Find Me in Darkness by Julie Kenner Read Free Book Online

“She was mine.” He spoke firmly, knowing that they all understood exactly what he meant by that. “And everything came back to her. She remembered me. Remembered us. She knew what was happening and why. And then—”
    From the corner of his eye, he saw Callie take Raine’s hand and squeeze as tears glistened in her eyes.
    “What?” Liam demanded. His voice was businesslike. Practical. But Mal could see the way Liam’s fingers were digging into the arm of the chair.
    “She almost lost it.”
    “Oh, Christ,” Liam said. “Oh, fuck .”
    “No.” Mal stood, because he needed to get this out. He’d been thinking—god, how much he’d been thinking over the past two days. “No, I pulled it back. I absorbed it—not the weapon. But her own energy. I backed it down, and the darkness fell away, too.”
    “You backed it down?”
    Mal nodded at Callie. “It’s what I’m especially good at. Absorbing energy, then turning it around for my own purpose.”
    “The way Raine is with electronics.”
    Mal nodded. “Takes me hours to talk to a computer, but he can do it in a nano-second.”
    “So when you took her energy, it left her exhausted, so the weapon thing couldn’t, um, detonate?”
    “Something like that.” He didn’t mention that the effort it had taken was brutal, and that he almost hadn’t managed in time. What he did say was, “That’s when she forgot. Who I was. What had happened to her. To us.” He dragged his fingers through his hair. “That was my opportunity. I had the chance to do it right then. To buy us another few decades, maybe a century. But I didn’t take it. I took her memory of what happened in that alley, and I left her there.”
    “You left her,” Liam repeated.
    “Don’t worry. I kept surveillance on her. No one’s getting to her without going through us.” Mal knew well that the fuerie wanted the weapon back. And that meant that it wanted Christina. And once it knew that she was alive again in the world, it would do anything to reacquire her. To keep her. And, when the time was right, to use the weapon inside her.
    Of course, one of the brotherhood, Dante, had the ability to reach out and search for the unique disturbance in the air caused by the fuerie’s energy spectrum. He couldn’t pinpoint them around the globe, but if any of the fuerie were near, he could pick up on their vibration. That skill, however, required Dante to purposefully reach out and was limited geographically. In other words, a handy trick, but with limited usefulness.
    To be safe, Mal needed eyes on Christina at all times. And thank goodness she was living in a building with excellent security.
    “Fuck, man,” Liam said. “Do you know the goddamn risk—of course you know the risk. What the hell were you thinking?”
    Mal ignored the question. “I’ve taken most shifts, and when it’s not me, I’ve kept one of the red teams on her,” he said, referring to the elite ex-military operatives that Phoenix Security, the brotherhood’s front company, kept on the payroll. “But yes, I walked away, and I left her alive. And I’ve come here, and I’ve thought, and I’ve planned.”
    He bent to retrieve a fallen chess piece, then sat in the armchair again, the white queen in his hand. “I can’t do it anymore, Liam. And I won’t let anyone else do it, either.”
    “Won’t let?” Liam’s brow rose.
    “There are other options.” He put the queen on the table. “There are other ways to win this game.”
    “Dammit, Mal. We just had this conversation. You know—”
    “Hold up, Li,” Raine said. “Could you destroy Jessica? Take a blade to her over and over and over again? Can you even imagine what it’s like to lose her? I can,” he said, tightening his arms around Callie. “And Mal’s had it a thousand times worse. So if he says there’s another way, then we need to at least hear him out.”
    He turned to Mal. “We all know she’s dangerous, so I’m not saying that we’re going