Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Ophelia
I never stood across a chasm from Malakai before he left, but entering our suite to find him in the foyer, hands braced against the wooden table, knuckles turning white with the force, that was how I felt.
“I’m sorry,” I started, voice trembling with restraint. “We shouldn’t have insisted on the tattoos tonight.”
Malakai shook his head and released a dark laugh. “That’s not it.” For a moment, he could barely hold himself together: arms locked, eyes closed, words he wasn’t sure he should share bursting his seams.
“What’s going on, then?”
“What’s going on?” he echoed, squeezing his hands tighter before pushing back, striding toward me.
“What’s going on is that I have no fucking clue what’s going on.
No idea what I’m supposed to be doing. Why am I here?
What’s the point of any of this? These strategies you’re constantly speaking of, these meetings, this entire life? I don’t want any of it.”
His anger barreled down at me, and I snapped. “I’m not forcing you to do anything.”
“You’re making choices I don’t understand.” It wasn’t what was bothering him—not entirely. I could tell that much from his frantic search for something—anything—to say. But it gave us something to latch on to. So, I did.
“Why do you need to?” I roared.
Seeing Aird had rattled me, and that fury bled into this fight now, but I couldn’t stop it. I unleashed all the fear and uncertainty I’d bottled up as the fight we’d been suppressing for days sprang back open, a force stronger than the both of us.
“Why can’t you just believe in me, Malakai? You always used to.”
“A lot has changed since then, hasn’t it?”
We were across that chasm, screaming to each other, voices adrift in the wind. On entirely different drafts. His arguments carried north and mine south, neither destined to reach the other, and that burned me up.
“Can’t you simply have faith in me?” I asked, palms open to catch the accusations hurled between us. “Can’t you see all I’ve done without you and believe I know what I’m doing?”
Once, we wouldn’t have had to explain ourselves. Support had been a pillar of us, but we’d changed. I shut out the possibilities of what that meant.
“Like you did with me?”
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped. “Don’t you dare compare our actions right now.
” He’d hidden a world of betrayals from me, allowed me to break beneath the sharpened points of their blades again and again.
And I was trying to balance healing and proving myself, crumpling under the combined weight, fighting to reach him.
“No, I will compare it. Because you seem to forget that everything I suffered and every lie I told was for a reason. It was to save lives, to save you.” A ripple of agitation rolled through him, but he shook his shoulders out, stifling his memories.
“I never asked you to save me, Malakai. If you truly saw me, you’d understand that.” I stalked toward him, anger slowing my steps to a prowl. “You’d know I’d rather have suffered beside you, knowing the truth, than lived in ignorance forever.”
Malakai ran a hand along his chin, palm scraping across that scar from his father. “You’re so focused on what you want—are you even grateful for the sacrifices I made?”
That accusation slammed into me with the force of the Angels descending.
You don’t make the decisions here, Malakai.
Perhaps you shouldn’t either.
Was that truly how he saw me? Incompetent, unworthy, ungrateful. Impossible to compromise with, perhaps not deserving of the effort. The implications buried me like a snowstorm, shame washing in with them.
I’d been ungrateful. Selfish. Perhaps he was right, and I was the problem. I should be more understanding.
His narrowed stare shrank me, my faults piling up between us. He’d been broken by Lucidius and Kakias, his trust in anyone beaten so thoroughly it might never heal. In my anger, I pushed him away. Punished him for the choices he made about my life, our relationship.
But he’d pushed me away, too. He thought I didn’t notice, but he’d guarded his emotions as fiercely as I had, and neither one of us was willing to relent.
I wished we could revert back to our former selves, where ignorant bliss was all we knew, but that wasn’t real life. Reality was a shattered glass waiting for you to slice your hand open against it and pour your deepest desires on its surface.
No, Malakai didn’t understand my decisions, and I didn’t understand his either. But, Spirits, my fight was dying, my soul weighed down.
Instead of replying to his slights—because truthfully, I didn’t know what to say—I leaned across that chasm, meeting his lips in a slow sweep, asking if this was all right. If we could put our problems on hold and get lost in each other.
He hesitated at first, but when I teased the seam of his lips with my tongue, he relented, sighing into my mouth. One hand surged to the back of my head, tangling in my hair as he commanded all of me.
