Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King
Well, fix it, Christophe returned. That's what you do, right? I'm just here temporarily, so don't get any ideas about leaving the priesthood to me. No how, no way.
Alaric cut off the conversation without responding. He had no patience with Christophe's carefree ways. Not now, when every fiber of his being was demanding he cut ties to his own responsibilities and flee with Quinn before anything worse could happen. Or perhaps his lack of patience was a mask for an emotion far darker--a manifestation of his own bitter envy.
He could never do it--doom his people to extinction without even trying to save them. Not even for Quinn. But it was surprising how enticing the idea was to him; he, who hadn't been tempted to swerve in his duty even once in so many centuries, suddenly wished fervently to throw it all over and live a simple life with the woman he could finally admit he loved.
Tempting brought him back to thoughts of Quinn in the shower, and his pants suddenly no longer fit properly. Yes, the body knew what it wanted to do, and the parts definitely worked, so there were two concerns alleviated about the possibility of ending hundreds of years of celibacy. The sound of the running water stopped, and he groaned at the lovely mental image of Quinn drying off her body. Driven by a primal hunger that was far older than Atlantis itself, he climbed to his feet, shoved his dagger in its sheath, and put his hand on the doorknob.
There were some things a man--even a warrior--should not have to endure.
Quinn dressed in an old pair of jeans and a sweater of Lauren's and opened the door to find Alaric on the other side, hand on the doorknob, an expression of such intent hunger on his face that she almost backed up a step.
"I cannot bear to be apart from you a moment longer," he said, his voice rough.
She nodded, feeling the exact same way, but suddenly apprehensive about what would happen next. None of their problems had gone away; Alaric was still bound to a terrible promise to a cruel god. And yet here they were in another bedroom, and she had the feeling there would be no malfunctioning Trident to save them this time.
She wrapped her arms around his waist, leaned her head against his muscular chest, and stood there, content to feel his arms around her. Content with the silence.
"I never get this," she finally said. "To allow myself to depend on someone else's strength. I had Jack, of course, but we didn't lean on each other like this."
"I'm glad to hear it," Alaric said, a tinge of a growl in his voice.
"I've been in charge for so long I've forgotten how to let someone else be strong, just for a moment's respite. A break in the action." She wanted to do what she'd never done before--surrender. To Alaric's strength and protection. A purely feminine impulse that was so shocking to her, she who'd lived her life as a fighter. He made her want to love and protect and be cherished in return.
Forbidden longings teased the surface of her skin, and something hard and cold in her heart unfurled like one of the fantastical Atlantean flowers. It was too much, too quick, and her emotions threatened to sweep her under like a bit of driftwood caught in a storm-tossed ocean.
That her mind presented her with metaphors of the sea made her smile, press her face into his shirt, and breathe deeply of the scent of sea and salt and sun that was so uniquely Alaric.
"And yet you are so quick to defend me and so fierce about it," Alaric murmured, stroking her back. "The warriors and I fight together, but never in all the years of my existence has someone tried to protect me the way you have. I do not deserve it, and I am humbled by it."
She pressed even closer to him and suddenly noticed the very hard bulge pressing against her abdomen. Her cheeks flamed hot, and she tried to move back, but he tightened his arms.
"No. Not yet. I cannot bear to let you go until I can truly believe you are safe."
He lifted her into his arms and moved to the bed, where he sat carefully on the edge with her in his lap and told her everything that had happened with Poseidon and also what Christophe had reported.
She gave him a reproachful look when he told her about the tsunami, but she didn't say a word. Perhaps she was beyond words. He needed to know, though. She owed him that.
"Now it's your turn. I want to know everything, Quinn. Can you bear to tell it?"
She shook her head. "Not yet. I need a few minutes."
After warding the room with his strongest magics, Alaric left Quinn to gather her thoughts. He only went as far as the bathroom, where he sped through a quick shower, but every instinct he had urged him to hurry, hurry, hurry.
