Chapter 17 Wrath #2
I’d spent the last few hundred years finding a means to an end, fucking quickly and savagely, mostly from behind.
After so much time, I needed a release, and I wasn’t picky about who wanted to accommodate that.
But Lily had never been an itch I needed to scratch.
The moment I laid eyes on her, I wanted all of her.
I wanted our eyes to lock, wanted her heart to beat against my chest, wanted the chance to earn another night with her if she felt it too.
I’d made love to her the first time I’d had her, and all I ever wanted to do was make love to her.
I desired her body, loved the way she looked in nothing but those knee-high socks, but the love I had for her was so much deeper than the flesh.
“Callum.” She whispered my name, the name that would mark my headstone if I had one. But now, no living person knew me by that name except her. A name I’d almost forgotten because it’d been so long since I’d heard it.
I could see the way her eyes started to water again, either from the anticipation of the fall or because she felt exactly what I felt.
I’d loved my wife with a pure heart and made the ultimate sacrifice for her.
But the love I felt for Lily was so much deeper.
She was the woman meant for me. I knew it from the start.
And a part of me wondered if this had been part of Bahamut’s plan, another way to torture me.
For me to find my soul mate, just to let her go.
“Callum.” She said my name again, her hand cupping my neck like she knew I’d drifted off again. She brought me back to the present, to live in the moment we still had rather than grieve for the time we wouldn’t have together.
I came back to her, eyes locked on hers, watching her take a breath every time I thrust inside her, the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on underneath me, looking at me like I was the stars and she was my sun.
Her thigh was hiked over my hip, and her fingers lightly grazed over my chest as she stared into my eyes. We spent most of our time this way, fully satisfied in comfortable silence, time passing by in a rush even when we did nothing to drive it forward.
“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.” Her fingers continued to brush over my hard chest as a softness entered her gaze. Her fingers eventually came back up my neck until they felt my hard chin. Her eyes moved down to examine my mouth. “All the hearts you must have broken in your time.”
The only heart I’d broken had been my wife’s. Because she’d thought I’d run off with someone else while she lay on her deathbed. Because she’d accepted the lie as easily as if it were truth. As if she didn’t know me at all. “I was never that kind of man.”
“I believe that.” Her fingers continued to graze my jawline.
I didn’t ask or comment about her past relationships.
They seemed irrelevant to me. Without asking her about the intensity of her former lovers, I just knew I was the deepest relationship she’d ever had.
I knew her heart beat for me in a way it never had with anyone else, even though she hadn’t explicitly stated it.
It was in the air between us, in our lungs with every breath we took, an endless yearning.
Her fingers suddenly stopped against my chin, and she looked at me again. “You can take me anywhere?”
“I can.”
“So you could take me to distant lands to look for the platinum?”
I nodded. “But it’ll most likely be buried underground and will require miners to reach it. That’s not something you can do alone…at least not efficiently. But now that you know what the substance is, it should be much easier for you to ask your allies to search for it.”
“Yeah, true.”
“And yes, I can take you there and save you a trip on your dragon.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
Something else I wasn’t supposed to do, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
She was quiet as she contemplated to herself in silence. Her eyes were elsewhere, thinking. “Could you take me to the underworld?” She let her words hang between us for a while before she lifted her gaze and looked at me again.
A numbness spread throughout my body until the pain surfaced. “Why would you want to go there?”
“You’ve seen my world. I want to see yours.”
“It’s not my world.”
“But it’s where you are when we’re apart.”
My eyes flicked back and forth between hers. “Every moment we’re apart, my heart is here with you, Lily. There’s nothing for you to see there. Only darkness and despair. Only monsters and every nuance of evil.”
“But I still want to know your world.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to understand your life.”
“I don’t want your pity, Xivin.” I didn’t want her to see the world that I’d somehow gotten used to these last few hundred years. It would be a shock to her, and of course, it would break her heart to know that was my existence. A cold world in a sea of muted colors.
“I still want to know.”
I wanted our time together to be spent in the throes of lovemaking or loving stares next to the fireplace. To pretend that we had forever, even when we only had moments in between waves of chaos. “I warned you I would leave if you did this.”
Her eyes hardened at my threat. “All I asked was to see the place you call home.”
“You want to see the underworld to figure out if there’s a way for me to escape it.
