“I appreciate that you did. If you hold Belle any tighter, you might strangle her.”
She looked down at the squirming cat she had a death grip on. A ghost of a smile lit her eyes briefly as she forced herself to let go. “I’m surprised she didn’t bite me. Shadow cats were raised to be vicious.”
“Your brothers used torture on your cats, various tortures, perhaps not sexual, but torture the same, which Barnabas taught in his class. You are not vicious, and neither are the cats.”
Her dark eyes searched his face carefully. “Isai, I don’t want you to think I’m always perfectly nice. I’m not. I have quite a few very negative feelings built up.”
“I am very happy about that. I do not wish to have a lifemate who is all forgiveness. I intend to destroy this man, Barnabas, as well as your family. If you do not have ‘negative feelings’—whatever that is—you would not support me in this endeavor.”
She made a face at him. “Sometimes, when you talk to me, the way you phrase something is so very off-putting, I’m not certain how to respond.”
“‘Yes’ is the proper response,” he teased.
He actually got a smile from her and that helped to reduce some of the coiling tension in him. He hadn’t realized that just getting her to smile could light up his world. He didn’t know how, after what she’d gone through, she could be the woman she was. Courageous, strong and someone who would reach out to another woman in the way she had Elisabeta. He even understood that friendship a little better.
“I don’t want you to take any chances, Isai. Before we do anything else, we have to recover that book. We can’t take the chance that it will fall into Anatolie’s hands. Or my brothers’ hands. Or Barnabas’s.” She gave a little shudder when she indicated the last.
“Would they know how to open the book?”
“They would reverse the order in which Xavier closed it. He sacrificed a life from each species. There is some controversy over whether he only used dark mage, Jaguar and Carpathian, or whether he had a second ceremony before or after that one. That will cause problems, but they aren’t insurmountable if you’re willing to kill a lot of people.”
“You are saying that to open the book one must kill five people in the correct order.”
She nodded. “That’s the truth of it. The members of my family and Barnabas are very much willing to kill three times that many in order to open the book. And if Sergey gets wind of the book being so close—and he will eventually—he’ll do anything to recover and open it. He has tiny bits of Xavier in him. In fact, he would probably know precisely how to open it.” She tilted her head back, both hands buried in the cat’s fur. “We have to recover that book first, Isai.”
“We will,” he assured her.
“Why haven’t you ever questioned that I might be trying to recover the book for my family, or for myself?”
“It is impossible to lie to one’s lifemate. You can omit things, but lying will not work.”
She very carefully put the large shadow cat from her lap. “Thank you for believing in me, Isai. I haven’t given you that much cause to.”
“That is not necessarily true. You risked your life to try to help Elisabeta. You could have gotten away and yet you didn’t. You allowed Sergey to keep you prisoner so that you could aid her. Have you told her of your experiences with Barnabas?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted in a low tone. “She was held prisoner for centuries. It wasn’t nearly as bad for me.”
“You cannot compare the two, and neither will she. Sergey might have tormented Elisabeta, but I doubt that he tortured her. He wouldn’t want her to commit any act that would take away her innocence. It was her light he needed. He might have hurt her in order to get her to comply with his commands and to rely on him, but he wouldn’t have sexually assaulted her with the kind of pain Barnabas inflicted on you.”
Isai made absolutely certain that he kept his features perfectly expressionless. He didn’t want her to know that he was seething with the need to find Barnabas and then her family and one by one wipe them from the face of the earth. He did find it a little laughable that she thought an ancient couldn’t handle mages. He had learned so many things in his time on the planet and most of those had to do with battles and hunting vampires. Mages sometimes helped and sometimes got in the way.
He was careful, searching for the right words. She was already wounded. She needed to know she was worth something to him after hearing what her family had done to her. She felt shame and that infuriated him, but he made certain none of his growing anger showed in his voice. “Like me, Elisabeta will admire and respect you for your courage. You truly are worthy of being her friend and my lifemate.”
Her gaze jumped to his. For the first time since she’d decided to tell him about her past, she looked pleased. He’d said the right thing. He took a chance. “Perhaps it would be a good thing to talk to Elisabeta. If there is anyone who will understand and not judge you, it will be her. She is a woman of the light, just as you are.”
