Lock quirked a brow. “Us at your pretty little ball?”
Raze rubbed his jaw. “It’s not a bad idea.”
I exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. They were going to do it. There washope.
“Better than your bullshit idea,” Lock said, looking at Grim.
Grim stepped back to me. He slid his hands to me, fingers digging the back of my neck, thumbs at my jaw. “I won’t risk you.”
The kitchen dissolved until it was just me and Grim, that ache in his eyes, and the deep piercing fear in my heart.
“We have to try.” I gripped his wrists. “We’re too close.”
His eyes searched mine, back and forth, looking for something that I hoped he found.
After an agonizingly long minute, Grim spoke. “You won’t be part of it. You tell us the way and then you stay the fuck away. Deal?”
I smiled. “Deal.”
FORTY-NINE
GEMMA
Grim and I stayed awake through the night and into the next day. Thick, tumorous clouds now blanketed the horizon, so nothing changed as day faded into night. The sky was eerily black.
Grim held me against his chest, our bodies facing the black sky. All day we hadn’t left the bed.
He touched me lazily, tracing paths along my flesh. A line from my hip to my lower stomach, from my belly button to the space between my breasts. If I fell asleep, I woke up to him inside me, whispering hot, Spanish words against my flesh.
I almost forgot what we had to do, pretend we were normal. We could be a couple who argued about who ate the last Pringle or something. Not what wewere.
As we lay in bed all day, I learned about him, asking a thousand and one questions, desperate to know everything about him. He was allergic to cinnamon, which madeenjoying mole difficult. His favorite junk food was vanilla Oreos. And deeper things, too, like how he missed his mom, even though he still resented her for making his life what it was. That he used to wish he knew his father, until Vander showed up.
I felt the proverbial strike of midnight inside me, the illicit sanctuary we’d built crumbling. Soon we’d have to go back to my world. But Grim stroked up and down my arm, along the curve of my hip. No urgency in his movements.
“Tell me the plan for tonight again,” he said.
“We start by pretending like everything is normal,” I said. “But you’ll be with me, he’ll see you at the party, and?—”
“No,” he interrupted. “What happens if something goes wrong?”
At my silence, his hand paused on my stomach. I knew what I was supposed to say. If things went wrong, I would run. But I couldn’t, Iwouldn’trun. After another moment, Grim disentangled himself, and I felt the bed dip with his movement.
He came around the bed, and even in the darkness he was deliciously, distractingly naked. The shadows clung to the ridged parts of him, delineating brutally cut muscles.
“I’m not running,” I said.
Emotions battled in his eyes as he stared down at me, the angle sharpening his jaw. Then he bent over and kissed my forehead, mouth moving against my flesh. “I got you something. It’s in the closet.”
His lips lingered on my skin, hand curling around my neck, before stepping off. I watched him throw on a pair of black pajama pants and leave the room. After a moment, I went to the closet to see what he could have possibly gotten me.
Grim never struck me as a physical gift kind of person. His gifts were action and blood. But sitting atop the island counter was a rectangular black box. It was surprisingly heavy, wrapped in a leather box with texture like snakeskin.
Inside sat a simple teardrop pendant among the sea of black velvet, a small handwritten note underneath. The diamond was a unique, smoky red.
I picked up the letter.
This diamond was seeded with my blood, grown just for you. I’d cut my heart out if you asked, but maybe this will work for now. My heart is yours, my blood is yours. Always.
