Page 234 of Breathe Like Hell

Panic and terror surged in my brain. I forced all of it back.

I still couldn’t fathom that this was real. Every time I remembered it was real, it felt like I’d been shot in the chest, and not in the way Dakota had done it. There was no love in the bullets this time.

Despite claiming to want it, I’d never truly imagined a world with Micah Killshaw dead, and me still alive. It was a reality I’d been completely unprepared for.

In every ending of our story I’d ever imagined, I was the one who ended up dead.

Not him.

Never him.

It was completely and utterly unthinkable. Unfathomable.

I brought Dakota into my bathroom and started the shower, then unbraided her hair and took her clothes off. Mine too. I knew she could feel my anger in the way I held her, the too-harsh press of my fingers against her upper arms, but she didn’t speak about it. She didn’t speak about anything. She just cried.

We stepped into the warm shower together and when she turned around my heart squeezed so tightly it might’ve stopped altogether.

Two large scars, stretching diagonally from her shoulders towards her spine.

That was Micah. Those marks on her skin were the last living pieces of him.

She flinched when I touched them, as if she’d forgotten they were there.

My fingers traced the shape of them, brushing over the twist and pull of her skin where she’d been made into an angel. She had wings now, black wings like me. I wasn’t ready to see them. Every reminder that she’d been changed was only a reminder that he’d died. The scar on the bottom of her foot would be healed, too.

Dakota stared at nothing, letting the hot water stream over her hair and her face.

After a minute, she turned around, her eyes finding mine. Green flashed through the heat and the steam, only made brighter by the red around her eyelids.

And then she was in my skull.

My hand snapped up to grab her throat before I even noticed what I’d done, crushing her windpipe.

She didn’t falter, though.

Her stare remained locked on mine as she dug through the emotions painted along the inside of my skull, as she sought out all my instability, all the ways I wanted to hurt her now.

Don’t do this.

My grip tightened on her neck until she couldn’t breathe.

“Get the fuck out,” I said through my teeth.

She hadn’t been raised in Heaven, didn’t understand that angels never did this to each other. Micah was different. And she’d gotten all her knowledge from him.

Dakota didn’t respond to me, likely because she couldn’t breathe.

But she didn’t need to speak for me to see the hatred in her eyes, glistening beneath her tears.

“Dakota!” I shouted, slamming her back against the wall.

You don’t get to do this to me.

Stubbornness and defiance claimed every inch of her expression, every bit of tension in her body language. She felt different in my head than he did, and my emotions were too strong to keep her shallow. The longer she explored, the angrier I got, the deeper she could go.

She wasn’t human now. It would take much longer to make her pass out.

Fuck.