“She is so lost and wounded,” Julija protested. “She doesn’t need me to dump my troubles on her. She needs me to be there for her.”
“Maybe she needs to know she’s needed. Would you want to be the one everyone feels sorry for? Everyone tiptoes around? Helping you, even if it is just to listen to you, might be the thing she needs most to start healing.”
Julija looked down at her hands. “I don’t think it’s possible to heal after what she went through. I hate the idea that everyone thinks she’ll rise all perfect.”
“No one believes that, least of all her lifemate. They were born for each other. He will know how best to make her happy.”
Her chin went up. A challenge. “Do you know how best to make me happy?”
“Yes. But you are unwilling to take that chance. Now that I know why, at least I have understanding.”
He wasn’t certain if that was completely true or not. He wanted it to be. He wanted to do whatever she needed him to do without regret. He was her lifemate and if she absolutely could not stand the idea of it, then he didn’t want to force her. They wouldn’t work. Some men claimed their women, and he knew they did so because, deep down, their women needed them to. Julija had to make up her own mind. That was as important to him as it was to her.
There was a long silence. He could hear her heart beating a little too fast. Had he already claimed her, he would have immediately corrected that and soothed her. She was upset, and embarrassed, two emotions she didn’t need to ever have around him.
“I don’t know what to think anymore.” There was honesty in her voice. “You’re very different than I expected. I was terrified of becoming a lifemate to a Carpathian, now I don’t know what to think.”
“Terrified?” There had been genuine fear in her voice even when she’d said the word. That seemed abnormal for her. Julija wasn’t a woman too many things terrified. “You studied the Carpathian species?”
“Yes, it was a requirement. My father wanted me to know everything about the species.”
“Since there are no books on us, how were you informed?”
“We had instructors for our classes. The Carpathian class was taught by my stepmother’s brother . . .” She trailed off as he kept looking at her. Her gaze shifted away from his. “So the Carpathians wiping out the mages never really happened? According to the class I took, that was the reason Xavier began to fight back. He had thought they were his friends.”
“It never happened, Julija. Is this class taught to all mages?”
“I have no idea. I was privately tutored.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “My brothers were supposed to take the class, but they didn’t, and they weren’t in trouble for it. I tried to skip out once and my father was furious. I was punished for a couple of weeks.”
“How long was this class?”
“Just a couple of weeks, which I thought was strange, even at the time.” She shook her head and looked straight into his eyes, realizing the truth. “It was fake, wasn’t it? At least fake mixed with truth. Had it all been fake I would have known. I was impressionable at the time and was still trying to figure out why my father was so harsh with me.”
“He knew you were Dragonseeker. He knew what that meant. He wanted to find ways to turn you against the Carpathian people. He knew you were growing powerful as a mage and the longer you lived, the more your Carpathian blood would call to you.”
“They all fed off me.” She held up her arms for him to see. “Once when he was very angry with me he told me I had been bred just to sustain his life and if I wasn’t giving him my blood, I was useless to him.”
“How were you fed blood? You must have needed it?”
“I was trying not to use it and that was what made him angry all the time. I didn’t like that if I didn’t have it, I grew weak. I prefer the night and sometimes, when I was hurt, after he beat me, I would lie in the yard, in the dirt. It soothed my body. Once, my brothers caught me and they told him. He was furious. He said I was acting like a traitor and he would bury me alive if he ever caught me doing such a thing again.”
She wrapped her arms around her middle, shuddering with memories pouring in.
“Your father is an ass,” Isai declared in hope of making her laugh.
He didn’t get a laugh, but he did get a faint smile.
“I suppose you could call him that, although it’s mild.”
“Julija, we need to get moving to find Iulian and the book. I have to feed again. It will not take me long. You will be safe here while I am out hunting. Are you comfortable with that?”
She nodded. “I can clean up while you’re gone.”
“When I return, you’ll need to feed, you know that, don’t you? To keep your strength up.” He kept his gaze fixed on her face, reading her every emotion.