Chapter 16 #3
I see understanding in the painted green strokes through his whitish eyes. I see his cheekbones clear of frost, his mouth relaxed, not snarled or thinned.
I swallow back a lump in my throat.
“No.” Tension runs through me, turns me rigid. “I’m sick of you, Samick.”
His eyes flash—and he lifts his gaze from the tear streaks.
“I am sick of all you fae freaks. The darkness, the walking, the danger—it’s all nothing compared to how much I fucking hate you.”
It’s truth that spills out of my lips.
But not the whole truth.
That doesn’t matter.
That doesn’t stop me.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve said similar words before to people who dared get too close. Like the minute I start to feel something, or they do, I have to cut them as deeply as I can, because if I do, they won’t chase after me. They’ll hate me.
And that’s better than the alternative.
It’s safer.
Samick’s mask of patience cracks.
Slight fractures. His mouth tightening, the shadow of his jaw darkening—
But his stare sweeps over me.
Like he’s considering my entire silhouette, shoulders to legs, hands to—
Fucker.
He’s reading me.
Sifting through the deafening roar of my rage and pain—to sort out the sounds and figure out if I’m telling the truth.
Something in me snaps.
The torch slips from my grip as I lunge at him.
And my hands come smacking into his chest.
He doesn’t move an inch.
Like his boots are rooted to the earth, and his body is pure stone, he doesn’t even sway from the impact.
My wrists ache—immediately.
But that doesn’t stop me.
I’m unravelling.
Something hasn’t just snapped in me.
It left me completely, and I’m suddenly shoving him again and again and again.
A guttural sound rises in me.
Like everything, every single fucking thing, that I’ve locked in the vault is breaking free—like Mika sauntered into my head, used an elegant key, and unlocked the door.
Now, a feral rage rushes through me—and tightens my hands into fists.
I throw the hits right at his chest.
Not little punches either.
The kind that I’ve thrown before at the faces of grown ass men. Hard enough to draw blood—every fucking time.
But still, Samick is unmovable.
Standing in the border of darkness and my fallen torchlight, he looks down at me, sort of curious, sort of confused.
And his eyes are starting to pale.
With each hit, every sudden ache along my knuckles and finger bones, more and more frost splinters over his irises, until his eyes are lace.
Darkness lashes over his stony face—but a muscle feathers in his jaw before my next punch is whacked off-course.
He smacks my arm aside.
The force of it throws me off balance and into the tree, boots slipping over foliage.
Rough bark scrapes over my cheek.
I don’t get a second, not a moment to pull away from the coarse texture, not before Samick has come up behind me, his hand firm on my nape, and he shoves me against the trunk.
The chill of his voice tickles my ear, “All the patience you believe I have, and you don’t consider that there is a limit. You don’t consider what it means to reach that limit.”
The cold whispery threat rinses over me.
My breath shudders into the dark side of the tree, where the light is blocked.
Samick blocks it.
Muscle and stone and marble, towering over me, but curved down to whisper his threat into the air around my ear, “I have killed for much less with a mere touch, woman. You are not immune to my nature.”
The tension on my neck is unbearable.
A cry catches like tangled string in my throat—and the pressure of the trunk against my chest almost silences me.
But I manage a wheeze, “You’re suffocating me.”
Tendons tug and dent under his tight grip. Fingertips digging in more and more. His mouth curls at my ear, “Perhaps I should.”
A cough jolts my chest.
The raspy sound of my voice grates along the coarse bark, “You have been suffocating me. Since the road—”
Samick yanks me back a step, spins me around in a dizzying whirl, then slams me into the tree again.
My spine alights.
Those stars of pain send shocks through my body, heat the back of my head that may or may not be bleeding, and glitter my vision.
I squint through the glare at him.
Shadows haunt his eyes, a clash of green and white, like the colours are shifting right in front of me.
I can make out his frown, the faint lines between his eyebrows—but the tension in his jaw hasn’t eased.
“I have protected you.” His lip curls, matching the snarling gravel of his tone. “Fed you. Clothed you.” His teeth bare at me. “But you say I suffocated you?”
