Chapter 37
Chapter thirty-seven
Willa is enamored by my new tattoos, and I am enamored by the way she touches them.
I lay back, stretching my aching muscles, enjoying the soft feel of her fingers.
She traces the lines of color I’ve inked through every story on my body, because each one—each tale that imprinted itself onto my heart through the centuries—were a path leading me to the best story of all. Her.
My death lazes at our heads, and I’m thankful for the brief respite from its painful hold. It is as exhausted as I am—nerves raw and frayed and vulnerable—but it is the first time since I returned that I don’t feel the pull of its ravening need. With Willa, it does not need more. It is sated.
Her fingers trail over the ‘V’ of my hips before rolling back up to circle my ribs where the tattoos split around a shiny new scar. “I used to know every inch of you,” she says quietly, fingertips bumping over the gnarled tissue. “And now so much of you is a mystery again.”
Willa pulls her hands away, her lashes flickering downward. “While my skin is the same as ever.”
I catch her wrist, and roll her on top of me. “Your new scars may be invisible on your body, Darling, but I see them all the same. And I intend to learn the story of every one, and to exact my revenge on all those who caused them.”
Her mouth twists. “I caused them. Just like I caused yours.”
I hum, pressing her hand back to my ribs. “You weren’t the one who stabbed me while my back was turned.”
“You’re right. I prefer to do it while staring you in the eyes,” she says with a light laugh that pierces through my chest more surely than any sword. Her laughter is so rare, a delicacy of the highest order.
“As you should. A defining feature of your character, truly.”
I let a leveling breath escape slowly through my teeth, everything in me warring against reliving any of the past. Like if I even dare think of it, somehow the present will dissolve into the fever dream it feels like.
It has been three days since Willa arrived bleeding on my doorstep, and my heart has yet to settle.
Always lurching, always racing, always on edge.
Because none of it feels real. And I know better than anyone, the land of dreams will ferret out your deepest hopes to taunt you with just before they are stolen away. Like the Indomnitus; like my power; like my freedom. Everything comes with a cost.
But this time, I’m prepared to pay. With blood, with pain, with everything I have. I meant what I said—I’ll burn the island to the ground before I let it take Willa from me once more.
So, I allow her into the past year, pressing her fingers into the scar marring my shoulder. “This was courtesy of my brother the same day I arrived on the mainland.”
Her palm is warm against my skin as I guide it to the opposite side of my abdomen, where a long, thin scar slashes through one of my favorite stories. “This one was a rapier belonging to one of Wendy’s hired guards.”
Beneath my guidance, her hand skims down the sharp bone of my hip and over the top of my thigh to my knee. “And this…is because I got roaring drunk and tripped up the stairs.”
This time when Willa laughs, it’s loud and radiant and makes me feel like I’ve won something.
“Of all the things I’ve missed, I’m especially sorry to have missed the Carrion King falling on his ass.”
I sniff primly. “I’ll have you know it was spectacularly graceful, just as everything I do always is.”
She laughs again, and I dart forward to taste it, its effervescent magic sparkling between our tongues.
“I will tell you everything you missed, Willa,” I tell her in earnest when we part. “Every horrible thought, every terrible thing I did to get back to you…you only need ask.”
I mean it as a vow to her—a promise to never repeat the mistakes of our past that led to our separation. But Willa stiffens at its utterance, something dark flashing in her eyes that has nothing to do with that infernal shadow.
“I don’t think I want to know everything,” she mutters, pulling away suddenly.
For an absurd moment, I consider tying her up again. Anything to keep her from retreating—from slipping from my grasp like silk, fluttering into the wind until she’s no more than a distant memory.
Instead, I snake an arm around her waist and measure my words. “You were just lamenting the fact there are things you don’t know, and now you don’t wish to hear any of it?”
Willa chews at her bottom lip, her eyes skating past me to the bay of windows beyond. They only rest a moment, before bouncing to the next thing and then the next. Everywhere but me.
“Willa?”
Heat rushes to her cheeks, and I nearly lose my train of thought as I watch it wash down over her collarbones and breasts.
Star above, how did I survive so long without her delicious colors?
I’m considering where to begin tasting them when the words she’s been holding back pour from her in a jumbled mess.