After he cleaned and dried his clothes with Atlantean water magic in the space of a few seconds, he returned to sit silently next to her on the bed. When she raised her tearstained face to him, he asked her again.
"Can you bear to tell it?"
She nodded and fisted her hands in the fabric of her sweater. As she told him all of it, from the press conference to the murder, he grew more and more furious, but at her first mention of Anubisa, he glowed nearly incandescent with rage.
Literally.
She had to shield her eyes.
"Hey, you're going to need to tone it down for the human," she said gently.
He instantly dimmed the energy so she could bear to look at him again.
"My apologies. I am holding so much power, channeling it to support Christophe and Serai in stabilizing the dome and the Trident, that it takes little to push me over the edge."
"I understand, but if you want to hear all of it, you're going to need to calm down a little. I don't want to cause your brain to explode."
He nodded, but she could tell from the way the muscles in his jaw clenched that he was gritting his teeth very hard. She told him the rest of it, right up to the point where he'd arrived to rescue her.
"He told you he wanted to impregnate you," Alaric said.
She could tell from the way he so carefully enunciated that he was on the verge of going berserk.
"He said it, but he didn't touch me. Not like last time," she said softly, almost too softly to be heard.
His entire body tensed beneath her, as if steeling for a blow. "Last time?"
She bowed her head and told him something she never, ever talked about anymore. "Six years ago. When that murderous bastard of a vampire kept me as his plaything and--worst of all--I let him. Alaric, I know you think you want me, but you'd be far better off without me."
Silence. Utter, complete silence. It took a while for her to gather the courage to look up at him, but when she did, the revulsion and rejection she'd expected were nowhere in sight. Instead, a far more powerful emotion blazed forth from those beautiful emerald eyes, and he kissed her so thoroughly that she'd nearly forgotten her own name by the time he lifted his head.
"There is nothing you could ever do that would make me think less of you, mi amara," he said. "There is no deed, no matter how horrific you may have found it, in your past that could compete with the grace and courage of your soul. Tell me, if you will, or do not tell me, if you would rather never speak of it. Know this, though: I will fight everyone on this planet--even you, if it must be--who attempts to make me give you up."
Chapter 22
Alaric watched Quinn carefully as a yawning chasm of insanity beckoned at the edges of his consciousness. He fought it back in the toughest battle he'd ever waged. This was absolutely, in no way, about him.
His rage for what some monster had done to her.
His anguish that she had been violated.
None of it--not any of it--was about him. If he 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
"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 nightmares."
Alaric tried to take her hand, but she flinched away.
"No. Let me tell it all, first. You see, he didn't rape me. I let him . . . I let him. I became his toy. I pretended to like it. I became the whore he thought I was, just to survive. Just to find a way to kill him." Tears streamed down her face, unchecked, and he wondered if she even noticed them.
He swung around and dropped to his knees in front of her; not touching her, not crowding her, but facing her so he could tell her the most important truth he knew.
"No. Never that. Never a toy, never a whore. What you were--and are--is a survivor. You survived, under impossible, unbearable circumstances. You survived, and you made sure that he did not. Your strength humbles me, mi amara. I am in awe of your courage."
Slowly, tentatively, she reached for him and touched his face with one delicate hand. "You really mean that, don't you?"
"I have never meant anything more in my life," he said, leaning into her touch. "You are a survivor, and you have protected so many because you had the courage to endure the unendurable."
A ghost of a smile traced her lips. "Moira said the same thing. Maybe you're not so hopeless at this counseling thing, after all. I'll have to tell Myrken."
"He will be elated," he said dryly.
She laughed a little, and he knew he'd never heard any sound so sweet.
"Will you hold me now?"
"Always," he said, and he gently pulled her into his embrace, as careful as if he touched the most fragile of cherished treasures; realizing even as the thought crossed his mind that, in fact, he did.
"I've, ah, recovered a great deal since then," she whispered. "Moira helped, and Jack helped, but mostly just the passage of time and throwing myself into my work helped me to heal. I'm not . . . I'm not fragile anymore."
He stilled. "Quinn, what are you saying to me?"
