Page 267 of Breathe Like Hell

My brain was full of all the terrible words he’d said to me over the past months, all of the awful things I’d screamed back at him, all of the pain and hurt and misery and anguish. I thought of all the ways we’d destroyed ourselves and each other. All the sex we’d tried to have that only made me feel disgusting afterwards.

But through it all, my heart kept beating. I kept loving him, and he kept loving me.

It was the most toxic sort of love, something most people wouldn’t understand, but it was still there. I still loved him with my whole soul, even though it hurt.

All I could do now was pray we’d be able to recover from darkness that absolute.

Mason wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me to his body, my own arms raising to hug him back. I could hear his heart with my ear pressed to his chest. Still beating. If nothing else, at least I’d kept him alive.

“I love you,” he said, his voice low and quiet, almost hopeless in a way. As if he’d already given up but had committed to giving me the comfort I needed in this moment. It scared me a bit. I didn’t want him to sound like that. “So much. And I’m sorry.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered. “Do you think we can get through this?”

He was quiet.

“I don’t want to talk about it, though. Not now,” I continued, eliminating the space he’d left in our conversation. I hugged him tighter and he did the same to me, his strong arms encircling me steadily. Tears stung my eyes.

“Me neither.”

“Micah is the first priority.”

Mason didn’t say anything to that, but he began stroking my hair, lightly running his fingers through the strands, setting his chin on top of my head.

Micah.

Micah was alive now. Sleeping in his bed.

Mason and I both looked over at him.

He was so fucking beautiful. I would never let him slip away from me again.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

MASON

I didn’t sleep the entire night. I’d promised Dakota I wouldn’t, because I knew she wouldn’t be able to rest unless I reassured her everything would be fine with Micah. So, I sat in a chair, watching Micah sleep for hours, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest like his continued breathing was the only thing keeping me alive, too. He wasn’t wrapped around Dakota the way he usually was. She slept restlessly but never woke up fully.

When morning came, pale blue light bleeding over both of them, Micah was the first to wake. His disorientation was obvious from the moment he opened his eyes, but I didn’t go to him. I had a sense my presence would only make him feel worse, so I remained sitting, my hands flexing on the arms of the chair.

Micah pushed up from the bed, the covers falling off of him, twisting lines of onyx stretching the length of his naked body. He looked at me, then Dakota, then himself in the mirror over the dresser. When I focused, I could hear his heart. Beating, pumping blood and ichor, keeping him alive.

But it was hard to hear anything over the rush of my own blood in my ears.

I hadn’t learned how to stop missing him overnight, wasn’t able to turn off my grief in a blink. My guilt didn’t disappear with the sound of his heartbeat. I’d already buried him in the graveyard of my heart.

But he was alive.

Kill.

Somehow, Dakota had brought him back to the tree where he fell, rescuing him from whatever void he’d disappeared into when his body burned. For months, I’d prayed for death, wishing I could’ve traded my life for his, barely surviving, drowning under the weight of his absence, and now he was standing not ten feet from me.

His hands shook slightly as he took a pair of boxers from his drawer and stepped into them, then left the room without saying anything to me.

I stood up and followed him.

The past nine months had hurt so much more than the twenty two years before them. Those two types of pain were almost incomparable, like a gunshot to the heart versus crashing his car at two hundred miles per hour and breaking every bone in my body. My soul ripping in half versus shattering completely. I thought I’d known how it felt to lose Micah Killshaw, but I’d been wrong.

He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water, then drank all of it.