is crying out for the opposite,” he confessed.
    “You want to protect me. You want to go back and find that vampire, whom I killed myself by the way, and kill him all over again. Piece by piece, so he suffers for hours.”
    “Suffers for days.
Months
, perhaps,” he growled. “But instead, I will ask you if you are willing to tell me what happened.”
    “I don’t talk about this,” she said, her eyes dark pools of painful memory. “Not in casual conversation, not ever, really. Riley doesn’t even know, but Jack does. He helped me find Moira.”
    Alaric watched as she clenched her hands into fists and then relaxed them, over and over. He wondered if she even realized she was doing it.
    “Moira was my therapist. She helped me to be able to talk about it and, after a long while, to be able to heal and move on.” She shrugged. “Pretty stupid, a big, tough rebel leader needing a shrink, right?”
    “You’re not that big,” he said lightly. “More like a pocket-sized rebel leader.”
    She elbowed him, but she did smile a little, which was what he’d intended.
    “No matter how tough you are, nobody survives pain, or torture, or violation without needing some help to get through it,
mi amara
. Even Conlan would not have survived the aftermath of captivity without support from your sister.” He was amazed that he’d kept his voice so steady. No wound he’d ever suffered in battle had pierced him deeper than the agony of being unable to undo her past.
    “And you. Riley told me how you helped Conlan get through that and cope with everything that happened when she and he met. You’re kind of a hero, aren’t you?”
    “I prefer rock star,” he said loftily, wondering a little wildly when the gods had given him the ability to banter while the walls he’d built so carefully around his heart over the centuries, stone by stone, shattered into rubble inside him.
    It was almost a miracle.
She
was the miracle.
    Quinn stared down at her clasped hands and drew in a shallow, fractured breath. “It was a terrible plan,” she began, her voice so quiet he could hardly hear her.
    “A terrible plan. Since then, I’ve come up with a hundred ways—a
thousand
ways—we could have done better, but we thought it was a great idea. We’d sneak into his lair, stake him as he slept, and save our little corner of the world. He was a ruthless, murdering animal, and somebody needed to take him down.”
    “And somebody was you,” he said, hating it. Understanding it.
    “Somebody was me,” she agreed. “Except, he didn’t stake so easily. We didn’t know, back then, the full extent of the powers of the old ones. We didn’t realize they could wake up and suck a human into their minds during the daylight hours.”
    He clenched his jaw against the questions burning in his throat for release, giving her time to tell him the story in her own way.
    “He caught us, and he killed everyone else with me. He . . . he took a liking to me. Thought I was the girlfriend of one of the shifters or something. Didn’t realize I was one of the fighters. So he decided that he’d keep the whore for himself. Spoils of battle,” she said, bitterness dripping like acid from each word.
    “I’m glad you killed him,” he said fiercely; the only comment he’d allow himself.
    “I didn’t.” She lifted her face to look him in the eyes. “I couldn’t—not for a while. For far too long. I had no opportunity and no weapons. He was way too strong for me. Instead, I came up with horrible plan, part B: I pretended to
like
him. I thought if I could get him to trust me, I could find out more about his plots and conspiracies, and . . . and . . .”
    She broke down and started to take deep, calming breaths. “Breathing exercises. Moira taught me to use them, you know? For a while, they were all I had to fight back the