I leaned into the competition for control, forcing him back. Our mouths became a violent clash of stifled emotions as I ripped his shirt free of his pants, undoing the buttons and shoving it from his shoulders. He gripped my hips with one hand, tugging my head back with the other.
My nails left indents in his flesh, red lines clawing down his chest. He growled at the sting, the noise rumbling down my throat, spurring me on. But I was gentler when my hands explored his back, each raised stretch of flesh a stab to my own gut.
Sensing my reluctance, Malakai wrapped his arm around my waist, pressing me into him. Fucking Spirits, I nearly gasped when his hard length ground against me. It certainly wasn’t the first time, but when I was lost to this crazed anger, it always seemed different.
Malakai broke the kiss, breath hot between us.
“Why can’t you stop fighting me?” Malakai panted but watched my hand inch down the plane of his stomach.
I hooked my fingers in the waistband of his pants and tugged, walking backward.
“I think we’re on the same side right now.”
Domineering and smug, taking my words as a win, he pressed me into the cold marble. I inhaled, arching into him. Bracing one hand against the wall beside my head, he kissed me roughly, his other hand trailing down my body.
We could have been anywhere in that moment. Back in our clearing, in the Cub’s Tavern, atop the mountains themselves. We could have been anyone, rather than two damaged lovers avoiding their pain through each other’s bodies.
But dammit if it didn’t feel good to forget.
Malakai tipped my head farther back, lips moving to my jaw, down my neck, and across my collarbone, goosebumps following in his wake. I stroked him through his pants as heat gathered between my legs.
“Do you care about this dress?” he murmured against the pounding of my heart.
I could barely even remember what dress I wore. I looked down, seeing my nipples peaked against the light blue fabric, and while I did actually like this one, I shook my head. Who cared about a dress when it was standing in our way?
With a lust-drunk smile, he reached for the straps.
But an all-too-familiar glow bathed the room, freezing us.
“Bad timing?” The Angel chuckled.
“Damien!” I shouted.
“By the fucking Angels,” Malakai gaped.
“Must you all swear on my kind as such?” Damien shook his head. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Malakai remained frozen. The Angel lounged above the table, legs crossed, hands tucked behind his head. His imposing Angellight bathed the foyer like a sunset, coating every piece of artwork and inch of marble floor.
“You truthfully have the poorest timing of any reverent being I’ve ever met,” I snapped, bracing my hands on Malakai’s chest. His heart hammered beneath my palm.
“And how many have you met, Chosen Child?” The damned Angel smirked.
“First you appear when I’m drunk and in my undergarments.” Malakai mumbled a curse. “Then, after Malakai and I had just been together, and now this? Have you no decency?”
“It is not my fault you are always indecent when time demands I confer with you.” Damien waved one hand at where Malakai and I were half-clothed.
“As if you have no control over the matter.”
“On that you are correct.” Damien’s throat bobbed as he sat up, hovering in the air with gentle flaps of his golden wings. And there was something in his purple eyes—something that tugged at my gut and sent my second pulse pounding.
Something that made me turn to Malakai and say, “I’ll see you shortly.”
“You don’t want me to stay?” The disbelief in his voice twisted my heart, but Damien shook his head, and my fate was sealed.
“I’ll meet you in the bedroom,” I whispered.
Bringing him into this would only spark more questions, more arguments, and we had too much to work out between us as it was. We’d said no more secrets, but Malakai had enough on his shoulders without me making it worse.
Hurt flashing behind his eyes, he left. I banished the ache in my Bind and stormed across the foyer into my office. A fire flared to life, flames reflecting orange and yellow against the white marble mantel.
“Your timing is truly horrendous.”
“Your manners have certainly seen better days,” Damien observed, following me.
“I’m very sorry, most honored Prime Warrior.” I bent in a mocking curtsey, but there was little heat to our banter. “A lot has changed since we first met. I fear I have become a new woman, and perhaps the grace has become selective.”
He tilted his head, the most human gesture I’d ever seen of him. “Why do you fear that?”
I pondered his question. “I don’t fear the woman I have become. She has endured more than I thought possible. But I fear the things that shaped her and what she has yet to do.” Because I didn’t know where this path would lead, but every day, the world was slowly caving in on me.
Damien’s eyes flashed with an unnamed emotion. “Do not fear what is beyond your control.”