"You should know I have an arsenal behind the bookcase."
"I saw the arsenal, babe."
"I'm just saying."
He grinned, his thumb finding the inside of her wrist where her pulse was running too fast for the conversation they were having. "As I said before, my sweet babe…you’re lethal. I’m very well aware. Every fucking part of me."
She tracked his thumb on her wrist, the depth of her showing in her eyes. She planned on taking more, and her hand turned slightly in his so that her palm was open against his palm. She pushed back, the way she usually pushed back, because she had to. Even now. Even with the apocalypse on the table and his confession sitting in the air between them.
"You all came here to convince me. I want that on record. You arrived with a team. You arrived with a plan. You arrived withthe assumption that I'd hear you out, and I have. I want you to know I'm aware that I've been arranged."
"Yeah."
"That's not an accusation. It's an observation."
"Observation noted."
"Why my bloodline? Why am I the lock to your key? You say I have a choice, Flash, but you've handed me a choice between compliance or ashes. That’s a prison sentence masquerading as free will. I don't like being arranged, Jae."
"I know." He looked her dead in the eye and said, "You’re right. It is unfair. It’s a completely fucked up position to be put in. I had the same damn decision, and believe me, I resisted like a stupid son of a bitch until I understood and accepted. I pledged service. I pledged my life fully aware of the consequences of my actions. If I were you, I’d want to burn the cosmic loom down just for looking at me."
"I would have come if you'd asked first."
He absorbed that. He met her gaze, and he understood, with the cold clarity of a man who'd just been corrected by someone he had no labels for, that she had named something true. He and his brothers were a team, that was irrefutable, but the cosmology, the ending of the world, was now their mission.
“I don’t expect you to take me on blind faith, babe. So, asking you before you had all the facts and the time to process them was premature.”
"I know," she said.
He took a hard breath. “Now that you do. I'm asking. Will you save the world with me?"
She held his gaze for a long moment as her palm traveled up his forearm. Her breath rushed out, while the room held them, and that thing he had developed for her since their eyes met, relaxed.
“I will, mostly because I can’t reconcile what I feel for you, and this will give me time to find out who you are.” She released a soft breath. “God help me, I want to explore all of you.”
“That sounds very promising and fulfills another reason why I’m here.”
“If I had refused?"
He reached out and took her face in his hands, forcing her melted gaze to lock onto his steady gray eyes.
"Listen to me, Killa," he said, his voice dropping all the cosmic weight, becoming raw and entirely human. "Forget the font. Forget the world. I’m asking you to chooseme. Not because you're a lock, and not because the sky is falling. If you look into your soul and tell me your answer is no, if you want to stay right here in this tower and let Chaos take the rest of it, then that is what we do."
He leaned in until his forehead rested against hers. "I’ll send the team away. I’ll sit right here on this couch with you until the world burns to ash around us. I don’t have a cosmic price tag. It doesn't depend on your compliance. The choice is yours. Always."
Her eyes flared, those threads in her irises turning dark, almost predatory. His dick hardened all the way, aching against his jeans. He would take this to the maximum with her. He’d dreamed about it for a year. Now that it was here, he wasn’t sure how he was going to sleep tonight with the fierce beating of his blood.
* * *
For a second,she couldn't breathe. The air in her lungs felt like liquid lead. She looked into his gray eyes, searching for the tell, the angle, the slight shift in focus that would betray a man trying to manage a difficult woman with beautiful words.
There was nothing. Just Flash, raw and stripped of his SEAL armor, offering her a kingdom of ashes if it meant she stayed free.
The realization hit her like nothing ever had in her life. Her shield core melted, the one who spent thirty years braced for the next trap, found absolutely nothing to fight. He was tearing the walls down, standing there unprotected.
A shudder went through her, violent and brief, starting at the base of her neck and dropping straight into her thighs. His gray eyes were like liquid fog, flaring with heat scorching her. The vulnerability of his confession made her fiercely, dangerously hungry. If he was going to lay his whole heart out for her, she couldn’t resist the temptation to claim it.
She leaned into his palms, her jaw pressing against his calloused thumbs, her breathing turning ragged and shallow against his lips.
