Page 33 of Try As I Smite
His Christmas Carol was over. They were done. He had no doubt. But they weren’t nearly finished with what was to come.
He lifted his gaze, offering his hand again to the woman still sitting in a heap on the floor beside her mother, and froze halfway there at the sight of her expression, gone so blank, so uncaring, she might as well have punched him in the face.
“Delilah?”
She rose to her feet slowly, chin tipped up at that haughty angle that used to make him so damn frustrated. Still did. Anger stirred in his breast, swirling with a hurt betrayal that was worse by far. After all this…was she going to let him face this alone?
He could see the truth of it in her eyes before she spoke.
“I can’t go,” she said.
“Why?” he snapped the word.
She shook her head. Was she refusing to tell him? “Just go. You can’t—”
Her mother cut her off. “When my daughter was born, both factions—angels and demons—feared the power a child of both could hold over them. Neither angels nor demons can affect our daughter. But with the blood of both in her veins, she could destroy an entire species if she wished. At least, that was the concern.”
Dread dropped over him like a blanket woven of lead. He turned his gaze on Delilah. “Was the concern?”
She glanced away, then back, then shook her head.
“The binding won’t let her speak of it,” her father said quietly.
Alasdair looked over her shoulder to find a man tormented by the actions he’d taken against his own daughter.
Every horror of that decision written plainly in the lines of his face, the deep regret in his eyes. “That spell that bound her powers was an unbreakable oath. She can’t help or harm either side. Anything to do with angels or demons and she must stay out of it.”
Alasdair dropped his gaze to Delilah’s face, finding…nothing. She watched him carefully. Held herself carefully. And he had no fucking clue what to say to this. “Or what?” he asked.
She shrugged, still distant. “I’ve never tested the limits of the consequences.”
Why was she acting like this? Every duty, every fear, the weight of his people and possibly the world, rested on what happened next, and he found that he wanted…needed…her at his side. What were consequences in the face of annihilation? “Come with me anyway. Do what you can.”
Delilah stilled like a doe in the forest with a hunter’s bow trained on her heart. And, for half a second, he thought she was going to reach for his hand. But then she drew herself to her full height, hands fisted at her sides. “No.”
The single hard word, uttered in cool control she’d perfected, dropped between them, seeming to thud on the ground like a dead body dropped from a great height.
After a long beat full of disbelief and betrayal, Alasdair shook his head. She couldn’t mean it. The woman he’d come to know today, hell the woman he’d learned of this past year and in that alley, wouldn’t walk away from someone facing supernatural peril.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, slowly. Softly. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She tipped up her chin. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me. I’m not coming with you, and you’re out of time.”
She glanced at her father, who, after a pause, waved a hand, and without a will of his own, Alasdair was sent away.
Chapter Eight
He hates me.
His expression as he disappeared told her that much. She’d made him hate her so that he could go. So that he would go.
The series of emotions that had crossed his face when he’d learned of her binding had moved too fast for her to catch every nuance. She’d expected the worst. Accusations. Incriminations. Instead, what she’d seen was the one she’d secretly, selfishly been hoping for.
Understanding.
Even though he no doubt blamed her for the entire fiasco of a day, he’d understood and wanted her with him anyway.
I would push the limits and risk any pain, for you. The words had hovered on her lips, feathering through her soul as though sewn into the fabric of her very makeup. But she’d held back.
