Chapter Twenty-Seven Aria
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Aria
“Are you sure this will be okay?” Dani flitted around the small spare bedroom she predominantly used for her office, readjusting the bedspread that covered the full bed and fluffing the pillows. “I know it’s cramped in here.”
“If you saw some of the places we stayed in the last few weeks, you wouldn’t be so concerned right now.” I didn’t hide the wryness as I stood at the doorway, watching her fret.
Her pink hair flipped to the side as she grabbed a decorative cloud-shaped pillow that matched the white-and-blue-polka-dot bedspread and tossed it onto the window seat that overlooked the front yard. “That bad?”
“I think we were trying to give dive a new definition.”
I blinked through the fog of memories of the last few weeks. Days and nights that felt as if they’d been set to fast-forward, blips of cities and towns that we’d sped by imprinted in my mind in a black-and-white haze.
The endless slew of crappy motels that had all felt the same, though each was so distinctly different.
The beauties and horrors that had been found behind their doors.
It felt as if it all had transpired in a flash yet had stretched over years.
“But I didn’t mind. And this? It’s honestly perfect,” I told her. “Your adorable house. Being here, with you and Timothy. It’s better than anything I could have imagined. It feels like what home should feel like.”
“A place where you’re safe. Understood,” she murmured, as if she felt it, too, her pale, pale eyes soft as she glanced in my direction.
My nod was slow. “Yeah. That’s exactly it.”
“Do you miss yours?” she asked as she straightened, and she leaned her hip against the white desk that sat against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. It was where she spent her days as a graphic designer for a local advertising company.
Three large monitors were arranged side by side, and a digital drawing pad and a keyboard sat on top. Colorful pens, markers, and notepads were organized in containers, and what had to be a thousand sticky notes with ideas scribbled on them were tacked off to the side of the screens.
An ache fluttered through my chest. “I do,” I admitted.
There’d been a constant worry about them.
The worry that they might be targeted again, though everything had seemed to be fine the few times I’d texted to check on them. My mother and siblings were still staying at my grandmother’s house since my mom wasn’t sure how to handle my father.
How to trust again.
I cleared the roughness from my throat. “You know how much I love them. How I’d do anything for them. But this . . .”
She padded across the floor, and she reached up and hooked her fingers through mine. “This is your family.”
Emotion gripped me. I nodded through the blear of moisture that rushed to fill my eyes.
“And I will forever be thankful that you brought us together. All of us,” she said.
Her long lashes fluttered behind the lenses of her glasses as she blinked through her thoughts.
“Today was like being reunited with a part of myself that I only knew was missing but couldn’t pinpoint exactly why it hurt so bad. ”
“It feels right, doesn’t it?” I whispered.
“It feels like a dawning after being in the dark for my entire life.”
She glanced behind me toward the low-pitched mutter of voices coming from the other room, where Pax and Timothy talked in hushed tones. “Seeing you and Pax in the light of day is so amazing. An experience I will forever cherish. But God, Aria. Timothy being here?”
The words cracked, hinged with the wash of confounded joy.
“That I get to experience this, even if it’s just for a little while? Even if I only got to see him once? It means everything to me. It is the one wish I had ever made . . . the one true prayer I’d issued a million times that I never believed would be granted.”
It was as if our spirits were peering into mirrors, her thoughts perfectly reflecting mine.
A tear slipped free of my eye, and she held my hand against her chest. “It’s a gift, Aria. What we share. All of us. But especially with them. And this can’t be temporary. It can’t. We have to find a way.”
Reaching out her free hand, she brushed away the moisture that lined my cheek, her voice soggy as she continued.
“And I have faith that we will. Because even though I can feel what’s festering in the air—the malignant—I can feel there’s a solution.
A remedy. Something bigger than what threatens to consume us.
I can’t believe we’d be here together if there wasn’t. ”
Footsteps scuffed down the hall. We broke apart, and I poked my head out to find Pax and Timothy laughing under their breaths as they approached.
