“What hair?” He had intentionally refused to give her his DNA because he had known what she would find. But apparently she had found precisely that—that he was a match to John Thiroux—and she had chosen to believe it couldn’t be true. She had chosen to accept the more logical explanation that there was a lab error, which he had to admit was probably what the majority of people would conclude. The truth really was unbelievable when you didn’t come from his world.
“One of your hairs was stuck to my pillow so I took it. I had Jocelyn compare it to Thiroux’s hair, and she said it was from the same man. A perfect match.” She shook her head. “I thought I had goofed somehow, but now you’re telling me it’s true? That’s crazy. Just crazy.”
“It’s not crazy. It’s true, Sara, I swear to you.” He had no idea how to convince her. He had never told anyone the truth of what he was. So what he did was instinctive, the only way he knew to show her so she could believe. He reached out and took her hands, opening his mind and projecting it onto her, letting her see his thoughts, feel his emotions, trace his life back to the beginning. Back to when he was Jonathon Thiroux and Dauphine Street was filled with brothels and drinking holes.
He opened himself and showed her the truth.
Sara felt it the second Gabriel’s hands touched hers. It was a tingle, a static shock, the sensation of electricity rushing up her arms and vibrating in her shoulders. She would have jerked back, except that his grip on her was tight, and his deep brown eyes were drawing her in, holding her in place, mesmerizing. It should have frightened her, the intensity, the gleam, the depth in his eyes, but instead, she was reassured. This was Gabriel. This was the man she had fallen in love with.
And he was letting her into his thoughts. She could see and feel them, wrapping around her, whispering in her ear, his fear that she might have been hurt by Marguerite, his desperate relief that she wasn’t. His powerful and honest love for her, the surprise he felt at the depth of his emotion. She felt the struggle it had been for him to not touch her, how much he had wanted to make love to her fully and completely, and how torturous his restraint had been.
She would have spoken, would have questioned why he couldn’t touch her, share the pleasure of their bodies together, but he put his finger on her lips. The shhh reverberated in her brain, as clear as if he’d spoken it, but he hadn’t. Just watch, he said into her consciousness, and she barely had time to register the wonderment of having him inside her mind, his thoughts blending with hers, when she saw it.
It was the years clicking backward, like pages in a calendar, until she saw Gabriel in the same apartment, wearing clothes with an odd seventies cut, quiet and alone, resigned but in control, the French Quarter outside him dirtier than what she had encountered. Lonely, both the man and the street, shabby and knocked around a bit, bleak, but calm. It shifted, blending and blurring until he was writing on a typewriter, and walking dark streets crowded with mid-twentieth-century cars, women in voluminous skirts and bright lipstick rushing by in pumps, Gabriel’s demeanor cautious, brittle, a residual hardness lingering as he refused to make eye contact or speak with anyone. Then she saw him in a smoky bar, women with short capped hair and straight dresses laughing and dancing, the atmosphere secretive, seedy, seductive. Gabriel was watching the piano player croon to the crowd with a longing to touch the keys himself. But mostly he watched with loathing. There was a drink in Gabriel’s hand, several empty glasses in front of him, and his mood was bitter, dark, desperate. He wanted to fling the glass at the piano and make the halfhearted, unimaginative music stop.
Then suddenly he was lying in the gutter, filthy and bruised, his hair caked and crusted with grime, sweat, an empty bottle clutched to his chest. People walked over him, sniffing in distaste, someone stealing his boots right off his feet while Gabriel sang quietly to himself off-key, his eyes closed, heart screaming with a pain so violent that Sara wanted to weep for him, for all he had been, all he had lost.
But the image shifted again, and she was there. In that tiny room. Seeing through Gabriel’s eyes the loveliness of Anne’s arm in the moonlight, his desire to capture her. She felt the fuzziness of his mind, understood the languor, the sharpness, the pleasure of the powerful absinthe-and-opium cocktail. Then the confusion, the sharp shock when he realized that Anne was dead, her blood on his fingertips. The shift from pleasure to horror in the minute it took his fog-filled brain to process what the smell, the wet feel on his fingers was. The smack of death, harsh and ugly, ripping into his daily stupor.
The vision cut off before she could see Anne’s face, but it was enough to understand the horror of the moment, the self-hatred, the grief, the guilt.
Sara whispered, “Gabriel. I’m so sorry.”
It wasn’t possible that he was immortal, not by the standards of the reality she had always lived in, but she knew it was true. She had seen it, felt it. However it was possible, whatever it meant, he was the same man.
He squeezed her hands. “So it was me who found Anne Donovan dead. She was the girlfriend I told you about who was murdered, and for a hundred and fifty years I wondered if I could have done that, if I could have been hallucinating, blacked out, and taken a knife and killed her. I had to know. I had to find some way to deal with the answer—to make it right, for Anne.”
“Why would Marguerite do that to Anne?” she asked, glancing back at Jocelyn. “And please tell me my friend is going to be okay.”
“She’ll be fine. When we’re done talking, I can wake her up. She won’t remember anything.”
He was holding her hands so tightly her fingers hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him to ease up. The solidity of his touch was comforting and she suspected he actually needed to hold on to her, to reassure himself that she was still there, standing with him.
“Marguerite did all of this because she was jealous. She was jealous of women Raphael was involved with. He had visited Anne earlier that night before I got there, and Marguerite must have seen them together. She seems to have concluded that her relationship with Raphael was more than it was, because I don’t think they were ever actually dating.”
“So she killed my mother because Rafe was in a relationship with her? That’s appalling.” And she didn’t know what was worse—when she hadn’t known why someone would do that, or now that she knew someone had for such a flimsy, selfish reason. But there was a soft, sad comfort in knowing that she had been right about Rafe, that his love had been genuine. It helped to know that her mother had enjoyed the last year of her life with him, and that it was legitimate emotion on his part.