My eyes gave up the fight, but my fingernails scraped his ribs, anchoring onto him. “You’ll stay with me?”
He found a place beside me, enfolding me in his arms while his fingers traced shapes on my bare skin. “I’ll stay with you, Sophia. Until I die.”
25
Say The Words
…as they kiss, consume.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,ROMEO AND JULIET
It took days to heal. Lucas only left my side to meet whatever requirements the Hunters demanded of him, but he always returned, greeting me with a kiss and a subtle hand to my forehead, checking for fever. While he was gone, I rested and ate the food he left for me. He removed the stitches after a couple more days, and my bruises faded from violet to yellow. Moving grew easier, and I unsnarled the tangles from my hair with a hairbrush Lucas used to pretend was a knife.
I napped.
A lot.
Sometimes I woke to an empty house; other times, I opened my eyes to him lying beside me, sleeping or reading. It was sonormal, like a war wasn’t happening right outside the window.
But it was.
The war remained the ghost in the room with us, haunting our every second together. I’d never feared ghosts before, but now I was terrified. Lucas Scott was a crisis of my faith. Short ofa miracle, a great deal of pain loomed in my future, and I found myself praying to a deity I’d long forsaken to save us both from the inevitable.
No answer ever came.
“I should get back to headquarters soon, shouldn’t I?” I asked one evening, drowsing with his finger twirling a curl round and round.
His attention didn’t stray from his book. “You’ll go back when I say you can go back.”
I couldn’t stop the sleepy smile. “When will that be?”
“I’d prefer never.”
I peeked up at him. “You want to keep me forever, Lucas?”
He hummed noncommittally and turned a page.
“Theo will wonder where I am,” I said, scooting close enough that I could press a kiss to his shoulder.
“He knows you're safe.”
I stilled, my hand splaying over the pages of his book so he was forced to look at me. “What did you do?”
His brow lifted. “Who, me?”
“Lucas! Tell me.”
In a flash, he tossed the book aside and rolled until he had me caged beneath his body. His legs straddled my hips while he held my wrists in a loose grip against the mattress.
“Make me,” he said, and his treacherous mouth crushed mine in a hard kiss before he pulled away.
I would have—if I’d had the strength. I would have made him do a lot of things. The heat in his eyes had only grown hotter as the days passed. If he weren’t so afraid of injuring me, I was sure he’d have already surrendered to the magnet between us. I had only to stare at him a certain way, and his gaze would light on fire.
Still, he resisted, and my patience waned. I wanted him, but I didn’t have the strength to act on it—a frustrating position.
After a week, once I could walk properly, he took me to his communications closet, where the carpet was stained brownish red with my blood. He’d long discarded my ruined fatigues, but he’d saved the objects in my pockets in a small drawer.
A switchblade. My dog tags. The bladed knuckles I’d dropped on the porch, still bloody.
