“Tell me,” I warn. “Give meonereason not to hate everything about you.”
He grinds his jaw, then slams his palm against the wood, making me startle. “For you,” he snarls. “All right? I used to wish for you. I’d come up here and wish on a shooting star and ask for the same thing, every time. You. My mate. And look how that turned out.”
My pulse sputters and dies. Just ceases to exist, stranding me here with nothing but his words, resounding inside my head.
I used to wish for you.
My eyes prickle, the sting stitching me to the moment. Good goddess, but no one has ever wished for me. Not my sisters, not my father. I’ve only ever chased their approval and gotten exactly nowhere.
Now the floor tilts, tipping me forward. I counteract the pull by inching backward against the door, but I can still feel the precipice beneath me, my toes edging out over nothing. “So youdidget your wish.”
A broken laugh catches in his throat. “No. I asked for someone to share eternity with. But you don’t want to be here. You can’t wait to go home. And I’m…ruined. My life isn’t a life, anymore. I’m nothing and no one, half of me missing, this pain eating away at me, second after second, minute after minute, day after day and year after year.” He cuts himself off, catches his breath.
I stare up, something deep and wide shifting within me.
“And shadows take me, I can’t do it anymore.” His voice drops to a strained whisper. “Ican’t. I can only send you into the labyrinth andwait to see what happens and hope for death at the end, one way or another.”
That nearly yanks my heart from my chest, a hard wrench that has me biting down on a cry. “Death? Why death?”
“Because. If you fail, then this is all I can ever hope for. And if you succeed…you leave.”
I blink up at him, my lip caught between my teeth. “And me leaving is enough for you to give up? Even if I break your curse? Why would you do that?”
He hovers there, his stare drilling into me. He won’t answer. I know he won’t, because that would require him to articulate something he’ll never admit, not even to himself.
“Why?” I say again.
His expression tightens. Or…I think it does. It’s hard to tell in the dark, and his gaze tilts downward, hiding from me. I expect that to be the end of it, for him to move away, and maybe he actually tries, because he spends a moment locked in place, his body trembling. But then he releases a shuddering sigh and movescloser, his face angled toward my neck.
All the blood in my body veers off course. The room shrinks down to the heave of his exhales, to the way his body curves around mine, a shield against the world.
“What’re you doing?” I whisper.
“I’m tired,” he says beside my ear. “I’m just so. Fucking.Tired.” He breathes deep, inhaling me. His hands fall from the door, feeling their way through the darkness, finding my hips. He touches me tentatively at first, then more boldly, squeezing my hipbones through my gown, pinning me to the door.
A whimper blooms in my throat. “What’re you doing?” I say again.
Or at least, I think I do. The words might get lost between my chest and my mouth. As it stands, my thoughts have definitely gone missing on their way to my brain.
“Smelling you,” he mutters, his breath hot against my neck.
“But you’redrunk.”
“Who cares?” he says. “You’re not.”
His exhale paints liquid fire across my skin. I try to pullaway, but I have nowhere to go. Nowhere to retreat to. And in the next moment, I don’t want to anymore, because his mouth closes around my throat, bathing my pulse point with heat.
A jolt rips through me, like a lightning bolt spearing the heart of a tree. The moment we touch, I feel everything inside him. A door slams shut on the anguish he’s suffered for two centuries, but even the pale shadow left behind is enough to make me feel like someone is ripping me apart, turning my skeleton inside-out.
Just for a second. In the next, the pain dies away, and then I’m flying, soaring into orbit, buoyed by the intensity of his relief.
Amriel groans, sweetness and agony all rolled into one. His tongue works against my skin, tasting, sucking, taking.
Fuck. So this is what happiness feels like.
The thought blooms inside my skull. I don’t know where it comes from, whether it belongs to me or him.
Well, that isn’t true—I never curse. But the words might as well have sprung from me anyway, because my body goes electric, alive in a way it never has been, my blood a mere conduit for the pleasure running rampant in my veins.
