“I can live with that,” Mal said, her voice thick.
“Good.”
He pulled her closer, so they were within kissing distance.
“I can’t live without you, Mal. So I need you to be all in. Don’t run away from us again. Don’t give up on us. I never will.”
He pressed his lips to hers, kissing her softly, sweetly, like they had all the time in the world. Which they didn’t because just then, the pixies arrived and all hell broke loose.
Chapter Six
The noise of shrieks,growling, high-pitched laughter, terrified screaming, and—maybe a tornado? —broke through Mal’s euphoria. She pulled back slightly, feeling Law’s warm breath on her cheeks. His gaze held her locked, intense and happy.
“Did you hear that?” she asked as something big crashed to the floor and shattered, rattling the walls. It sounded an awful lot like a chandelier. One of the big ones, the size of a VW bus.
Whirring sounds interspersed the other noises, a kind of rolling, buttery hum.
“Nope,” he said with perfect sincerity as another crash sounded, this one not quite as loud, though wetter, less glassy.
“I think something might be happening,” Mal said in her role as Queen of the Obvious. She couldn’t look away, totally hypnotized by the promises in his eyes. He’d never looked at her like this, so open, so much peeled back and exposed. It humbled her. Sent a bolt of fear sizzling into her soul. Could she trust him as much? Was she even capable?
She drew back, only a half an inch, but it was far enough. Too far.
Disappointment clouded Law’s face, and his eyes shuttered. He started to shift back.
A different kind of panic made Mal grab his arm.
For a moment she found herself in the past. She’d spent most of her life hiding herself, protecting herself. When her mother died, Mal had been devastated. That, she might have recovered from, but then her father, a necromancer, had decided to raise his beloved wife from the dead.
Mal couldn’t even bear to remember that time. Her mother hadn’t been anything like herself. She’d been a shambling shell, lost and afraid, torn between the afterlife and the present. Her spirit had passed over, and her husband had pulled it back, unlike Mal’s ghosts who had never gone over in the first place.
Except, only part of her mother had come back, and living with her had been the worst kind of hell. Mal had come to hate the woman she had once loved more than anyone else alive, and had hated her father for making it so she couldn’t think of her mother without disgust, without thinking of the smell, the way her flesh rotted, her skin turned green and sloughed away…
Because of him, she couldn’t remember her mother without searing regret and horror. Because of him, Mal had been forced to kill her mother a second time and make it so her father couldn’t raise her again.
The gruesome act had destroyed her but not as much as her father’s reaction. He’d viciously attacked her, physically and verbally. He’d been out of his mind with grief and had beaten her nearly unconscious, and she’d let him. When he was done, she’d crawled away and had never seen him again, but she couldn’t escape the damage. She couldn’t make herself love, couldn’t make herself trust anyone. If her own father, the one she’d trusted the most, the one who should have protected and comforted her, could hurt her so deeply, then how could she trust anyone?
So she trusted herself and didn’t let anybody inside.
Until Law.
He’d been her partner and she’d trusted him more than anyone, even her father. She’d tried to tell him about her growing horror at killing but couldn’t make him understand. Maybe if she’d told him about her mother… but it was too great a wound to reopen. Desperate, in pain, she had run.
She was still running.
“You can’t do that,” she said, her fingers digging into him like he was trying to pull away, which he wasn’t. “You can’t just back off and let me off the hook. I’m not the stable one right now. I’m willing but I’ve got bad habits and a lot of baggage. You’ve got to call me on my shit.”
“I don’t want to push you so hard, you have to leave. Not like before.”
“It’s different now. I didn’t know you loved me then, and you didn’t know how bad off I was. I’m all in. Even if I run and hide, I’ll come back. Nothing is going to hurt me worse than losing you to my own cowardice; I promise.”
She flinched as a particularly shrill scream cut the air followed by laughter and loud clapping. It sounded like a full concert hall. That could not be good.
“You need to get to work,” she said. “LeeAnne has got to be flipping out.”
“She allowed the damned creatures to come in,” he snarled. “Anyway you’re far more important to me than Effrayant, and I’m not going anywhere until we settle this.”
“You’re blood-bound,” Mal reminded him. “Youhaveto take care of this place.”
