Until I Die

Chapter 37 Watch It Burn

Watch It Burn

Any assault upon a person under the protection of a command sanctuary shall be treated as an attack against the Defiance itself, and punished without mercy.

— THE ARTICLES OF THE DEFIANCE

Days passed, and Lucas fidgeted with nervous energy, pacing our cabin, reorganizing the scant decorative objects on the shelves, drumming his fingers across surfaces like the keys of his piano.

Every morning, he took a private meeting with Theo and Williams while I was asked to piss off.

Eventually, his meetings transitioned to the main building so he could run drills with his new squad.

Adam and Isaac were selected for this covert mission, but none of them would tell me how much danger was involved.

“Obviously that means it’s a lot,” I said to Lucas one night while we ate dinner with Adam at our small table.

“You’ll be fine,” he replied, eyes on his plate.

“I’m not worried about me, Lucas. Clearly I’ll be fine if I’m sitting at home waiting for you to come back.”

Adam chuckled, but he declined to engage in the argument. Lucas said nothing.

“So there’s a chance you’ll come back, right?” I finally asked in a small voice.

Unsmiling as he met my gaze, Lucas tore off a piece of bread and chewed. “What do you think?”

I crossed my arms at his flippancy. Adam’s smile died.

Lucas’s bare smirk emerged. “Tragedies only hook an audience if there’s suffering, sweetheart. There’s a reason Williams is pushing the fearful passage of our death-mark’d love.”

I hated that he was right. The crippling sensation of being used like this, our broken hearts manipulated to please an audience… It made me want to hit things.

“Please stop quoting that goddamn play, Lucas.”

He leaned forward and touched his lips to mine. “Thus with a kiss I die.”

As February plodded into March, the weather remained frigid and blue. My boots crunched in the dry grass as I trudged back and forth from the main building to our new home, cheeks red with the cold snap.

Around lunchtime a week into our cabin lockdown, I was heading back to Lucas with a paper sack full of food. My escort—Lieutenant Salinas today—hung back several steps. Deep in my own thoughts, I only noticed the other sets of footsteps when something squeezed my arm.

The powerful grip unleashed a vortex of fear. The sack in my hand dropped to the ground as a force slammed me back against a tree. Pain exploded across my barely healed back.

My scream tore through the air, sending winter birds fleeing.

A hand clamped over my mouth.

My lungs stalled as I took in the two men restraining me, hostility gleaming in their eyes. Behind them, a giant of a soldier had taken Salinas in hand, though it didn’t escape me that my guard did nothing to break free or help me.

The man whose hand covered my mouth stared down at me with hate and revulsion, but also a tinge of thrill.

I whimpered behind his hand and squeezed my eyes shut.

I’d seen a look like that before.

On Jack Miller’s face.

Images assaulted me.

The cuffs had been so tight. They’d burned my skin raw. The sandalwood invaded my senses. He held my mouth shut when I cried so I could smell every note of that cologne.

I thought of Lucas’s voice. Breathe, Sophia.

A quick shot of air made it through my nose, but the panic wouldn’t recede. I scratched at my captor’s hand, but his compatriot snatched my arm and wrenched it against the tree.

Subdued.

Stuck.

Silent.

I can’t breathe.

Trees.

“… brought him here …”

I can’t breathe.

Rain.

“… the kind of woman you are …”

I can’t breathe!

Cypress.

“… whore to a Hunter … should put you out of your misery …”

Something sharp pressed into my throat.

No sound. A bare flash of movement.

The hand ripped from my face, and I slid down the tree trunk to suck oxygen through my mouth. The man who’d silenced me pitched to his knees, clutching his neck. The knife he’d held to my throat dropped to the dry grass. Lucas stood behind him, bloody blade in hand.

His gaze touched my face for only a second before he turned on the others. Expression honed into that cold-blooded mask, he advanced on my attackers.

“Wait,” I said, trying to stand, but my voice was weak and breathless.

Adam appeared in my peripheral vision, breathing hard as if he’d sprinted to us. Salinas struggled against the giant’s hold.

