Chapter 52 LONDON NIGHTS
Ava's POV
"Your mark is showing," he said, and he touched my shoulder lightly with two fingers and I felt it, warmth spreading out from where he touched, and I looked down and through the fabric I could see it, a faint glow under my skin, like something lit from the inside.
I stepped back fast and hit the wall behind me and he held his hands up immediately.
"I'm not here to hurt you," he said again, quieter this time, like he understood that saying it twice didn't make it more believable but he was saying it anyway.
"Then who are you and how did you get into this room," I said, keeping my voice down because I didn't know if I wanted Dominic to come out yet or not, didn't know what would happen if he did.
"My name is Elias," he said, lowering his hands slowly, "and the door wasn't difficult, I've been in harder places."
He looked ordinary, that was the strange thing, maybe late twenties, dark eyes, nothing threatening about the way he held himself, but there was something about him I couldn't name, something that felt just slightly off in the way Dominic sometimes felt off, like the human packaging didn't quite contain everything inside it.
"You were following me today," I said.
"I was making sure you got back safely," he said, "there are people in this city who already know you're here and not all of them are friendly."
"Friendly to who?"
"To marked ones," he said, and his eyes went to my shoulder again, "people like you."
I opened my mouth to tell him I had no idea what he was talking about but the words didn't come because the truth was I did have some idea, I just hadn't let myself sit with it properly yet, the mark, the glow, Dominic's eyes in the dark of the plane, my father saying she's already changing.
"How do you know my mother," I asked instead, because that was what mattered right now.
Something shifted in his face. "She never told you about me?"
"My mother is in a hospital in New York," I said, "she's been sick my whole life, she hasn't told me a lot of things."
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "I knew her before she got sick, a long time ago, before she met your father even," and the way he said it was careful, like he was choosing each word and checking it before he put it down.
The bedroom door opened and Dominic stepped out still buttoning his shirt and he stopped when he saw Elias and the room went completely still.
They looked at each other and I watched something pass between them, not recognition exactly but something close to it, the way two people look at each other when they already know what the other one is.
"How did you get in," Dominic said and his voice was flat.
"Same way you always get in when you want something," Elias said, and he didn't seem afraid which told me something because most people became at least a little afraid when Dominic used that voice.
"Get out," Dominic said.
"Dominic," I said quickly, stepping forward, "he says he knew my mother."
"I heard him," Dominic said, not looking at me, eyes still on Elias.
"Then you know why I'm staying," Elias said, sitting down on the arm of the sofa like he'd been invited, "she deserves to know what she is and what's coming and you've been feeding her pieces instead of the whole thing."
"That is not your decision," Dominic said.
"No," Elias agreed, "it's hers," and he looked at me when he said it.
I looked at Dominic and he looked back at me and I could see it in his face, the same careful holding back he always did when I asked the questions he didn't want to answer, and something in me got very tired of it very suddenly.
"Sit down," I said to both of them.
Neither of them moved for a second and then Dominic crossed the room and sat in the chair by the window and Elias stayed where he was on the sofa arm and I stood between them feeling like something being decided over and refusing to let that be what this was.
"Talk," I said to Elias.
He told me about my mother, not everything, I could tell he was editing even as he spoke, but enough, that she had been marked the same way I was marked, that the mark wasn't a birthmark or a coincidence but something that happened when a person's bloodline was connected to Dominic's kind, that my mother had been bonded once, briefly, before my father had taken her away from it, and that the severing of an incomplete bond was what had been making her sick all these years, her body fighting something that had been cut out of it before it finished.
I sat down on the sofa properly while he talked because my legs stopped cooperating somewhere around the part about the severing.
"She's been sick because someone interrupted the bond," I said slowly.
"Because your father interrupted it," Elias said.
I looked at Dominic. "Did you know this?"
He was quiet for just a second too long.
"Dominic."
"I suspected," he said, "I didn't know for certain."
"You suspected and you said nothing," I said and I heard my own voice go flat the way it did when I was past anger and into something colder.
"I was trying to find a way to tell you that didn't destroy everything," he said and he said it straight, no deflection, just that, and I didn't know what to do with the honesty after being angry at the withholding so I just looked at the floor for a moment and breathed.
"What happens to me," I said to Elias, "if the bond completes."
"You become something between what you are and what he is," Elias said, "stronger, different, the mark stabilizes instead of progressing."
"And if it doesn't complete."
He glanced at Dominic quickly and back to me. "The same thing that happened to your mother starts happening to you, just slower."
The room was very quiet after that and I could hear London outside, buses and rain and the river, all of it carrying on while I sat in a hotel suite finding out that my entire life had been shaped by something nobody had bothered to explain to me.
Dominic got up and came to sit next to me and he didn't say anything, just put his hand over mine on the cushion between us, and I turned my hand over and held it because I was furious at him and also he was the only thing in the room that felt solid.
"I need you to leave," I said to Elias, "I need to think."
He nodded and stood and moved to the window and I expected him to go to the door but instead he pushed the window open and looked back at me.
"I'll find you tomorrow," he said, "there's more you need to know and some of it can't wait long."
Then he stepped out onto the ledge and was gone and I stared at the open window for a moment because we were seven floors up.
Dominic got up and closed it without a word, like a man stepping out of a seventh floor window was something that happened regularly in his world, which I supposed it probably was.
I looked at him when he turned back.
"How long have you been lying to me," I said quietly.
"I haven't lied," he said, "I've been slow with the truth."
"That's the same thing," I said, and he didn't argue because we both knew it was.
He came back and sat next to me and I leaned into him because I was tired, genuinely bone tired, and he put his arm around me and I let him and we sat there in the London quiet while I tried to figure out how to be angry at someone I couldn't stop needing.
Later, much later, when the city outside had gone quiet and Elias's words were still sitting heavy in my chest, I pulled Dominic toward me and kissed him, not gently, hungry and a little desperate, because I needed something to be uncomplicated for five minutes and this, at least, never was.
He kissed me back hard and his hands found my waist and pulled me across his lap and I grabbed his shirt and everything else went away for a while, all the marks and bonds and secrets, just his mouth and his hands and my name in his voice, and I took everything he gave and asked for more.
Afterward I lay against his chest and listened to his heartbeat and thought about my mother in that hospital bed and how she had been sick my whole life and never once told me why.
I was still thinking about it when I finally fell asleep.
I woke up alone again, same as the plane, and I had almost decided not to think anything of it when I looked across the room and saw him standing at the window with his shirt off and the London dawn coming through the glass, and down his back, moving slowly like something breathing, the symbols were glowing.