Bullet

25

I SAT ON the edge of Jean-Claude’s bed. Even after a year of living here almost every day of the week I still didn’t think of it as our bed. I was wrapped in a soft navy blue blanket because one, my hair was wet again, and two, all my robes were silk. Jean-Claude knelt behind me in his black velvet robe with the fur lapels that were as black as the rest of the robe. I usually liked him in that robe a lot, but today I didn’t seem to care. He held a bunch of my curls in his hand and rested them on the big, toothy-looking head of the diffuser on the dryer. I usually let my hair dry naturally, but I’d been shivering, so he’d asked to dry my hair. Fine with me, I didn’t care. The best thing about the dryer besides the warmth was it was too loud for anyone to talk around me. Talking felt very overrated.

Jean-Claude picked up another bunch of my curls and laid it over the blow dryer. I sat there and let the hot air bathe my scalp, let him play with my hair. He’d rubbed some kind of leave-in conditioner into it, gently, so the dryer didn’t dry out my hair. He’d asked first, and my answer had been what it had been for the last hour: “Fine.”

To the question, “Are you all right?” my answer had been, “I’m fine.” If it was a lie, I didn’t know the truth yet. I was fine.

He turned the dryer off and laid it on the bed beside him. He bunched my curls in his hands, settling them in some order that made him happy. I sat and blinked. I had seldom cared less about what my hair looked like than right now.

I heard the door open behind us. I didn’t turn around. It didn’t seem important enough. Then I smelled coffee. My pulse sped a little, and I sat up and realized just how much I’d been huddling in on myself. I forced myself to sit straighter, shoulders back, spine straight. I would not hunch like a dog that had been kicked once too often; the fact that that described how parts of me were feeling was neither here nor there. My emotions felt kicked to hell, but I could not let it make me look like I’d been kicked.

Richard was in front of me shirtless, in a pair of jeans so faded they had white patches here and there, as if there’d been some sort of bleach accident. Richard threw out jeans when they looked like that. He was barefoot, too.

“Sorry all your clothes got wet,” I said. My voice didn’t sound right, as if there were an echo between what I was saying and the inside of my head.

He held a red coffee mug down to me. It was one of the new mugs that went with the new dishes that Nathaniel had picked out for here. Just like back at our house, he had picked two contrasting colors of plain, heavy dinnerware. For our house it was green and blue, but for the Circus he’d picked red and black. The dishes sat in the newly installed kitchen that had gone in at the same time as all the new bathrooms. Good thing nothing went this wrong when we’d had all the workmen in here.

Richard knelt in front of me and held out the mug. “Coffee. You need it.”

I nodded but made no move to take it. All I could think of was that Nathaniel was down the hall with doctors and Micah to hold his hand. I was waiting to get my shit together before I went down to see him. There was a quiet part of me that kept repeating, “Haven tried to kill Nathaniel. He meant it to be Nathaniel lying there with his brains all over the floor.” Then I’d shove the thoughts away and try to stop thinking about anything.

“Do you not want the coffee?” he asked.

“It smells good,” I said, and my voice sounded as numb as I felt.

Richard touched my hand where it showed around the edge of the blanket and wrapped my fingers around the handle of the mug. “Drink it.”

My hand started to shake as I raised the mug, so I had to use my other hand to steady it. Two hands were better. I took a moment to smell the aroma: rich, dark, good coffee. Nathaniel had been doing my coffee shopping for me. He was the only one who always got what I wanted.

“How’s Nathaniel?” I asked.

“As I’ve answered before, ma petite, he is fine. He will be fine. He is hurt, but it is not permanent.”

“Drink the coffee while it’s hot, Anita,” Richard said.

I sipped the coffee and it was good. There wasn’t quite the right amount of sugar in it, but Richard didn’t know that I’d started putting in more sugar. He hadn’t been around enough to know that I’d changed anything.

“How do we keep everyone safe?” I asked, and I wasn’t sure who I was asking.

“We will meet with the tigers when you are ready,” Jean-Claude said.

