Poisoned Kisses

“In this weather?” she asked. “My closest neighbor is a mile away.”

Marco glanced out the window with frustration. The snow was really coming down. He’d planned to be well on his way to Toronto by now. But that was before he nearly killed his ex-fiancée in a car wreck. “I don’t have a better idea.”

“You’re not dressed for a hike through a storm,” she said, eyeing his ruined dress shoes and sodden overcoat. “And I don’t need an ambulance. I’m okay.”

“You looked dead out there,” he said, the memory of it still churning like bile in his stomach. “You looked dead,” he repeated, unable to fathom how quickly she seemed to have recovered.

“But I’m fine. I just have a few bumps and bruises. Besides, in your profession, I’m sure you’ve seen people hurt much worse.”

He stooped in front of the hearth to start a fire. “My profession?”

Kyra watched him, noting the way his shoulders tensed. His emotions were like a tinderbox just waiting to flare up. She remembered the dark expression on his face in Naples and the way he’d frightened her, and she wondered what the hell she was doing. This wasn’t the way to lure him into the basement dungeon. Still, impulse control had never been her strong suit. “They say you’re a gunrunner. I’ve seen your name on the news.”

“Since when are you interested in the news, Ashlynn?”

Kyra sighed inwardly. Just her luck to have chosen to impersonate the one clueless woman from his past who wouldn’t care about his illegal enterprises. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

Marco arranged a few logs in the grate. “Maybe we both have.”

“So, is it true?” she pressed. “Are you an arms dealer?”

He lit a match and started the fire. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It mattered to your father,” Kyra countered.

He rolled his muscular shoulders, but didn’t turn to look at her. Still, she knew her arrow had struck true. “You know, Ashlynn, I do what I do so that people like you can live your safe little lives and never have to think about the horrors of the world.”

“You broke your father’s heart,” she said bluntly.

Marco silently stabbed into the fireplace with a poker. Then he exploded all at once. “What else is new? You remember how he was. I wanted to do something with my life so that other people wouldn’t have to suffer like my mother suffered, but he couldn’t get over the fact that his only son didn’t want to work in the family business. The only thing he cared about was that stupid restaurant.”

That’s crap, Kyra wanted to say. But instead, she kept Ashlynn’s sweeter demeanor. “No. Your father just thought he’d escaped a world of war. He didn’t want to see his son back in it. But at least he was proud of you when you were a soldier. It was when you amassed your own private arsenal to sell to criminals—that’s what he couldn’t forgive.” Kyra knew this, because these were among the last things Mr. Kaisaris had said before she led him to the entrance to the underworld.

Fortunately, Marco didn’t ask her how she knew. He was too pissed. “My father didn’t understand and neither do you.”

“I understand that you cause wars.”

“Gunrunning doesn’t cause wars. It simply prolongs them.”

Ug! He sounded like Ares himself. Wrapping her blanket more tightly around her, Kyra wondered if he knew how chilling his words were. “And that’s better?”

“It is better,” Marco said, turning to face her at last. “You see, there are some things civilians don’t get.“

Civilians? Did he still think of himself as a soldier? Even now? Fighting some war the rest of the world had forgotten? “Why don’t you educate me, Marco.”

“Sometimes the only thing that keeps people alive is war. In some places in the world, ‘peace’ only comes after a massacre. Fighting isn’t the worst thing that can happen, especially when it means you live to fight another day.”

“How can you say that? You used to be a UN peacekeeper.”

“Because when I was a peacekeeper in Rwanda, they killed eight hundred thousand people in one hundred days. Which is how I know peacekeeping is a joke.”

Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but the fire and his temper weren’t the only things burning; where his blood had dripped onto his collar, smoke rose from the cloth. She recognized the potent scent of it and it immediately reminded her of how Marco’s blood had literally stopped her heart. Kyra pretended not to notice, but he caught her glance. “I need to get cleaned up,” was all he said.

Chapter 7

While Marco showered, Kyra took his clothes into the small laundry room off the kitchen, and put his shirt and slacks in the dryer—his jacket was a lost cause. He’d told her that once his clothes were dry, he’d hike through the storm to find a phone. Kyra thought he was a menace to himself and society for even considering going out in this weather—wet clothes or dry—but she didn’t know how much longer she could keep him here unfettered.