Though the air—it completely shifted when Dani stepped out into the hall.
Timothy slowed, just taking her in.
She couldn’t be more than half his height, this tiny slip of a human who folded herself into him when he made it to where she waited. His mouth went to the crown of her head.
The energy begged between them.
Alive and real and eternal.
An understanding that surpassed all boundaries.
A bond that stretched beyond worlds.
“’Night, you two,” Timothy rumbled.
“Good night,” Pax and I returned.
Timothy slipped his arm around Dani and began to lead her down the hall toward her room at the end.
She paused only to slant me a knowing glance before she fully turned and stepped into her bedroom, Timothy right behind her.
The door clicked shut.
Pax and I watched, reverence in the air before our gazes moved toward each other.
That same connection billowed and weaved.
Though ours somehow felt familiar.
The soft smiles that fluttered across our lips.
Pax eased forward, his face cast in the bare light that shone from the sconce that hung on the hallway wall.
Striking, gorgeous angles.
He slipped an arm around my waist.
“It’s good, Aria. It’s fuckin’ good.” His voice was coarse. Grating with sincerity.
My fingers found the steady beat that pounded at the center of his chest.
“I know,” I murmured through the fervency that thudded within mine.
A giggle echoed down the hall, and Pax smirked, though it was adoring, and he pressed a kiss to my temple as he wound an arm around my neck and muttered, “Come on, we should get some rest.”
We stepped into the room, and Pax clicked the door shut behind us. He moved to the end of the bed where his duffel sat on top of the mattress. I’d already changed into sleep pants and a loose shirt, my feet bare.
Pax shucked off his boots and jeans and tee, all the way down to his underwear. He watched me the entire time where I hovered near the door, just as surely as I watched him.
He straightened, his body hewn in all that sinewy, defined muscle. The horrors were so clear where they were written on his scarred, disfigured flesh, though his aura skimmed over the top of them, whispering that things might not be so bleak.
He placed both our bags onto the floor, then moved to the side of the bed nearest me.
I flicked off the light switch, and it sent the room into darkness, though the faintest innuendo of light filtered in through the slats of the white wooden shutters from the porch lamp out front.
It was enough to make out his form, the way his back flexed and bowed as he dragged down the covers, then sat on the edge of the bed.
“Want to hold you.” It sounded like a claiming, and rippled through the energy that tugged between us.
I didn’t hesitate.
I crossed the space separating us and climbed directly onto his lap, wrapping myself around him.
He shifted to lie us down facing each other.
Chest-to-chest and breath-to-breath.
The sheets were cool and crisp, and a shiver rolled through me that Pax erased, his body a furnace that burned into mine.
Still, he pulled the blanket up, covering us as if it were a shield of protection.
“We made it,” I whispered into the darkness, my face pressed up under his chin.
His palm smoothed up my spine and to the nape of my neck before his fingers threaded in my hair. “We made it.”
“Thank you for doing it with me. For trusting me that this needed to happen.”
“I will never doubt you, Aria.”
He shifted onto his back, and I curled into his side and rested my head on his shoulder. “I wish we could stay just like this forever.”
Soothing fingers stroked through the strands of my hair, his voice a low resonance that swept through my being. “You are my forever. Whatever that looks like.”
I barely nodded, and a fog of exhaustion rolled through me in a disorienting haze.
“Sleep, sweet girl. I’ll meet you there,” he rumbled.
I snuggled deeper, sagging into the refuge I found in his arms. Into the steady thrum, thrum, thrum of his heart that soaked me like a balm.
I hovered there in the nothingness.
On that shimmery plane where I danced between asleep and awake.
In that weightless moment before my spirit would detach.
And I was there, in Tearsith, with Pax at my side. Descending into Faydor to fight the battle that I was terrified would never cease to rage.
Hours were spent hunting in the bowels of depravity. Slaying every wicked thing we passed while searching for any indication of Ambrose.
Until I was ripped from that realm.
Jolted awake by an explosion of shattering glass.