Chapter 56 TRUTH BREAKS
Ava's POV
I stared at him.
"What do you mean he's the one she was bonding with," I said slowly, sitting up properly now, the sheet pulling around me because suddenly I needed something between me and the air in the room.
"Elias is old," Dominic said, and his voice was careful the way it got when he was choosing each word, "older than he looks, older than most things in this world, and the kind of pull you described feeling when he kissed you is not attraction Ava, it's a residual bond, one that started with your mother and transferred down the bloodline when it was severed."
I just looked at him because my brain was working through that and it was taking a moment.
"So when I felt that pull with him," I said.
"It's your mother's bond trying to finish through you," he said, "because it never got to complete in her."
I got up and went to the window and stood there with my arms crossed and London spread out below me grey and indifferent and thought about Elias in that café tucking my hair behind my ear and saying you look just like her and the warmth I'd felt and how I'd thought it was about him but maybe it was never about him at all, maybe it was something older than both of us trying to find its way home.
"Is that why he's here," I said, not turning around, "not to protect me, but because being near me is the closest he can get to finishing what he lost."
Dominic was quiet for a second and that silence was its own answer.
"Does he know that's what it is," I asked.
"I think he knows something pulls him to you," Dominic said, "whether he understands what it is I can't say."
I turned around and looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed with his shirt still off and his eyes fully blue again now and he looked tired in a way I didn't see often, like keeping everything together was costing him tonight.
"How much more is there," I said, "that you haven't told me."
"Enough," he said honestly.
"Then tell me now," I said, "all of it, I'm done finding things out sideways."
He looked at me for a long moment and then he said, "sit down," and I went and sat next to him and he started talking.
He told me everything and this time he didn't edit, didn't find the careful version, just laid it out straight, about what he was and where his kind came from and how long they'd been living alongside humans and why, about the factions that had been at war for decades over whether marked humans should be protected or eliminated, about the bond and what completing it would actually do to my body permanently, about why my bloodline specifically kept producing marked women and what that meant in the larger shape of things.
He talked for a long time and I listened without interrupting and the room got darker around us as the afternoon moved into evening and London lit up outside the window piece by piece.
When he stopped I sat with it all for a while before I spoke.
"The people who want marked humans dead," I said, "are they here in London."
"Yes," he said.
"And they already know I'm here."
"Yes," he said again.
"That's why the suite alarm went off the first night," I said, remembering, "that wasn't a random breach."
"No," he said, "they were checking whether the mark had advanced enough to be worth moving on."
"And has it," I said.
He looked at me and his jaw tightened slightly. "Yes."
I breathed through that and then I said, "and Elias, whose side is he on."
"His own," Dominic said, "which sometimes aligns with mine and sometimes doesn't and I've never been able to fully predict which it'll be."
"But he's not trying to hurt me."
"No," Dominic said slowly, "I don't think he is, but his reasons for being near you are complicated and I don't trust complicated."
I looked at his face and saw something there that I hadn't seen clearly before, not jealousy exactly, something older and more certain than jealousy, like a man looking at something that belongs to him and trying very hard to be reasonable about someone else touching it.
"You watched us," I said, "at the café, you were outside."
He didn't deny it.
"You saw him kiss me."
"Yes," he said and his voice was completely flat.
"And you came back here and didn't say anything."
"I said something eventually."
"After you—" I stopped and almost laughed because there was something genuinely unhinged about a man who watched someone kiss his girlfriend and then came home and took her apart against a window before calmly asking about it afterward and he must have seen something in my face because his mouth did the thing it did when he was trying not to smile.
"Don't," I said.
"I'm not doing anything," he said.
"You're doing the face," I said and he looked away and I felt the tension in the room shift sideways into something almost manageable and I was grateful for it because the rest of it was a lot.
I leaned back against the headboard and pulled my knees up and he lay back next to me and we stayed like that, not touching, just parallel, looking at the ceiling.
"I'm scared," I said quietly, because it was true and he deserved the truth back after giving me his.
"I know," he said.
"Not of you," I clarified, "of what's coming, of what I'm becoming, of not having a choice in any of it."
"You have a choice," he said, turning his head to look at me, "you can walk away from me and the bond stops advancing, it'll be uncomfortable for a while but it'll stop."
"And then what," I said, "I go back to New York and wait to get sick like my mother."
He didn't answer because there was no good answer to that.
I reached over and took his hand and he turned his palm up and held mine properly and we lay there in the quiet and I thought about everything he'd said and tried to find the bottom of it and couldn't.
"What does completing the bond actually feel like," I said.
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "like finally being able to breathe after holding it for a very long time," and the way he said it, simple and without any performance, hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
I moved closer and he put his arm around me and I lay against his chest and his heartbeat was steady and real and whatever he was underneath the human form he wore, whatever the symbols on his back meant and whatever came next, this part felt true and I held onto that.
We lay there for a long time and I was almost asleep when the alarm on the suite door went off, not the gentle chime of someone using a keycard, the actual alarm, sharp and sudden, and we were both off the bed before it finished its first sound.
Dominic was at the door in seconds and I was right behind him and he looked through the peephole and every muscle in his body went rigid.
"Get behind me," he said and his voice was not his normal voice, it was the other one, the one with no human edges left in it.
"What is it," I said, not moving behind him.
"Ava," he said, sharp and certain, "behind me, now."
I moved behind him and he opened the door and the corridor was empty except for Adrian who was standing three doors down pressed against the wall with his hand to his side and when he moved it his palm was dark with blood.
"They're already in the building," Adrian said, and his voice was steady even though he was bleeding, "and Dominic, there's more of them than last time, a lot more.”