The strike against my head was so sudden and sharp that it takes too long for the waves of dizziness to leave me.
And it was so consuming I didn’t even feel his hand slip around my jaw, clutch tight, and angle my face with his.
“You did.” I breathe easier now that I’m not being fucking crushed, but the lungs in me are so damaged that they won’t be soothed now until I feed on that inhaler.
A defeated scoff jolts me. “You don’t know what it’s been like—what it is to live here with you all. You think because you fed me that I should be glad?”
I blink up at him.
Those pesky tears still fall.
My voice trembles with the ache swelling in me, “You have no idea what it’s been like for me.
You might have fed me, and clothed me—but I’ve been alone, Samick.
I’ve been alone through all of this, all of your conversations, all of your camps, all of your walks, and when you butcher your way through towns and people and cities—and I’m dragged along for it all, and all I want…
” My voice breaks, it pitches into a squeak, “all I want is to go home.”
His lashes lower over clashing eyes; a battle between green and frost.
“Not home to your world,” I whine, and I feel the cold in the air biting at my slick cheeks. “I want to go home to my flat—with Bee. I want my records, my vinyls, my books, my bugs—”
“Bugs?”
His icy voice is a sword through the air—and it startles me.
I blink up at him, at the creases still knitted between his brows, the hair falling into his eyes.
The breath I loosen shudders the air between us.
“My bugs…” I echo. “I… I pin bugs… and frame them.”
My cheeks roar against the cold.
For a long moment, he stares at me, blank.
Then a single eyebrow lifts, arches in derision at me, and it scalds my face even hotter.
I don’t try to explain it. I don’t tell him that it’s the only thing that turns off my mind.
That it brings me back from dissociation, and grounds me, and takes me to mindfulness and meditation.
Or that it reminds me of my mum—memories of sitting on the floor while she cleaned the gift shop at the museum, and I picked through the bins to find those little framed treasures.
Maybe I don’t have to explain it.
Maybe he feels it, hears it, churning in me.
Whatever he feels, it has his grip on my jaw softening. It doesn’t vanish completely, just eases, until his thumb brushes over the bone of my jaw for my mouth—and strokes over my lips.
He lazily wipes at the tears gathering there.
His tone is soft, bordering on a whisper, as though he can’t risk hearing his own question, “What is a vinyl?”
I blink—and more tears fall.
“It’s music.”
And I would do anything to hear music again.
I add, my own voice a whisper, “I remember when life was living—and with you, it hasn’t been that. It’s been surviving. And that is suffocating me.”
The pad of his thumb strokes over my mouth again, glazing my lips with my tears.
He’s curved over me, the white lacing of his rich green eyes sweeping over my face, considering every inch, every freckle, every blemish, closely, too closely, and I can feel it, every cold stroke of his gaze brushing over my flesh.
“You are an emotional human,” he tells me, and my face crumples. He considers the creases. Unfazed, he goes on, “You are loud and volatile. Self-pity has made a home in you. It encourages you to forget what you are.”
My throat thickens with tears.
“You sacrifice your people for your own safety. You do not care about the humans we kill or enslave. You care for your possessions.”
Silent, I weep.
But there’s no viciousness in the way he tells me these things about myself.
He just states them as facts.
As memories—of the first time he saw me, and I did nothing to save Ramona. Of the second time, and I tried to leave Emily behind to save myself and Bee.
He isn’t wrong.
That twists my face with a fresh surge of tears, and I grab at his forearm, solid and unmoving, and try to tear his grip from my jaw. “How can you feel everything from people around you—and still be so fucking empty?”
“You misunderstand, Tesni.” His grip on my jaw firms. His fingertips glide up to my cheeks, catching the tears in their paths. “There is no kindness that survives in me. Nothing for you to nurture and grow. I am hollow.”
His fingers curve around my jawline to tuck under my chin, and lift my face.
Tears cling to my lashes.
My breath shudders—and lures his gaze.
For a beat, he just considers my mouth, damp with tears…
Then my breath pins to my chest.
Samick brings his lips to mine.
“And so are you,” he says, soft, before his mouth presses against mine—and he kisses me.