“I just…I mean…This is the first time in months I feel somewhat in control of myself.”
I tear my gaze away from her tits rather unwillingly, attempting to ignore the heat licking up my spine to focus on what she’s saying.
“And I know there are…things…that I can’t handle hearing,” she continues breathlessly.
I stare at her. “What things? Have you developed an aversion to blood and violence in my time away?”
Willa huffs a sharp breath through her nostrils. “You’ve been gone for almost a year, Niko!” she snaps, her sudden rage as enticing as it is bewildering. “In a world you could touch anyone you wanted.”
If she didn’t appear so miserable, I’d laugh at the ridiculousness of her implication.
“I can touch anyone I want now, Darling,” I drawl with a wicked tilt of my head. “They just may not appreciate the consequences.”
Her returning glower is heated. “You know what I mean. On the mainland, you could climb into anyone’s bed you pleased without the…the consequences.”
I watch her fury blossom at my confusion, biting back a smirk. “And?”
“And,” she seethes, her skin growing hot beneath my fingers. “I’m sure you haven’t been starved for companionship. And I know all of this is my fault, but I can’t handle hearing about it if I want to keep the shadow under control.”
My eyes widen, before narrowing to dangerous slits upon the realization that Willa is entirely serious; that somehow, she still thinks ridiculous things like worlds and time and magic matter to me in the fucking least.
I sit up, arranging her in my lap so that we’re eye to eye. Pinching her chin between my forefinger and thumb, I drag her gaze back to mine.
“I don’t know what it is you don’t understand,” I say in a low voice. “But allow me to clarify any remaining confusion. There is no one but you for me. Ever.”
She squirms beneath my grip, and abruptly, I see her unease for what it is: a means to punish herself further.
Star knows, I’ve done the same thing for two centuries—drowned in the pain because I thought I deserved it.
She’d been the one to show me that past mistakes didn’t have to define the rest of my life.
“Niko, that’s ridiculous—” she snarls, shaking her head as much as she can with her chin still trapped between my fingers. “I’d never hold it against you. I get—I mean, I understand…before me, you’d spent so long without touching anyone, I don’t blame you for needing to—”
“Star above, Willa, if I find out you’ve touched anyone but me in the past year, I’ll decay their skin until it slides from their bones, and I expect the same fervor in return.”
Her lashes flutter, those brilliant eyes shining with something like fear as she searches my face. Fear of pain; fear of disappointment; fear of splaying her heart open and being left alone anyway. “What are you saying?”
“I am saying,” I say in the same tone I’d use to coax an injured animal, “that I could have been on the mainland for the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t have taken anyone into my bed.”
I expect her to be assuaged, so I’m unprepared for the way her expression shatters; for the way her body curls like my words have struck her in the stomach. Her lower lip trembles, and for a terrible moment, I think she might cry.
“I’m sorry…” I say faintly, irritation and confusion licking up my spine. “Did you want me to fuck someone else?”
Her lush lips press into a thin line as she gathers herself.
She shakes her head, then seems to think better of it, and shrugs listlessly.
“I thought about traveling through the wards and begging you to come back so many times, Niko,” she admits.
“Every hour of the day. But I knew you’d rather be dead than return to your pain. ”
Willa’s words dig between my ribs and my death rises from where it was nestled to flare in the air around me.
“I told myself I had to respect that. That you were happy on the mainland…you were no longer in agony and could find someone new to lo—” The word sticks in her throat, and she swallows roughly like the action will dislodge it.
“To touch. And instead, you stayed true to me even after I banished you. After I hurt you. You were faithful to me without knowing there’d ever be a way back. How could you do that?”
Her words are angry again, but the rage is not for me.
“How could you suffer like that…for me?”
“Darling, you know me,” I tell her with patient pity, splaying my hands along her lower back, pressing my fingers into her skin.
“You know it was not some misplaced sense of martyrdom that kept me from another’s bed, nor some eternal penance in service to you.
Death is not some fickle entity that flits from one amusement to another, and neither is my heart. ”
Willa searches my face, hope sparking beneath her fear.
“I do not want anyone else. I will never want anyone else.”
“But—”