Poisoned Kisses by Stephanie Draven Page B

from her murderous immortal family, after all.
    With that thought, she turned and fled the bathroom.
     
    In the living room, she stared out the front window. Shadowy tree limbs arched gracefully under the freezing rain, encased in moonlit ice. She’d never seen a storm like this and she couldn’t stop shivering, but this time not from the cold.
    She heard Marco come up behind her. “Ashlynn, look at me.” It wasn’t her name, so she didn’t turn around. She just pushed her hands against the windowpane and let the cold seep into her. “Ashlynn, it’s just me. It’s Marco. I promise. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He wrapped his arms around her, holding her, trying to comfort her, when she should be the one apologizing. But she couldn’t speak. “I think I just wanted someone to know about me,” he said softly as the fire in the fireplace crackled behind him. “To know that I can change into people who’ve hurt me in some way. I’m some kind of… I can’t explain it.”
    Was it possible that he didn’t even know what he was? “You’re like a hydra,” she whispered, suffocating under the weight of her own deceit. He was not like a hydra; he was one. But how to tell him?
    He turned her around so that she was looking at him. “A hydra?”
    “Your parents are Greek,” she whispered. “Don’t you know the old stories?”
    “I know them,” he said, tilting his head.
    Kyra stole a glance up at him from beneath her lashes. “The ancients said that the hydra was a poisonous monster. And it had a thousand heads. If a warrior cut off its head, two more would grow in its place.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said impatiently. “Unless the warrior used a torch to cauterize the wound.”
    How innocently he said it. How guileless. He didn’t suspect he was holding a torchbearer in his arms. Nor that she was fated to destroy him. And yet, she couldn’t pull away. “I think you’re like that, Marco. Like a hydra.”
    She hadn’t meant her words to wound him, but he fell back as if struck. “You think I’m a monster. ” His face reddened. Then, finally, he nodded with grim resignation. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a monster.”
    Kyra’s stomach clenched, as if she could feel his pain as her own. She was only trying to help him to understand what he’d become. “Marco…what happened to you?”
    To her surprise, he told her.
     
    He told her about Rwanda. He told her about how he had been shot. He told her about the villagers in the ditch, slaughtered while he stood by. And he told her about the day he buried them. The way his voice flattened broke her heart. Even now, he made fists of his hands as if to keep them from shaking as he finished his tale.
    “When I returned to base camp, I looked in a mirror and, instead of my own face, I saw the face of the militiaman. I saw the face of a murderer and somehow it made perfect sense who shot me, because I’m just like him.”
    Kyra listened to his story in silence, but couldn’t contain herself any longer. How could she have been so wrong about him? “You’re nothing like those men.”
    He leaned back against the arm of the sofa, unable to meet her eyes. “I stood by and just watched that massacre happen.”
    “No, you didn’t,” she argued. “You tried to stop it and got shot for your trouble.”
    Reminded of his old injury, his hand went to his bare shoulder. “Well, that’s what soldiers are supposed to do. We’re there to take the bullets if we have to. We’re there to protect people who can’t protect themselves. But in the end, we just observed .” He said the word with venom.
    “You were just following orders.”
    He winced. “Bullshit, Ashlynn. Since when has that been a defense for anything? But I’m trying to make up for it now. Now I help people fight back. I make damned sure they’re equipped to fight back. I give them all the guns and the ammo they’ll ever need.”
    He was just like her—trying to do the right