She blushed a hot pink all the way to the tips of her delicate ears. "I'm saying that I'm not afraid to be intimate. I--well. I had a sort of casual, sort of not casual encounter . . . well. Enough of that. I'm not afraid of physical closeness, Alaric. I just never found anyone worth trying to have it with, before now."
"I am honored that you would trust me with this gift," he said, humbled yet again by her bravery. Wondering if his own could match hers.
She suddenly laughed. "It's a lot of pressure, isn't it? All those years of celibacy, and now you have to throw in my background trauma. I'm surprised you're not flying out of that window."
He knew, by the sincerity of her laughter, that she'd told him the truth. She'd overcome her past and was ready to move forward. Now it fell to him to deserve her. He had to tell the truth and let her see his flaws. Chief among them, at the moment, was a searing jealousy.
"If we are to have honesty between us, I must admit that I would kill him, too, this casual encounter, if I could," he said, a wave of fierce possessiveness surging through him. "You should know that if you ever give yourself to me, there will be no more casual or not casual encounters in your life, ever. You will be mine, utterly and completely, as I will be yours."
She blinked. "You know, these days, people have amicable breakups all the time."
He narrowed his eyes. "No. Not for us. I will keep you forever. Everything in Atlantean culture dictates free will, Quinn. Even the soul-meld does not take away choice, but I must be entirely candid with you. I know my own nature, and I will never, ever let you go if you say yes to me. You must factor that into any decision."
She grinned. "So, no casual sex, is that what you're saying?"
He laughed then and kissed her thoroughly, not stopping until she was breathless. "And yes, I will always want to kill anyone who ever even thinks about harming you. That, too, is in my nature."
She laughed a little, but her eyes were shining with unshed tears. "You can't protect me from my past, Alaric, but I confess I love you for wanting to."
He stilled, every inch of his body turning motionless. She'd said she loved him.
She loved him.
She loved him.
"Say it again," he demanded.
She tilted her head. "Say what?"
"No. No, you do not get to say those words to me and pretend you don't reme
"You said you love me," he told her. "Say it again."
Her eyes widened. "Oh, I said . . . No, I meant--"
"Do not. Do not begin to pretend that you don't love me, aknasha," he whispered. "I have seen inside your heart, remember? When all of Atlantis might be destroyed in the next forty-eight hours, do not deprive me of the truth of your feelings during this brief moment before duty calls me away from you."
She suddenly shoved him, hard, and he fell over next to her. She rolled over to face him, and her expression was far too serious. Or maybe not serious enough. Alaric found himself wishing he could take back his impulsive words.
"I do love you," she whispered. "I didn't want to admit it, because if ever there were a textbook version of a doomed relationship, we're pretty much it. But I can't help myself, no matter how hard I've tried. I've seen inside your heart, too, remember? And there you were, shining in the darkness. Honor, courage, duty, and a heaping helping of iron will. How could I not love you?"
He rolled onto his back and shouted a wordless cry of triumph to the world, and then he paused and looked at her. "And?"
"And what?"
"And world-bending kisses," he said, and he pulled her on top of his chest. "Let me demonstrate."
So he did. He kissed her until he no longer knew where they were or what their names were. There was no Alaric; no Quinn. Only the passion that burned so brightly between them he could hardly countenance that it did not set the room on fire. The silken feel of her lips against his breathed hope and laughter into his soul, and hunger turned to an emotion far deeper--far more powerful--far more life-sustaining.
Fire and warmth and home. She was and forever would be home to him, no matter what foes or battles he faced. The realization blazed through him like the summer sun breaking through the clouds after a tropical thunderstorm, and the kind of peace he'd never known suffused his mind, his heart, and his soul.
His body hardened past the point of endurance, until need and hunger drove him toward madness. He had to touch her--touch her now--touch her everywhere. He stroked the silky skin of her arms and shoulders, and even dared to press kisses along the elegant line of her collarbone. She was so thin--too thin--but far more beautiful than any woman he'd ever known.