I shook my head. “I don’t mean from Marmee Noir, I mean from things like what just happened. I thought Haven and I had worked things out. I thought it was safe.”

“We all did,” Richard said.

Jean-Claude sat down behind me, so he could curl his body against my back. His arms slid carefully around my shoulders so that he didn’t jostle the coffee, but he could still hold me. “You could not have known, ma petite.”

“That Haven was a bad guy? I knew that, and him beating them almost to death showed he hadn’t changed.”

He laid his head against my hair. “There are bad men among Rafael’s rats, but they would never have behaved so. It is not his past that made this happen. It is not that he spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law that made this happen.”

“Then what? Why?”

“Do not ask this now, ma petite. Please, let it rest until you have had more time.”

“No,” I said, “if you know why this happened, then tell me, because I don’t understand it.”

“Take the coffee, Richard,” he said.

Richard took it and sat back on the floor, his hand finding my fresh jeans under the blanket. I had clothes to change into no matter how many times I ruined them. I had my whole damn wardrobe here. So I could keep changing after every bloodbath. Richard rubbed my leg through the jeans. I let him.

“Jean-Claude, tell me,” I said.

He wrapped his arms around my shoulders, his face next to mine. “I believe that he had never been in love before, perhaps not truly loved anyone ever before in his life before you, ma petite.”

I frowned, putting my hands on his arms. “So what does that mean? If I was the first love he’d ever had, why did he try to kill one of the other people I love most?”

He held me tighter, and I knew whatever he was going to say I wouldn’t like, but I needed to hear it. I needed to try to understand what the fuck had gone wrong.

“I am told he answered the question of why he had done it, ma petite.”

I nodded. “He said, because I loved all the other men more than I loved him.”

“A certain type of man, when he loves for the first time, his love is not really love, it is possession. Possessions don’t have rights or feelings; they are something to be owned and controlled. He had spent more than a year trying to do just that, and failing.”

“So when he attacked Micah and Nathaniel the last time we were all at my house, that was sort of a last-ditch effort to try to, what, own me?”

“When you fought on their side against him, he couldn’t understand it,” Richard said quietly.

“He hurt people I loved. I don’t let that happen.”

“But he was stronger than they were; he could have won the fight if you hadn’t sided with them. I think if he’d been willing to really hurt you physically, you might not have won then.”

I nodded, holding on to Jean-Claude’s arms, leaning in against the solidness of him. Richard kept rubbing my leg over and over. “He was willing to hurt me today.”

“Maybe,” Richard said, “but it wasn’t you he wanted to bloody. Even in the fight he didn’t actually bloody you, did he?”

I stared down at him. “What do you mean?”

“He didn’t want to hurt you physically, even at the end.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I asked.

“No, I mean, yes. Shit.”

“Are you saying Haven wouldn’t have hurt me? That I didn’t have to kill him?” My voice was rising, almost yelling.

“No,” Richard said, “no, he had to die. He was too dangerous.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Richard put the coffee mug carefully on the bedside table and knelt in front of me, his hands on my knees under the blanket. “I’m saying he didn’t want to hurt you physically, but he wanted to hurt you, Anita. He just wanted to hurt you the way you’d hurt him.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Jean-Claude spoke with his face next to mine. “It means, ma petite, that he knew who to kill to break your heart the most.”

I turned so I could see his face. “What?”

“You love me, I know that,” he said, “but the thought of Nathaniel dead and gone, the thought of how close you came to losing him today, that is the thought that turns your skin cold and makes you unwilling to feel.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he was crazy, but I closed my mouth and tried to think. I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say to that. I’d feel just as bad if it were one of you wounded in the other room.”

Richard laid his head on my lap. My hand came down automatically to touch the foamy waves of his hair. “I know you care for me, Anita, and maybe if I stop being such an ass you’ll love me again, but I had my own bad moments watching you fall in love with Nathaniel and Micah. Micah I got. He’s Nimir-Raj. He might be too small to win a fistfight with me or one of the larger dominants, but he’s a good leader, better than me, better than Haven was. We both recognized that, and respected it, but Nathaniel—it took me a long time to understand why you loved him.” He spoke with his head in my lap, his tall, bare upper body bowed so he could fit his head and some of those broad shoulders in my lap. I could only see the side of his face as he talked, and he couldn’t see mine at all. Was that on purpose?

