"Not in all this time?" he asked gently, his fingers stroking her hair.
She shook her head. "I wasn't ready to see their gravestones so soon after the accident, and every year that passed, I never found the strength to go and tell them good-bye. No one knows that, not even Alex. I've been too ashamed to tell anyone just how weak I really am."
"You're not weak." Brock set her away from him, only enough that he could bend his head down and stare her solemnly in the eyes. "Everyone makes mistakes, Jenna. Everyone has regrets and guilt for things they should have done differently in their lives. Shit happens, and we do the best we can at the time. You can't blame yourself forever."
His words soothed her, but she couldn't accept all that he was saying.
She'd seen him grapple too much with his own guilt to know that he was only being kind now. "You're just telling me this to make me feel better. I know you don't really believe it yourself."
He frowned, a quiet torment passing over his face in the darkness of the Rover.
"What was her name?" Jenna touched his now rigid jaw, seeing the remembered pain in his eyes. "The girl in the old photograph in your quarters--I saw how you looked at her picture last night. You knew her, didn't you?"
A nod, barely discernible. "Her name was Corinne. She's the young Breedmate I was hired to guard back in Detroit."
"That image must be several decades old," Jenna said, recalling the Depression-era clothes and the jazz club where the young woman had been photographed.
Brock understood the question she was asking now, she could see that by the somewhat wry look in his eyes. "It was July 1935. I know, because I'm the one who took the picture."
Jenna nodded, realizing she should be more astonished than she was at the reminder that Brock and his kind were something close to immortal.
Right now, and every time he was near her, she thought of him simply as a man. An honorable, extraordinary man who was still hurting from an old wound that had cut him deeply.
"Corinne is the woman you lost?" she asked gently.
His frown deepened. "Yeah."
"And you hold yourself responsible for her death," she prompted carefully, needing to know what he'd been through. She wanted to understand him better. If she could, she wanted to help him bear some of his own guilt and pain. "How did it happen?"
At first, she didn't think he would tell her. He stared down at their entwined fingers, idly rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand. When he finally spoke, there was a raw edge to his deep voice, as though the pain of losing Corinne was still fresh in his heart.
"Back when I was in Detroit, times were very lean. Not so much for the Breed, but for the human cities we lived in. The leader of a local Darkhaven and his mate had taken in a couple of young homeless girls, Breedmates, to raise as their own children. I was assigned to watch over Corinne. She was a wild child, even as a young girl--full of life, always laughing. As she got older, a teenager, she got even wilder. She resented her father's precautions, thought he was too overbearing. She started making a game of trying to break free from his rules and expectations. She started pushing boundaries, taking awful risks to her personal safety, testing the patience of everyone around her."
Jenna gave him a gentle smile. "I can imagine that didn't go over very well with you."
"To put it mildly," he said, shaking his head. "Corinne was clever, and she tried damned hard to ditch me every chance she got, but she never outfoxed me. Until that last time, the night of her eighteenth birthday."
"What happened?"
"Corinne loved music. At the time, jazz was the big thing. The best Detroit jazz clubs were in an area known as Paradise Valley. I don't think a week went by that she didn't plead with me to take her there. More often than not, I let her have her way. We went to the clubs the night of her birthday, too--no simple thing, given that it was the early twentieth century and she was a white woman alone in the company of a black man." He exhaled a soft, humorless chuckle. "Skin color may be incidental in my world, among the Breed, but that wasn't the case among humankind back then."
"Too often, that's not the case now, either," Jenna said, twining her fingers through his a little tighter and finding nothing but beauty in the contrast of his skin and hers. "Was there trouble at the club that night?"
He gave a faint nod. "There were some looks and whispers. Couple of white men had too much to drink. They came over and said some crude things to Corinne. I told them where they could go. I don't recall who threw the first punch, but things went south from there."
"Did the men know what you were? That you were Breed?"
"Not at first. I knew my rage would give me away, and I knew I had to get out of the club before the whole place saw the changes come over me.
The men followed me outside. Corinne would've, too, but I told her to stay in the building, find somewhere to wait for me while I dealt with things." He drew in a ragged breath. "I wasn't gone even ten minutes. When I came back into the club, there was no sign of her anywhere. I turned the place inside out looking for her. I searched every corner of the city and all the area Darkhavens until daybreak. I kept searching every night afterward, even out of the state. But ... nothing. She had vanished into thin air, just like that."
Jenna could hear the frustration in his voice--the regret--even all these years later. She brought her hand up and gently touched his face, uncertain what to do for him. "I wish I had your gift. I wish I could take away the hurt for you."
He shook his head, then brought her palm to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the center of her hand. "What I feel is anger, at myself. I never should have let her out of my sight, not even for a second. When news reached me that a young woman's brutalized, burned body had been recovered from a city river not far from the clubs, I felt sick with dread. I didn't want to believe it was her. Not even when I saw the corpse with my own eyes ...
what remained of it, after what someone had done to her prior to the three months she'd been left in the water."
Jenna winced, knowing all too well how horrific death could look, particularly to those who cared for the victim. And most especially to a man who had held himself responsible for a crime he had no way of anticipating, let alone preventing.