Lucas canted his head like a cat, staring down the second man who’d held me against the tree.

“Sophia, get behind me,” he said, his tone nothing but ice.

I scrambled to my feet, but instead of hiding, I leapt in front of Lucas. “If you kill him, it will only make things worse.”

Lucas’s predacious stare homed in on the man, who now had his own weapon raised. “No one touches you and lives. I don’t need permission to protect you.”

I glanced at the soldier at our feet, now dead in a pool of his own blood. He’d threatened to kill me, and now he was dead. Everyone had been warned, and he attacked anyway.

Stepping closer to Lucas, I wrapped my hands around his wrist, trying to lower his weapon. “I’m okay, Lucas. Let’s just go back.”

The giant holding Salinas snorted. “Only a pussy-ass bitch takes orders from his woman.”

Adam moved closer to him, his combat knife at the ready.

Lucas flashed a glance the giant’s way. “You sound like a Hunter.”

The man’s expression melted into rage.

“Lucas, please,” I murmured. “Come on.”

His gaze dropped to mine. His free hand cupped my cheek.

I leaned into it. “Please.”

Without looking away, his arm jerked. The knife whipped through the air and buried in my attacker’s upper thigh.

I cringed as the man screamed. While he wrenched Lucas’s knife from his flesh, Lucas spun me behind him, raising another blade.

How many did he have?

“You can walk away with a flesh wound,” Lucas said, “or you can join your friend. Your choice.”

The soldier took in his fallen comrade, then the man restraining Salinas, still held off by Adam. “You’ll die before this is all over, fucker,” he spat at Lucas.

“I know,” Lucas said evenly. “I forfeited my soul to the pits of hell, and I’m watching it burn.” A few predatory steps had the man backing away. “I have no morals left, so if you come at her again, I will bleed you dry and enjoy every second. Do you understand?”

The man’s wrath remained caged behind a hateful expression, but he nodded.

“You’re alive right now by her grace,” Lucas said. “You have ten seconds before I change my mind.” He stayed motionless as both soldiers retreated, their watchful gazes on Lucas until they were far enough to run.

I tried to draw in air through an iron band wrapped around my chest. Fine tremors wracked my body, and a rapid pulse throbbed in my back.

I stumbled backward, hand to my chest, tears breaking through. Lucas appeared before me, face swimming through darkness. He was talking, but the words didn’t make sense, echoing to me like he screamed them underwater.

“They attacked me,” I whispered. “M-my own p-people.”

“Breathe, Sophia,” he said.

Trees.

My knees turned to jelly. He caught my weight.

Rain.

We sank to the ground.

Cypress.

“Take her,” said a voice outside my bubble. “I’ll deal with this.”

Suddenly, I was weightless, my body swaying with Lucas’s quiet steps as he carried me through the forest. I fisted his shirt and closed my eyes. “Stay with me.”

“You know I will. Until I die.”

When he set me down atop something soft, my body felt as if I’d run a marathon. I blinked around, recognizing our bed, the A-frame of the ceiling, the book he’d left on his pillow.

Sitting beside me, he brushed his hand across my cheek, fingers drifting down my throat. We remained that way for a long time, my heart rate slowing with each letter he drew on my pulse.

“He said he wanted to put me out of my misery,” I whispered after minutes of silence.

“You don’t have to worry about him, okay?” A seriousness crept into his eyes, bled into his expression. “You deserve so much better than this.”

“You saved my life again.”

“You save mine every day.”

I slipped my hands up his chest, clenching slowly on his shirt. In an unhurried, even pull, I dragged him closer, and then my lips were against his.

The kiss was halting at first, careful, like neither of us was sure this was the right move. When he pulled back a touch, I cupped his face in my hands. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

His brows drew together. “You screamed my name.”

“I—I did?” I remembered screaming, but not his name.

It tracked, though. Lucas equaled safety, and my subconscious knew it.

He nodded and kissed my temple, my cheek. “You call, I come. They hurt you, they die. They were warned.”

