Once, I studied her, memorizing every macro and micro expression. All her beautiful gazes. I catalogued her body language like data, as I have with every person I have ever encountered.
Now, it’s instinct. She wears her emotions beautifully, effortlessly. Beauty, pride, passion, and rage. I cut her open, bled her from the inside out.
I drained the poison—shame, bitterness, madness, stubbornness, even strength—whatever I decided didn’t serve her. I left her bare and vulnerable. The rawest core of her heart exposed, the marrow of her soul.
Then…I spitmypoison in after I pierced her with my arrow. But this time, she didn’t just swallow it. Shetastedit.
No masks. No retreat. No hiding. No running.
The war inside her was great. Mine was greater.
I played God.
Her demons played with her angels until she danced with her shadow self. The Abyss blinked—and she did not look away.
I saw myself in the little monster I made. It was why I hunted for ten days. Because she haunted. In the quiet, dark places where silence tightens like a noose, she haunted me.
I turn my eyes in a cursory gaze across each of my brothers. The silence thickens. They will never break it until I do.
But she…does. “Raphael.”
The gravity of how she speaks in a reverent whisper shivers my core in a way none could ever fathom.
The others dart their eyes between us since she does not likely know this minor transgression of Kinship Law. Ialwaysspeak first.
“I’m home.”
The tension leaves my brothers’ shoulders, their chests relaxing. Not Briella.
The wilderness whispered her name to me. Did her nightmares echo mine? Her ghost crawled under my skin and left razor blades there. Did mine strangle her chest till I filled the hollow where I stole her heart?
Her face followed me into the woods. Did mine follow her?
When her surface emotions fade—anger, pride, awe, relief—and I read the rawest parts of her, of possession and feminine divine fury, the answer is one of perfect clarity.
YES.
“She woke up on day three,” Jude informs me. “Healing well ever since.”
“I know.”
Briella looks up at me from the table, her lovely, pert nose in the air, brows knitted in suspicion. A wildfire glints in those hazel eyes beneath my cap.
I roll up my sleeve and tap my smart watch. “I see everything.”
She starts to push out of her chair.
Jude is at her side instantly, hands on her waist. My jaw clenches. The urge of possession has never risen in me to the degree that I imagine breaking my brother’s, mypartner’swrist.
She smacks it away instead. “I can do it.”
Gripping the edge of the table, she moves the chairs and hobbles on one leg. Sometimes, she puts pressure on her splinted leg. Subtly. Like a test. Because she wishes to feel: the pain of the scar, the reminder of what happened between us.
We both need pain to feel alive. But I also need blood and death.
And she—fucking—kills—me.
Like a broken queen moving across the chessboard, she finally stands before her king. Never letting her crown fall.
