There’s no wailing now. The door is shut. The curtain has been ripped down from its rod. The mirror is shattered. He grips the edges of the sink and stares into the glass. His own reflection leers back at him in compound fragments. Not a frightened little boy at all, but a beast. Black eyes. Bruised lids. Horns dark as pitch, curving back in on him in needle-sharp points.
The Gravewood fucking Devil, breaking everything he touches.
The rattle of the knob brings him bolt upright. The door opens and Shea slips in, falling back against it until it clicks. For a long time, neither of them speaks.
“Say something,” she orders. “So I know you’re in there.”
“You walked away.” His voice is graveled.
“You told me to.”
“Obviously, I didn’t mean it.”
“And what about everything else? Did you mean that?”
He takes a tentative step closer. When she doesn’t run, he takes another. She’s watching him, wary, her back pressed to the wall. He doesn’t know how to tell her he regrets every word he said. He doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry in a way that means something. Carefully—experimentally—he fists his fingers in the hem of her T-shirt. Same as he watched Asher do, waist deep in the surf. They both look down at his hand. Neither of them moves a muscle.
“I acted badly,” he whispers. “Here’s what I should have said last night—I don’t care if you’re his, as long as you’re also mine.”
Her eyes snap to his. She looks surprised. Then resigned.
She presses a hand flat against his sternum. His heart thunders into her palm as hope roars into his chest. Gently—firmly—she gives him a push. It isn’t like every other time, when she’s pushed him over an edge. This time, she’s pushing him away. His grip on her comes loose. His back hits the sink, hope extinguishing just as quickly as it ignited. She holds him there at arm’s length, the apex of his heart at the tips of her fingers.
“I’m not his,” she tells him. “I’m not yours, either.”
Fear bolts through him in a killing strike. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” Her touch is as ephemeral as a butterfly’s. Her voice is flat, lacking inflection. “You were right, before. This thing between us—it’s transactional. I misread the situation.”
Her words are a sucker punch to the gut. “You didn’t misread anything.”
“Blood for batteries. That’s what this is. It’s what this has always been.”
“Stop.”
There’s never any light in her eyes when she looks at him, and he hates it. The night Asher Thorley kissed her, she’d come in from the rain with eyes shining. All he knows how to do is snuff things out.
To take pretty things and break them, just like his father.
“I came in to check on you, that’s all.” She’s eerily calm, and he can’t stand it. He wants her to shout. To cry. To fight him—pushhim—until they’re through to the other side of whatever this is. He wants her to kiss him the way she kissed Asher. On her toes, a tide rushing in.
She doesn’t. She only asks, “Do you need to feed?”
He’s never heard a viler question in all his life.“No.”
“Then you and I are done here.”
Panic sinks its fangs into his throat and he catches her wrist quick, before she can leave. His bite marks leer up at him, feed after feed stitched into her skin in raised pink scars. Everything feels fractured, sharp. Shea studies his fingers encircling her wrist, her expression closed off.
“I panicked,” he says. “I said things I shouldn’t have—”
“Egor van Haut said you and I have knocked each other out of alignment.”
He blinks, slow. “Van Haut is a nutcase.”
“Is he?” She looks up at him, her stare empty. “I asked Poppy about proprioception. She said it’s your body’s ability to sense where it is. Since we met, all I feel is you. All I see is you. But that’s not love. I thought it was, but it’s just the feed messing with our heads.”
His grip turns raptorial as his panic builds. “Please.”
