It’s a push and pull between us. I feel him cling to me just as much as I’m clinging to him.
I press another kiss to his mouth. As if this is enough to make him stay. It has to be. “Don’t leave.” I kiss him, and he groans, leaning toward me. He’s hanging on by a mere thread, I know he is. “I love you.”
It’s those three words that break him.
His fingers tangle into my hair, knocking the crown from my head. It rolls to the dead earth, but I don’t pay attention to it. I can’t when Malek’s fingers are digging into my hair, clutching at my waist, and he’s suddenly moving, pushing me backwards until my back meets a tree.
This is something we can both understand. This mating bond between us exists, and it’s heady and strong. He can stand there and tell me he’s leaving, but his body and heart will always want me. Just like I will always want him.
My back digs into the bark uncomfortably, but I don’t care. Not when Malek slides his hand over my body. His every movement is wild, primal, as desperate as my own. My fingers tangle into his hair, and our mouths meet for a crushing kiss. Tongues tangle together, and it’s vicious in all its savagery. It’s everything I need.
As if this violent clash of bodies is what we need to tether ourselves to one another.
Maybe we can.
Maybe we can take the fragile, broken pieces of trust between us and mend it with this. With his hands sliding up the front of my thighs without preamble, pulling up the long, smoking dress as he goes.
My fingers fumble with the button and zipper of his jeans, and with a groan he pulls back from me. His gaze shifts slowly across my face as our breaths collide between us.
I pull him closer, as if we aren’t already close enough.
Stay.
I never say the word, but he shakes his head slowly at me.
I already know he won’t stay here, but I can trick myself into believing that he just might.
The faint brush of his lips against mine pulls more and more emotion from the pressing tension paining my chest.
It hurts to finally have him here when it’s all I wanted from the start.
I see the tenseness of his shoulders and smell the regret and heartbreak between us. A lump rises in my throat, but I choke back all the words and secrets I want to say, knowing that I can’t bring them to my lips. He can’t know, wouldn’t understand…
So I keep silent and watch him smooth out his shirt, and I wonder if it’s his way of ridding it of the scent of me. When he finally turns back to me, I’m fighting to keep the tears at bay. I brought this on myself; I know. I betrayed their trust, lied, pushed them away.
To protect them, to control myself.
I watched them die over and over and over again. And it would have truly happened if I hadn’t accepted my Prod in every way.
It was all for areason.
“The academy is falling,” Malek says. He half turns away. “We are fighting to protect it, so this chaos doesn’t get unleashed outside of these walls. We aren’t sure how long we have or if we can fix this mess.”
This messyoustarted. Those words go left unsaid between us, but I feel them deeply.
He turns then, and those golden eyes of his are piercing, demanding. “What side of the line do you fall on, Izara? When things get tough, who will you fight for?”
I take a step forward. My knees are still weak, and my thighs are still trembling, but determination lines my every feature. “I fight for you, Malek. For you, Saint, Syko, and Phoenix. I always have, and I always will.”
“Then come back to us. Help us get rid of Lucian Morningstar.” He holds his hand out and waits for me to take it.
I look from it to his eyes, the expectancy, the pleading. Yet what he wants is something I cannot give.
“You want me to destroy my father.” His hand wavers as I take a step back and shake my head back and forth. “I’m sorry, Malek. I can’t.”
I barely catch the sight of his broken expression before trees snap and crumble like twigs, parting down the middle as a figure steps through. His gargantuan body takes up so much space, he looks like a living, breathing statue with cracked gray skin and rocky wings.
His cruel laughter shakes around us like a rockslide, like marbles rubbing together, or rock crumbling beneath a fist. The Messenger of Chaos pulls his lip back in a sneer as he takes Malek in.
