Page 64 of City of Love

The idea of it going wrong scared him to death. The thought that if, after all of this, she would finally choose to come be with him, attempt the process, only to have it… fail… well, that would be a personal pain and guilt he couldn’t fathom living with for another two hundred years.

“Your thoughts aren’t exactly helping right now, you know,” she said.

Damn telepathy.

“Lexi,” he said softly in her mind. “Honey, I don’t think it’s going to go wrong. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t feel right. You had visions of us together for months before we ever met. And Alana senses that we’re meant to be together, she has from the beginning. If so, then you’ll make it through the transition.”

“But you can’t promise me that, can you?”

“No, of course I can’t. But even Roberto told us it does work most of the time.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to Cassandra.”

Ouch.

Silence.

“So where does that leave us?” He could barely stand to hear her answer. Almost couldn’t hear her with the blood pounding in his temples.

“I don’t know. I’m just so scared. Maybe… too scared.”

Fuck. She was going to do it. She was going to say no. And he couldn’t go through this again.

“Go through what again, Gideon?”

He squeezed his eyes tight, fighting the memories, but he wanted her to be open with him and he had to be willing to ask the same of himself. He opened his mind to her, showing her his past and letting her see the story of his youth.

Though he’d only been a teenager at the time, Gideon had fought side-by-side with his parents in the last uprising nearly eighty years ago. He’d been raised on a powerful belief system focused on the importance of history and the anti-industry choices his world had made. There’d been no question in his household but to take up arms and defend that lifestyle if necessary. And it had been necessary. The biggest battle of their world’s last rebellion had been fought right on the streets of Philadelphia, blood and bodies painting the very roads they walked on today.

Caught off guard by rebels who’d surprised them coming out of a now closed off section of Church Street, he’d been standing right next to his parents as they were both taken down, swords ripping through them. Young though he was, he’d managed to fight back and hold them off before the rebels eventually dismissed him as too young to kill or capture.

Afterward, until his cousin Julian finally found him, he’d lain next to their bodies for hours, knowing that the unborn brother or sister his mother had been carrying had been lost, too. His father had begged her not to fight given her pregnancy, but she’d refused to let her two men go off without her.

It took decades for Gideon to heal enough to get through his days without a constant, raw pain, though eventually he’d been able to get on with his life, finding pleasure and love in his friends, his music, his scientific contributions to their world. But in all the time since, he’d never been willing to let a woman very far into his heart. Never that kind of intimacy. Never someone who could become family, live in his house, grow old with him and eventually… die.

His family home had become a literal brick and mortar fortress against possible future pain. In fact, though no one knew this, whenever he’d bedded a woman since that time it had either been at her home, his club, or some other location. Never his home. Never his bed.

Until Lexi. In such a short time, she’d turned him inside out in the most thrilling way, and he’d been willing to risk it all for her.

“Oh, Gideon,” she gasped. “I had no idea.” He could sense her tears flowing. “Please, nothing’s changed in how I feel for you. I love you. I’d willingly go through all the pain of the process to be with you, without question, if that were the only factor. But the risk… It’s my life we’re talking about here, my possible death. Not yours. Can you not understand?”

“Yes, of course. I do understand, Lex. It’s not fair of me to ask it of you.”

He never should have started down this road with her. Never should have broken his own rules. Good lord, especially with an otherworlder. He’d been incredibly unfair to them both.

“Understand, I’m not mad at you, sweetheart,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m furious with myself!”

All the bright new colors of his soul began to fade from the world, turning to his familiar black and white once more.

“Gideon, what’s going on over there? I feel you pulling away from me. I don’t understand your thoughts exactly, but whatever is happening, please wait. I haven’t decided anything yet. I’m not abandoning you. I just… I don’t know what to do!”

He stood up, pacing the room, grinding his teeth. He stopped in front of a very old mirror, one his parents had brought from Venice some hundred and fifty years back. Staring at his face for only a moment, he slammed the side of his forearm into it, shattering the glass and knocking the delicate frame across the room.

“What was that?” She was sobbing now. “I’m just so afraid. Afraid of trying and afraid of not trying.”

“As am I. I’m frightened of those same things.”

He stared at the trickle of blood running down his arm from the shattered glass. Bleeding. Like his heart.

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