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, or anyone,” I said.

“I know that,” he said, “and sometimes I did mean to hurt you, Anita. I’m very sorry about that now, but Nathaniel offended that macho part of me. Haven had a lot more macho to live up to, partly because the lions are just that way, and partly because he’d been in the mob since he was a teenager. He just couldn’t share you with someone he saw as weak.” Richard wrapped his arms around my legs, hugging me. “He couldn’t bear seeing that you loved someone who was weaker, less dominant, submissive in every way, but you loved him more.”

I thought about that. “Is that why he was convinced I’d had sex with Travis and Noel? They’re weak, submissive, or Noel was, not sure about Travis. I don’t think he’s sure about himself yet.”

Richard nodded his head against my lap. “I think that was part of it. He looked at the men you loved most and the ones you seemed to fall in love with easiest, and it’s usually less dominant men. Micah is Nimir-Raj, but he doesn’t fight you about ruling the leopards. He doesn’t argue with you the way I do.”

Jean-Claude went very still against me. I looked down at the man in my lap, and finally said, “No, he doesn’t.”

He raised his head up so he could look into my face. “I thought you killed because it didn’t bother you. I didn’t understand until today how much it costs you.” He swallowed, and his eyes were shiny. “I’ve let you do my killing for me for years. I’ve forced you to do terrible things because I’m too squeamish. I comforted myself at one point by saying that it didn’t bother you, it didn’t mean anything to you, to do the wolf pack’s dirty business, but that was just to make me feel better. Everything you’ve done to keep us safe, and make other shapeshifters and vampires think twice before attacking St. Louis, had a price. I told myself that you didn’t pay that price, that you were cold about it. Today I saw your face when you realized Noel was dead. I saw your face after you’d killed Haven. I saw the pain. I saw the price, and I am so sorry that you’ve had to pay that price on your own.”

I looked into those brown eyes and didn’t know whether to pinch myself or him. “What are you saying? That you’ll help me kill people now?”

He shook his head. “I’ll defend the wolves with violence when it’s needed, but I’ll never be a shooter, Anita. I don’t regret that, but I am sorry that you have to pay more of the price for our safety than I do, because I’ll never be . . .” He stopped as if he didn’t know what to say.

“You’ll never be a killer like me?” I said.

He looked up and shook his head. “I did not say that, I wouldn’t have said that. Haven had to die. He was too dangerous, too unpredictable to be allowed to stay as Rex.”

“I didn’t kill him because of that,” I said.

Richard studied my face. “I don’t understand.”

“I killed him because Noel did a brave thing. Noel pushed Nathaniel out of the way of the shot. Noel who was one of the weakest of all of you guys, but he was brave when it counted, and he should have lived through that. He should have lived and gotten to be brave and get his master’s degree and have a life. He was only twenty-four and now he’s dead, and we can’t even tell his parents that he died a hero, because we can’t tell them the truth about what happened. They’ll never know that he died brave, and he died well, and he died saving the man I love, and all I could do was walk across the room and shoot his killer in the face until he died, too.” I was crying and didn’t mean to. “I didn’t kill Haven because it was the best thing for the city, or for the lions, Richard. I killed him because if Noel had to die, it was the least I could do for him. I killed Haven because he tried to kill Nathaniel, and that is not allowed. For that he had to die, because I looked into his eyes and knew that while he was alive, Nathaniel wasn’t safe, and I’d do anything to keep him safe.”

Jean-Claude held me tight, murmuring comforting words in French. Richard buried his face against my legs again and wrapped his arms around them. They held me close, and I let myself cry for Noel, and for Nathaniel, and for the knowledge that I’d killed one of my own lovers, killed him with the taste of his body still on my lips, the feel of him still like a memory inside me, and I’d looked him in the same eyes that had looked up at me in bed while we made love, and blown his face into so much meat and bones.

And in the end, that last was what made the crying build to screams.