Chapter 53
We Were Born to Burn
THE REQUIEM | Present
Iam sitting under the olive tree, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but I can’t feel the heat. I can’t feel anything except the tectonic plates of my own mind grinding against each other, pulverizing five years of lies into fine, choking dust.
The psychiatrist called it catatonia. A defense mechanism.
He doesn’t understand that I’m not catatonic; I am just terrifyingly, violently awake. For three days, every breath has felt like swallowing broken glass. Every time I close my eyes, the timelines collide. The sound of Hannah’s bones hitting the brick.
I killed her. I shot my own Mother. And the worst part—the deepest, darkest fracture in my soul—is that I would do it again.
A shadow cuts through the harsh glare of the sun.
I don’t need to look up to know it’s him. My skin recognizes him before my eyes do. He tastes of gunpowder and storm clouds, pulling the air right out of my lungs. My chest aches.
The guilt and the pain are there. And every time I look at him or think of him, I am hit with the realization of what I’d done and what I took from us, from him.
His hand gently gathers the edge of the blanket, pulling it back over my trembling shoulder. His fingers brush the bare skin of my neck. It burns. It feels like an execution and a resurrection all at once.
I reach up, my fingers locking around his wrist, holding his palm against my throat. I need to feel his pulse. I need to know he didn’t bleed out in that dirt.
“Selene,” he breathes.
The sound of my name in his throat is like a poison I want to drink willingly. The dam inside my chest disintegrates.
A choked sound tears out of my throat as I let go of his wrist, my hands flying to my face, my entire body convulsing.
The blanket slides off my shoulders into the dirt.
I am pulling myself apart, dismantling every wall I spent three days building, and the tears are coming so fast that I can’t breathe.
“Don’t,” I choke out. “Don’t look at me. Zagreus, please—don’t look at me.”
Before I can even gasp for air, the man who commands empires drops straight to his knees in the dirt at my feet, his massive frame shaking as he buries his face into my lap.
He wraps his arms around my hips, locking me against him.
“I’m looking,” he rasps. “I’ve spent years blind, Dolcezza. I will look at you until my eyes rot in my head. Cry. Scream. Break whatever you need to break, but don’t you dare ask me to look away.”
I slide down until I am on the ground with him, tangled in his lap. I am sobbing so hard my ribs ache, my hands gripping the fabric of his black shirt, bunching it into my fists until my knuckles turn white.
“I forgot,” I cry into his shoulder. “I forgot us. I let them give me to another man. I killed your Mother, our child, and I lived in a house full of ghosts. I didn’t know their names. I let her make me believe you were the monster.”
“Look at me.” His hands come up to frame my face, his rough thumbs desperately wiping the torrent of tears from my cheeks. His grey eyes are bloodshot. “Look at my face, baby. You survived. You came back to me through a fog that would have killed anyone else. Do you hear me? You came back.”
“But the baby,” I choke out. My hands fly down to my stomach, clutching the fabric of my dress over my womb, my fingers digging in until it hurts. “Our baby, Zagreus… I killed our child!”
He cups my face and pulls me to his chest.
Leaning down, he kisses my stomach through the cloth. “I’m sorry,” he gasps against my skin. “I should have known earlier. I let our child die in the dark, Selene. That is my sin. Not yours. Never yours.”
“No,” I sob, pulling his face up so I can look at him.
“No, Zagreus, listen to me. I thought… when the memories came back, I thought you only wanted me because of the vengeance. I thought I was just a prize you needed to take back from my family. I was so scared that you loved the memory of the girl I used to be, not the broken, ruined thing standing in front of you now.”
Zagreus lunges upward, his mouth crashing against mine, obliterating the space between us. It tastes like salt, tears, and a terrifying, eternal hunger. He kisses me until my lungs burn, until the static in my head turns into a beautiful silence I want to drown in.
When he pulls back just an inch, his forehead stays welded to mine, his hot breath fanning across my lips.
“A prize?” he whispers, his voice shaking with a lethal intensity. “I would live in the dirt, I would bleed out in that alley every single day for the rest of my life, if it meant I got to hold this broken version of you.”
He slides his hand to the back of my neck, his thumb tracing my jawline. “There is no ‘old version’ of you, Dolcezza. There is only you. You are my favorite weakness. My sweetest punishment. You are my entire fucking world, and if you are broken, then we will be broken together.”
I let my head fall onto his chest, listening to the heavy, frantic slam of his heart beneath my ear. One heartbeat. Mine. His. Ours.