They were warned, I thought. Theo told them Lucas and I had been placed within a command sanctuary. Adam would make sure the other two were charged as the Articles of the Defiance decreed. The soldier Lucas had left with a hole in his neck had intended to kill me. He deserved what he got.

I pulled Lucas back to my mouth. “I love you. Do you know that?”

“You’ve mentioned it,” he said against my mouth.

When my hands wandered up his neck to tangle in his hair, he deepened the kiss. He’d been so vigilant with me since he’d rescued me from Miller, hesitant to do anything that might trigger bad thoughts, but now I sensed the bridle in him, the desire that pushed right to the edge of his control.

“Say you love me,” I whispered.

His mouth trailed along my jaw. “Love is too soft. I’m obsessed with you.”

Longing crashed with the force of an earthquake, and I clutched on to him the way he liked, as if nothing short of the world ending could tear him from my arms.

“Show me,” I said when he dipped his mouth to the pulse in my neck.

His movements slowed, and his gaze met mine. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The blacks of his eyes expanded while he studied my face. The distance between us disappeared, and when his mouth finally touched mine again, I sighed in relief.

Worried I wouldn’t be able to have this, that sex had been poisoned for me, I moved without hurry. What if certain touches brought it all back?

But his caress was tentative, mindful, and he undressed me with the kind of reverence one would use to unwrap a holy object. Soft lips wandered down my body, lingering first in my favorite places, and then his.

After long minutes of leisurely kisses, his hand drifted between my legs, and that first wash of sensation shimmered through my nerves, pulling a moan from my throat.

I’d almost forgotten how good he felt, how perfectly we meshed.

His chemistry reacted with mine to create something transcendental.

When the pleasure hit, it extracted me from my body for endless seconds to set me in a place where pain didn’t exist.

Afterward, I caught my breath while nuzzling into his throat, pressing open-mouth kisses across his stubbled jaw. He lay back as I pushed on his shoulder, then let me climb on top of him. Bracing my weight on his chest, I straddled him and sank down.

His fiery gaze flickered down my body, but mine riveted to his face. Flushed cheeks. Aquamarine thinned to a strip around his dilated pupils.

Even though he’d seen it dozens of times, my naked body still lit him on fire. A buzz shot through my stomach at the inherent power I held over him, all that danger and lethality lying docile beneath me.

“Lucas.” His attention returned to my face, and I smirked.

He licked his lips. “I think you like watching me burn.”

I did like that.

I liked it a lot.

His hands slid up my thighs, squeezing, but he let me go at my own pace. Taking my time, entranced by the adoring ocean in his eyes, I fell deeper into the bottomless sea between us.

In the end, I needn’t have worried. Even when it was wild and unrestrained, sex with Lucas had never been just sex. A burning ribbon connected us. With his hands warm and sparkly against my skin, it was nothing like when I was abused and forced.

I kept my gaze on his until I came apart again, and afterward, I luxuriated in his touch while he kissed his way from my fingertips to my toes.

“Lucas, when did you realize that you loved me?” I asked, threading my fingers through his hair.

His kisses slowed to a stop, and he stretched out next to me. “That day you nearly killed me. You had your blade at my throat, and you were searching my face. Do you remember that?”

I did. The agony in his eyes that day had shredded holes in my hate for him. I’d known even then that this man had layers, but I had no idea how many.

Still, that hadn’t been a good day for us. “You fell in love with me when I threatened to kill you?”

He flashed a smile, there and gone again. “You weren’t searching for a reason to do it. You were searching for a reason not to. You were looking for my redemption.”

I pushed to my elbow so I could see his face.

His thumb grazed my jaw. “You decided I was worth saving despite it all, and…that was it.”

“You still tried so hard to convince me you were evil.”

“I am evil.” He smirked and rolled so my body was pinned beneath his, just as he liked it. His mouth brushed mine. “You’re easy to love despite your stupidity.”

I gasped when he kissed me and tried halfheartedly to buck him off, but soon, I gave in to the worship in his touch.

“You’ll pay for that remark,” I said when he let me breathe.

“Yeah? Show me how.”