“I ran out of ink,” he drawls.
“Bullshit.”
He points a finger at me. “It’s none of your fucking business.”
“Why didn’t you mention Ardruna and Talton in your journal?”
“It must have slipped my mind.”
“You pulled them out of their books around the time you stopped writing. But why then…?” Realization dawns. “Something made you snap and you pulled them from their stories. What was it?”
“What part of‘stay out of it’don’t you get?” He reaches for the journal, but I twist away from him.
“You didn’t have problems herding the monsters back into the pages before,” I say, thinking out loud. “You fought the occasional escapee but worked mostly on maintaining the library and writing your journal. And the doors of this world were open.”
“Your point being?”
“What happened to change that? What happened thirty years ago?”
He shrugs. “Nothing.”
“Gods, Roane, stop lying!”
He snarls and grabs my arm, hauling me against him. “Stop pushing!”
“How’s this for pushing?” Letting the journal fall, I press the tip of the knife to the middle of his chest. “Get back.”
But he leans into it and smirks. “Do it, then. Finish it.”
“What are you doing? Stop.”
His gaze bores into mine as he starts walking me backward. “Push more. Hurt me. Only you can end me,Ellin.Fucking do it.”
He doesn’t stop until my back hits a column, and then presses the full length of his tall body against mine. Muscularthighs, flat stomach, hard chest, and my knife is still pressing into his sternum. His gazes down at me, his gray eyes mesmerizing, dark strands clinging to his neck and temples.
“Roane…” I breathe.
“I thought something had happened to you,” his low voice rumbles, long lashes fanning on his cheeks. “And so I ran back here. I panicked. I don’t ever panic.”
“Don’t you?”
“Only when it comes to you, why… Why is that?” he breathes. “I forget myself, forget… that you’re here. That it’s not only monsters and animals watching me. That some things do matter, even if I thought they don’t, not anymore.”
“Like table manners?” I hazard. My mind is firing random thoughts. “Or lack thereof?”
His generous mouth tilts up to one side in a smile. He lifts his hand and I tense, but he only strokes a lock of hair out of my face and gently tucks it behind my ear. “You’re so soft for such a nosy, obstinate human.”
“Thanks.” Reluctantly, I lower the knife, afraid to hurt him. “And you’re hard.” I wince. “That didn’t come out right.”
The other side of his mouth lifts, and I’m breathless looking at him. How is he so gorgeous? It’s not fair. My thinking processes shut down when he’s close, and boy, is he close now. He isn’t wearing his belt hung with weapons, I realize, the soft leather of his pants doing nothing to hide his arousal.
He’s hard, all right. Aroused because of me. He wants me, and all that fury he arrived with seems to have melted away, turning into dark honey. It fills his gaze, his expression, his every move. It slows down time.
His head dips lower, and he inhales deeply. “Your scent… Sweet and light, like… like blossoms and honey.”
His mouth brushes over my neck, and I’m burning where his lips touch. His breath moves over my skin and I melt. Shiver. Need.
The knife falls from my nerveless fingers, clattering against the tiles.
