Chapter 45 #2
With a shaking hand, I trace the lines and curves of her face, her skin buttery soft under my touch.
“You’re the only person who has dared to get this close to me.
I knew you’d wait for me, if you could, but expected you to be curled up on the floor in the corner with a blanket, as far from me as you could get, and instead you’re in my bed…
and now in my arms. Yet you don’t tremble with fear.
Even after I tell you what I did. How can that be? ”
Her smile is soft. “I’m here to sleep,” she points out. “But I think that fear has never been in me when it comes to you.”
I want to keep her. I want her to be…
Mine.
The word flares to life inside me, but I douse it just as quickly. Because she can’t stay. Because even if she could, I shouldn’t let her.
“Have you ever met someone and felt as if you’ve known them your entire life?” I ask her. “Even though it had only been minutes or hours or days?”
The question surprises her. I can see it in the flare of her eyes. Me too, if I’m honest.
“Once,” she says slowly.
“It is a strange, uncomfortable sensation,” I say, staring right at the source of that discomfort. “I don’t know that I care for it.”
“Would it help if I told you that one day you and I will be…friends?”
“Friends?” I taste that word. “I don’t have friends.”
“You have Charon and Cerberus.”
I hum a doubtful sound as I trail my gaze over her face while I consider her as a friend. A mere friend. No. My soul rejects that. It’s not enough. “Now, if you told me that we were going to be lovers, that is something I would have an easier time believing.”
I swear she softens underneath me, so damn trusting in my arms that it hurts…and fascinates.
I trace my fingers from her temple to her jaw. “I wonder… What would it be like to taste you?”
Just a kiss.
A simple kiss.
Only one, and then I’ll send her out of this bed and far away from me forever.
I brush my thumb over her lower lip, watching her reaction. As natural as breathing, she lifts one hand and presses it against my chest, then gives a little whimper in the back of her throat. Can she feel how fast my heart is beating?
“Are you a siren?” I whisper. “To bewitch me so easily?”
An emotion passes over her features, too fleeting for me to catch it. Sadness, maybe, or a terrible knowledge. What does she know that I don’t?
Can I draw it out of her lips with a touch?
“Lyra.” Her name is like a prayer.
Like a confession—
I stiffen, seeing not her features but the memory of a single word uttered by lips I was just about to kiss. My whole body goes cold, and I narrow my eyes as her face comes back into focus. “Confess.” I whisper that word.
Unmistakable fear flares across her features. “What?”
“You used my power over a soul’s truth.” I tighten the grip I still have on one of her wrists. “My. Fucking. Power. You made me confess.” I clench my jaw so hard, trying to hold on to the fury burning through me like a flash fire, that a muscle jumps at the hinge of it. “How is that possible?”
She stares back at me like an injured fawn facing a ravenous lion, the pulse in her wrist hammering against her skin. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Did you take the power from me?” I demand, though quietly, in the way those who know me well know to fear. “Is that what you do? Take powers that aren’t yours? I thought you had power over time, but to have both that and a power over souls…” I shake my head. “Impossible.”
She swallows hard, the sound audible in the dead-quiet room. “I can’t tell you anything, except that I don’t take it from you. I would never do that.”
“So I give it to you?” I scoff.
“I can’t tell you—”
I’m off the bed, prowling back and forth at the foot, because I have to bleed off the rage somehow. I have to know. If I don’t and she leaves, I’ll drive myself wild trying to figure it out and not having answers. I want to trust her. I need to. But there’s only one way.
I go still. Utterly still. “Forgive me, my star, but needs must…”
Then I whisper a single word, this time imbuing it with power. A word that sounds like choir song. A command her soul cannot ignore. “Confess.”
Immediately, her face slackens, and her eyes turn cloudy as she’s pulled into the haze of her own mind, to the fog where only the truth is clear.
But she fights me.
I can sense it through the control I have over her. Fuck, she fights me so hard. I’ve never felt anything like it.
But I’m so much stronger. I will her to accept the command. Accept it and tell me the truth—
“I love you,” she says in a soft, sweet voice that is almost dreamy.
The truth.
I stumble back like she hit me.
“No matter when, no matter how, I love you. I love everything about you—the way you care, the way you fight, the way you make me laugh with a dark sense of humor that matches my own, your strength, the way you kiss and do a whole lot of other things, even the way you keep secrets for my own good. But especially the way you love.”
The terror that consumes me with every word she utters is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, even as part of me roars with triumph at the same time. But my fear sweeps away the happiness like a lava flow, not just burying it but obliterating it. It’s too much. Her love. She’s too precious.
She deserves better than me.
I can’t love her back. I won’t.
“I will always love you, Hades,” she says. Each word is an arrow to my heart. “Forever, no matter what you—”
That’s when she disappears, cutting off the sounds of the confession still tumbling out of her mouth.