My words clearly stunned him.
“That is very generous, milady,” Edmond said, greatly moved. Kneeling, he kissed my hand.
“Please don’t forget,” I said, fondly tugging his hair. “You have a place to come back to, okay?”
“Yes, milady.” Bowing, he took his leave, tossing over his shoulder as he walked away, “And I’ll be older then. Just the way you like!”
Impudent boy. I was still grinning when I left the locker room. Nolan was still at his desk, jotting down notes in the lesson book he kept on my progress.
“Did you mean it?” Nolan asked, looking up to meet my gaze.
“About Edmond being able to come back here?”
“No. About waiting for your lovers to come back to you. About wanting them to.”
Our relationship abruptly shifted from student and teacher to the more complicated relationship of a woman facing the father of one of the men she loved. “Do you mean Dante?” I asked softly.
Nolan nodded.
“Yes . . . if he can forgive me.”
“Goddess bless us. I believe it’s the other way around, as does he, likely: whether you could forgive him.”
“I would hope that we could forgive each other.” There was quite a lot to forgive, on both our parts. “I keep expecting him to return, but he hasn’t. It’s been three months since he left.” Truth—since I kicked him out. “Have you heard anything from him?”
“No, he hasn’t contacted us.” A flicker of worry, quickly concealed. “But he will soon, eventually.”
“Do you think . . . he wouldn’t try to end his life, would he?” That was my greatest fear. That he would die and this time not come back—be reborn. That was his curse, you see, laid down upon him by none other than yours truly, or who I had been anyway, this fierce Warrior Queen from long, long ago: a curse of dying and being reborn into an ever-diminishing bloodline until his family line finally ended. The number of his descendents was down to a trickle now, just him, his twin brother, Quentin, and his father and mother. But that wasn’t really the part of the curse I worried about—Quentin was even now enthusiastically sowing his seed, and Nolan and his wife, Hannah, might still yet bear more children. What worried me most was the possibility that the curse I had laid upon Dante so long ago might have been broken by the life we had created, the child that had lived so briefly within me before I lost it in a traumatic miscarriage.
It had almost destroyed Dante when I’d lost the baby. He’d taken out his grief by slaughtering all of Mona Teresa’s warriors, the Monère Queen who had injured me and deliberately caused the loss of our child. Last I’d heard, Mona Teresa still hadn’t recovered yet; few warriors had been brave or desperate enough to swear themselves into her service. If Dante had not been legendary enough before, slaying the first great Warrior Queen . . . well, he was certainly infamous now after he had single-handedly sliced and diced, and viciously torn apart Mona Teresa’s thirty warriors with exceptionally cold and bloodthirsty proficiency.
Dante and I had a real complicated history, you might say. We had been enemies long ago, then lovers in my second cycle of life in a most ironic twist of fate. The wonder was not that I had pushed him away: it was why I wanted him back.
The answer to that lay in his eyes—what I had seen in them as I had cramped and bled and lost our child, his hope for ending the curse. The way he had touched me and held me with a tenderness and concern that had fractured and broken my heart even more.
I had saved him, started to love him until my memory of him, of my first life, of being killed by him, returned. Then I had feared him and pushed him away, ordered him gone. And I was afraid now that he might be gone forever.
I know. I was one really messed-up gal. I pushed the men I loved away from me, and then when they left, I wanted them back. But I was aware of my issues and I was trying to change. Fate had given me a second chance with Dante, and though I had managed to screw up the first part of it, this second opportunity was not yet over. Please, Goddess, I prayed. If you give me another chance, I promise I’ll do my best to make it right this time.
The door opened and Hannah Morell rushed into the room. She glanced quickly at me, then fixed her gaze intently on her husband. “Dante has been seen on the island of Cozumel.”
And I discovered, to my surprise, that sometimes prayers really do work.
TWO
“COZUMEL?” I DON’T know why, but when I’d imagined Dante alone and suffering somewhere, I hadn’t pictured him in a tropical island paradise. “Are you sure?”
“It makes sense,” Nolan said, “if he took a boat from New Orleans.”
Leaving on a boat, and not just any boat but a cruise ship? I hadn’t imagined that either. After killing Mona Teresa’s warriors, had he traveled back to my territory, watched us and made sure we were doing well before going off into exile?
“Who saw him?” I asked.
“A group of tourists on horseback came upon him in the jungle,” Hannah said.
“Tourists?” I felt my eyebrows climb up my forehead. “Not a Monère Queen or one of her men?”
“No, milady.”
“Then how do you know it was Dante they saw?”
“They saw a saber-toothed tiger; that is his other form. It’s creating quite a stir since more than one witness saw him.”
“A saber-toothed tiger? For real? Aren’t they supposed to be extinct?”
“They became extinct over eleven thousand years ago,” Nolan answered quietly. “When they died out, so did the animal form in Monère shifters.”
Which meant that Dante had lived and died and been reborn for at least that long. Over eleven thousand years . . . Sweet Goddess! I’d laid one whammy of a curse of him. One whose painful depths I hadn’t fully comprehended until now. The wonder was that Dante hadn’t torn me apart, murdered me painfully and slowly the moment he had seen my Goddess’s Tears, the pearly trademark moles embedded in my palms, and realized who I was: that I was Mona Lyra reincarnated. It was a wonder he was capable of having feelings other than sheer loathing hatred for me after what I had done to him.
When I’d asked him once if he remembered his previous lives, his answer had been, My memories are most clear of my last incarnation and of my first life. That, I never forget. I get random flashes of other lives, occasionally. I think it’s my mind’s natural defense, that selective memory. Remembering everything would probably be too much for one single mind to handle.
The last sentence had been a vast understatement.
“I’m going after him,” Nolan said.
“Good,” I said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.” But leaving wasn’t quite as easy as that.
My men threw a hissy fit. It might not be the best words to apply to a collection of fierce Monère warriors and former rogues, but that’s essentially what they did. They didn’t want me to go, too dangerous. Not just where I was going but who I was going after. When that didn’t dissuade me, then they all wanted to come along to guard me. I had no problem with that.
“Whoever can be ready to leave in an hour can come with us,” I said agreeably. “Be sure to bring your passports. We’re catching a six forty a.m. commercial flight that leaves in”—I glanced at my watch—“four hours.”
The relief on my men’s faces turned back into fierce scowls.
“I do not have a passport,” said Tomas, one of my guards, his usual smooth-as-butter Southern drawl completely absent from his voice.
“Neither do the rest of us,” said Chami. All of my inner-circle guards were old, but Chami was probably the oldest among them. His full name was Chameleo, for his chameleon’s gift of blending in with his surroundings. He could virtually disappear in front of your eyes. “But that won’t be a problem for me,” he said, smiling.