***Revised Chapter

Literary universe not mine!!!

Dimitri felt his own steady heartbeat in the darkness of the earth. His mind soared free of its own volition, before he could tamp down on his need for her. He could feel the stillness of her mind in sleep. She had slowly been changing her schedule over the last year, staying up more and more during the night hours and sleeping during the day. Whereas before he had been only a shadow in her dreams, now he shared her waking mind. This caused him both exquisite pleasure and exquisite torment. As he parted the earth and floated out of the ground he mused over the heaven and hell he was enduring living in her mind.

Once Skylar made up her mind to do something, she did with her whole heart. In all his years Dimitri had never witnessed such an implacable resolve in a female. Not that he had been in the company of many females, but he had always considered them a soft and gentle race, capable only of imparting peace, joy, and nurturing to the world. Each new night in his lifemate's mind altered his worldview considerably. In fact, the tower of his illusion regarding the female of the species was slowly toppling and he was having a difficult time scrambling to pick up the pieces and salvage some of his superior resolve.

He could still remember the day she had put him in his place for the first time. After deciding that she would make herself into a woman she herself could love and respect, Skylar had convinced her parents Francesca and Gabriel to take her to Seattle, a city a continent away. Skylar had a very clear plan in mind to confront her past and she would allow nothing and no one to divert her from her chosen path. So she, Gabriel, Francesca, and Tamara – Gabriel and Francesca's small daughter – traveled to Seattle to seek out Mary Ann. Skylar had met her during the Christmas reunion in the Carpathian Mountains. Mary Ann worked with women who were victims of physical and sexual abuse and Skylar felt that she would be more comfortable talking to a woman that she knew than one that she had never met.

Upon arriving in Seattle they had discovered that Mary Ann was no longer there. After some searching by Gabriel, they discovered that Mary Ann had gone to South America. And did that stop his woman? No, he thought with a smirk. She just went about wheedling her parents until it seemed logical to take the opportunity to go to South America to visit Colby De La Cruz, who was lifemate to Rafael, a noted Carpathian, and half-sister to Skylar. Both Colby and Skylar were children of Razvan, a powerful mage turned vampire. They had been conceived with the sole purpose of supplying their father with life-giving blood. But Colby's mother had been jaguar and Colby had escaped the horrible fate Skylar had suffered. It seemed natural for Skylar to want to forge a bond with those blood-related to her, now that she had found them. Besides, Colby had taken on one of the De La Cruz brothers and that, to Skylar's way of thinking, was nearly as big a burden as taking on Dimitri. And oh how he had laughed when that thought had winged through her head. He was so shocked by his reaction to her that a stiff wind over the tundra would have knocked him over. He had not laughed in over three hundred years. Yet here he was, in the middle of the wild, alone, laughing like a loon because she thought him a burden.

You are the burden little one, not I. An inelegant grunt of disgust had been her only response to his taunt. He found himself clinging to small moments like this one, a balm on his soul when everything else without her was bleak and barren.

Dimitri had not been prepared for how deadly serious Skylar had been about facing the demons of her past, one by one. She began with the one's that she deemed the most fixable – her trauma from years of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. It had taken time for her to connect with Mary Ann. That woman had had her own difficulties and by the time Skylar was able to work with her, Mary Ann had been converted to the Carpathian race and was now lifemate to Manolito, another formidable De La Cruz brother. This only served to assure Skylar that this woman would be the one who could help her. Mary Ann warned her that dealing with the past would take time. It would require great patience and a willingness to open every part of herself so that she could know it, accept it, grieve it, then heal from it. Dimitri had resolved to be with her every moment, to shoulder as much of the pain as he could. He could not bear to think of her suffering again.

Skylar, however, had other plans. When she began her sessions with Mary Ann she was aware of Dimitri in her mind. It did not bother her that he saw her shame and agony, a fact that astonished her. She rationalized it to herself with the thought that if they were to be together some day, he would have to know every gory detail and make peace with each one, just as she would. The fact that each day her acceptance of the inevitability of their relationship grew was like a balm on Dimitri's soul. He had not imagined how uncomfortable it would be without her. His world had returned to grey within hours of leaving the Carpathian Mountains. His emotions too were waning. He could only feel the echoes of them bursting over him when he mentally connected to her, but he figured that they were actually her emotions he felt during those times, rather than his own.

When she began to feel the pain of remembering, he had tried to shoulder the burden for her, to alleviate the agony he felt in her soul so that it only briefly touched her before being shifting into him. Skylar evidently felt the sensation of her torment being swept away because it did not take her more than a second to realize what Dimitri was doing and she was furious. Her birthmark had burned as she held up a hand to Mary Ann to halt the session. Then she had focused the full attention of her wrath towards Dimitri. An ocean away he could feel her like a burn racing along his heart and then there was ice, an immovable, unbreakable glacier. He could hear her words in his head, each word clearly enunciated.

You will not take this from me.

Skylar, I am your lifemate, I cannot knowingly allow you to experience this much pain.

You must Dimitri. If I do not feel it, I cannot defeat it. I want you with me, I need you with me, but if you take my pain from me, I swear on all that is holy I will find a way to shut you out. Please, don't make me do it. I need you with me. I need you in my mind. Please. Promise me.

It was the most difficult promise he had ever made, more difficult than the promise that had led him to exile himself to the wilds of Russia. He could have easily forced her compliance, but something in the tone of her voice stopped him. She had never said that she wanted him before. She had never said that she needed him before. If he forced her compliance, it could do irreparable damage to the fragile bonds of trust they had formed during the past months. His first instinct was to protect her despite the cost, but there, firmly entrenched in her mind, was the pain of being forced into compliance by so many other males. If he did this to her, he would be no better in her eyes than those who had so brutally hurt her. Intentions were nothing to Skylar, actions were everything.

Dimitri could feel her relief at his mental acquiescence. Amazingly he felt her move closer to him as she opened her mind fully to him. Instinctively he reached mental arms to wrap around her waist to bolster her strength. He felt her spine stiffen in immediate gut-reaction, but then she relaxed and merged her strength with his. He could feel her small hands resting on top of his, holding him to her as she prepared to break down the barrier to her pain and lay herself bare.