Chapter Six Aria
Chapter Six
Aria
When my lids fluttered open, I found Pax staring at me from where his head rested on his pillow.
We faced each other, tangled in the middle of the bed.
Bare light flooded the room, but it was enough to cast him in a spotlight. Rays spearing through the drab atmosphere and glinting over the sharp edges of his face.
Cheeks cut like razors, his brow proud, and his jaw a blade.
But I was the one who felt lit up in the spotlight right then. The way he gazed at me through the space, those icy eyes the softest I’d ever seen them.
It was as if I had become a beacon. The only thing he could see.
He reached out tattooed fingers and brushed back the matted locks of hair from my face. A sorrowful smile touched his lips.
“Morning.” The word was rough as gravel.
“Good morning,” I murmured, eyes flitting back and forth as I took him in. Absorbing everything I could.
The sorrow from last night chasing me here. Knowing what Margarethe was waking up to.
A hole that I knew ached so horribly inside her.
Pax must have felt it, because he set his palm on my cheek, so big that it nearly covered the entire side of my face. “Nothing better in the world than waking up next to you. Getting to have you in my arms. Knowing you’re right here. This sweet body tucked right up against me.”
“It can’t be wrong,” I whispered.
“It can’t,” he agreed.
Wistfulness pulled through me, and Pax’s gaze tracked the motion as it pulsed through my expression. “You’re hurting for her.”
My hair swished around me as I nodded against my pillow. “I can’t imagine.”
“I know,” he murmured. “Weird that I never gave much thought to giving thanks in my life—but lying here, right in this moment, that’s what I am, Aria. I’m thankful. Thankful that I have you. Thankful that you’re mine.”
A warm buzz hummed in my chest, and redness rushed to my cheeks. I let my fingertips scratch through his stubble. “I told you that you were going to like claiming me.”
It was a thread of playfulness woven with a ribbon of sincerity.
A rough chuckle scraped his throat. “Oh, you did, did you?”
“I just had this hunch,” I teased with a lift of my bare shoulder, a lightness pushing through the gloom we’d been met with in Tearsith last night.
“Let it be known that there was never any question if I was gonna like it or not.” His tone shifted, too, riding on the whisper of levity that curled through the air. A flirty taunt from his tongue that had me snuggling closer to him.
“Well, I don’t know. I would have thought I’d have been irresistible the second you saw me.”
A hot palm slid all the way down my side. Chills lifted in its wake. “Turns out, you are irresistible, Aria Rialta. God knows I tried.”
“I guess I’m going to count it a positive that you were a total failure.”
Mischief danced on my tongue. The joy we’d found together bubbling through my being as that energy rolled through the room.
Pax let go of a warm, rumbling laugh, and he edged close, his nose brushing mine as he murmured, “Total, complete failure.”
I trailed the tip of my finger down his cheek. “You can take heart that at least you excel in one thing.”
In a flash, he rolled me onto my back and hovered over me.
He was so viciously beautiful that my heart clutched, and my stomach twisted into a thousand needy knots.
He angled down and wisped his lips across mine. “Oh yeah? And what would that be?”
My teeth raked my bottom lip, and the teasing evaporated. “Loving me.”
“That’s right. Because loving you was what I was created to do.”
He suddenly pushed back to kneeling, and the covers dropped from around his waist.
He rose high between my trembling legs, a fortress that towered over me.
A stream of light that cut through the slit in the drapes lit him in a dazzling blaze.
Every inch of him bristled with strength.
Skin scarred with our fate, covered with the violent designs he’d imprinted on his flesh.
Our truth.
But it was the first time I noticed what was hidden deep within the horrors inked on his abdomen. The first time I was this close to him in the light.
Veiled within a darkened expanse of red vingas.
The faint vestige of a face.
Gray eyes wide and long black hair whipping around the face.
With a trembling hand, I reached out and brushed my fingertips over the image he’d tattooed of me.
“Pax,” I whispered.
His body quivered beneath my touch. “You see it now, Aria? I was always yours. I just hadn’t quite gotten what that meant.”
The air changed. A charge of static electricity.
All the lightness vanished, and those fathomless gray eyes somehow darkened as he stared down at me.
“Need to feel you, Aria. Whole and safe and real.”
“I’m right here.”
He hooked his fingers in the edges of my underwear, and I lifted my hips so he could peel them down. Then he wound himself out of his, and he came to me.
Pressed himself inside me.
Took me.
His big body curled around mine as he began to move. He watched over me the entire time, our eyes locked, our souls hinged.
I swore that I could feel myself glow. Swore that I could see it reflected in his eyes. Flames that leaped and lapped. And when the orgasm tore through me, shooting me to the greatest heights, beyond the realms that we knew, there was only Pax and me.
Lost to a place that existed only for us.
Our match, something beyond my comprehension.
It didn’t matter, since what I understood was him.
Chest heaving for breath, he slumped down, though he immediately rolled us so he was on his back, and I was draped over him. A soft giggle got free. “So, I think you were totally wrong earlier. I think that is the best way to wake up.”
Amusement vibrated through him, and he curled his arms around me as a smile spread across his mouth.
Joy.
Even in the middle of everything we were going through, I still felt it wrap us whole.
Then he bucked up, the playfulness resurfacing, jostling me against him. “Go get yourself a shower; then we’ll eat.”
“So bossy,” I told him as I rolled away, slanting him a teasing smile.
He sat up, so intimidatingly beautiful in the middle of the bed. “Just taking care of my princess.”
“Fine, just as long as you remember my favorite way of waking up.”
His chuckle was dark as he raked his fingers through the crop of white hair on his head. “You think you’re going to find me complaining?”
Heat flushing my skin and a tiny grin threatening my mouth, I slipped off the side of the bed, taking the top sheet with me, and dipped into the bathroom.
I showered quickly. It seemed ridiculous that I had a smile plastered to my face the entire time, but I wasn’t going to feel guilty for it. As far as I was concerned, we’d earned whatever scraps of happiness we could scrape together.
Once I’d finished, I stepped out and wrapped myself in a towel before I headed back into the main room.
Though I froze when I felt the anxiety gripping the room the second I stepped through the door.
Pax was propped up on the bed, and his head was downturned, all his attention trained on his phone.
“What is it?” I croaked around the tension, not even sure I wanted to know.
Foreboding filled his features when he looked up at me and said, “William is dead.”