“Your favorite torture device?” She lifts one perfect brow.
I shrug. “The only one that works anymore.”
She turns to face me fully, and we’re close enough that I cansee the color of nature in all that green. “That’s either the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard, or you’re having a stroke.”
“Can’t it be both?”
Another smile threatens the corner of her mouth. “You’re genuinely disturbed, you know that?”
“Says the girl who killed someone with their own finger last week,” I tease.
“Allegedly.”
“We all saw it, didn’t we?” Because she didn’t necessarily hide it.
She holds my eyes. “Prove it.”
This. This is what makes her, her. The way she can discuss murder like foreplay, violence like vocabulary, and still somehow make me want to burn down the world just to see her laugh. Not smile—laugh.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she says, lying back on the grass beside me. Our arms touch from shoulder to elbow, and neither of us moves away.
“You’re not thinking loud enough,” I whisper, annoyed with how tight my throat feels.
“Trust me, Royal, you don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
I prop myself up on one elbow, looking down at her. “Try me.”
She meets my eyes, and for one second, all her walls drop. What I see there—the exhaustion, the loneliness, the rage that mirrors mine so perfectly it hurts—makes me want to kill everyone who’s ever made her feel less than fucking extraordinary. Because that’s what she is, and not even the fucking Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could take her from me.
“I’m thinking,” she says slowly, “that your brothers are right about me.”
“My brothers are idiots.”
She sighs. “They’re trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection.” I lean closer until I can feel her breath on my face. “Especially not from you.”
“You should.” Her hand comes up, fingers tracing the edge of my jaw with surprising gentleness. “I ruin everything I touch.”
“Perfect.” I catch her wrist, pressing her palm flat against my chest where my heart is trying to punch through bone. “I’m already ruined.”
She laughs and I swear my fucking heart flatlines. Why can’t shit be simple? She feels like home. No, that isn’t right. She feels like coming home to your house on fire, but being fine with living in the debris because having her in little, fucked-up pieces is better than not having her at all.
“You’re completely fucked-up,” she says, but her fingers curl into my shirt, holding on.
“So are you.” My lips brush hers, because if I don’t feel her on me I’m gonna kill something.
So what if your mate is more like mutual destruction?
The need to protect her hasn’t lessened. If anything, it’s grown a taste for blood. But now I understand it better.
I don’t want to protect her from everything.
I want to protect her right to destroy it whenever she wants to.
“Legend?” Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it.
“Yeah?”