The accident had left him confused and unsteady, which should make it easier to tranquilize him and drag him into the cage in the basement. It also made it easier for her to lie to him about not having a phone. She was lucky her purse had been thrown clear of the wreck, and that he hadn’t opened it and found the cell phone inside. Now she flipped it open, made sure it was still working, then tucked it, snug in her ruined coat, into a laundry basket.

Then she went to check on him.

He was in the bathroom with nothing but a towel around his waist. The first thing she noticed was his muscular back—broad, shower-damp shoulders above a perfectly curved spine. The second thing she noticed was that he had a sewing kit on the bathroom countertop, and a needle in his hand.

As he lifted the needle to his face, she gasped. “What are you doing?”

“A bit of quilting,” Marco said through clenched teeth. “What does it look like?”

He was giving himself stitches. He was actually sewing together the cut skin over his cheekbone as if he’d done it a hundred times before; as if he had no one else in the world he could trust to care for him when he was hurt. And maybe he didn’t. Kyra couldn’t help but let her eyes drift down to his hand—the one she’d slashed open with her knife in Naples. She wondered who healed him then. He was mortal, after all; his wounds didn’t close up the way hers did. Kyra reached tentatively for the needle. “Let me help you.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I told you, my blood is poison.”

She hadn’t forgotten, and yet, she still wanted to help him. Was it just her natural inclination as a lampade to guide him? Or did she really have a death wish, after all?

At that moment, their eyes met in the mirror, and before she could guard against it, she briefly glimpsed right into him. She saw him with her underworld nymph’s eyes, shedding light on forgotten corners of his soul. She saw his grief over his father. Again, she saw his need to know and be known, to understand and be understood. That same need echoed inside her and, for reasons she couldn’t explain, tears welled beneath her lashes.

“Aren’t you going to argue with me?” Marco asked, breaking eye contact as he cut the end of the thread. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s not possible to have poisoned blood?”

Kyra shook her head. “No.”

“I’m HIV positive,” he said.

“You don’t have to lie, Marco. When you told me your blood was poison, you meant it literally. I saw your blood burning your shirt. I just want to know…why.”

“Why?” Marco’s dark eyes met hers again, his voice thick with emotion. “I guess it’s because sometimes, in war, you see things so horrible, so unforgivable, so toxic, that it gets into you…it poisons you.”

Kyra understood this better than she could admit. With Ares came the vultures and anguished cries of the dying—cries that Kyra endured as part of her duties in the underworld. Like all the war gods, her father fed on bloodlust and brutality. It wasn’t just Kyra’s family legacy, it was in her blood. She could have let her violent instincts destroy her, but she hadn’t. She could have given in to her father, but she hadn’t. At least, not yet. “It doesn’t have to poison you. You can use it to find your purpose.”

“I have found my purpose,” Marco said bitterly. “It’s just a darker one than I ever imagined. You see, nobody cares about what happened in Rwanda anymore. It’s over, they think. The world has moved on, but I haven’t.”

He was struggling. Kyra could taste it. She understood it. While Kyra was born to darkness, struggling to live a life of light, for Marco, the reverse was true. “What I mean is that you can use what’s happened to you, to change.”

“Oh, I change,” he replied.

And then he did.

Kyra watched with fascination as his face reshaped itself. She saw the skin age and wrinkle before her eyes. She watched his hair shimmer with gray until he looked like his father. Then, in a horrifying display of malleable flesh and popping cartilage, Marco changed into a series of men Kyra did not recognize until he finally settled upon the face she knew. She startled, captivated by the sight of the lips she had kissed in Naples only moments before stabbing him.

Kyra didn’t have to pretend to be upset. No matter which face he was wearing, her inner torch revealed such exquisitely mortal pain, that it shamed her. She’d tried to kill him in Naples, like he was only a creature, like he was some sacrifice on the altar of her good intentions. She’d seen only the monster in him, not the man. Maybe she wasn’t so different from her murderous immortal family, after all.