” I knew Lily better than she realized, not because of our conversations, but because I watched her far more than she was aware of.
I watched her stare in the mirror and be disappointed by what she saw.
I watched the way she changed the grip on her sword several times, like she was unsure of herself in battle.
I watched her look death in the face with a bravery most men lacked.
I knew every beautiful layer of Lily Rothschild.
Every. Single. One. “And my answer is no.”
“What if the platinum is there?”
“I would tell you if it were.”
Her fingers withdrew from me entirely. “I still want to see—”
“There is no escape.”
“I just want to see your world. Where you sleep. Where you go—”
“You know full well that I don’t sleep.”
“Callum—”
“One more word and I’m gone.” I hated myself for the harsh words I unleashed, especially when I’d rather spend this time enjoying her instead of fighting her.
She flinched slightly at my words, and then tears coated her eyes a second later.
“My greatest fear is that one day you won’t come back.
Not because of your advice or the strength you grant me, but because of the way my heart hurts whether you’re far or near.
Because every moment we’re apart, I live for the next moment we aren’t.
So when you use your absence as a tool against me…
it really hurts me.” The tears in her eyes grew within the next breath she took.
And I felt worthless.
“I feel closer to you than I’ve ever felt to anyone—lover, friend, or family. So this punishment is as cruel as torture.” The tears escaped and slowly dripped down her cheeks before she quickly wiped them away like she was ashamed they’d ever come free.
“You’re right, Xivin.”
She wouldn’t look at me now, her eyes still watery.
“I’m sorry.” I spent so much time nurturing my rose in the flower garden…
and then I stepped on her. Crumpled her stem and dirtied her petals.
Let the rain flood the soil and nearly kill her.
I regretted some of the parenting choices I’d made in the past, but I regretted this effort most of all.
“I’ll never do that again, regardless of the content of our conversation. ”
Her eyes finally came back to me. “Promise me.”
My hand cupped her cheek before my fingers slipped into her hair. “I promise, Xivin. But that’s still not a conversation I ever want to revisit. If you want to talk about it, don’t expect me to reply.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” I looked into her pained eyes and wished I could look into them for eternity—even a single mortal life.
Her fingers wrapped around my wrist gently. “Then…will you take me?”
My instinct was to push her away, but seeing the lingering tears in her eyes grounded my anger. “There’s nothing to see, Xivin.”
“I want to know you. All of you.”
“Xivin…” I didn’t want her to witness the physical manifestation of misery. Didn’t want her to understand my suffering. Didn’t want her to think about what she’d seen during the brief moments when her world was quiet. “We have more important matters at hand.”
“But you said time passes differently there than it does here. That a week for you is merely an hour for me.”
I had said that, and now I wished I hadn’t.
“You know me in a way I’ll never know you.
You can replay moments of the past, show me how my father lost his first wife and daughter, how he took back the Southern Isles with the army of the dead.
Watch me when I don’t know you’re there.
Witness a private conversation between me and those I love.
And this is all I get to see of you, the small amount you’re willing to show me.
The tip of the rock that juts out of the ocean, while the rest is concealed beneath the surface.
” Her emotional eyes flicked back and forth between mine.
“I know it won’t be the beautiful, secluded beach with the little house you built just for the two of us.
I know it’ll be a horrible place. But it’s still the place you go where we’re apart, and I just want to know. ”
I only considered the request because of the person making it.
“Unless it’s unsafe.”
“It would be the same as it is when I’m here. No one can see you but me.”
“And I can return.”
“I would never let you stay down there even if you wanted to, Xivin.” Even if she decided she wanted to leave her family behind to spend a life with me in Xian, I wouldn’t allow it.
It was something I’d contemplated before, something I’d even asked of her, but as my love for her reached a depth greater than I could ever fathom, I knew it was the wrong choice.
She deserved so much more than that. A woman like Lily Rothschild should never settle for a man who could only give her despair.
“Then you’ll take me?” she asked, somewhat hopefully.
“If you seek a solution to my problem, you won’t find one.”
“Our problem,” she said. “And I still want to see.”
I searched her gaze and found the resolution of a woman who wouldn’t change her mind.
Who wanted to see the horrors of the Underworld and carry those memories for the rest of her life.
Talon Rothschild had handled the equivalent of a year in that dark place.
I knew his daughter could handle much more.