Chapter 55 #2
Mason hoisted me into the air again, my stomach dropping with the rapid change in altitude.
When he caught me this time, it wasn’t safety.
It was possession, claws closing over something he refused to let go of.
My nerves were frayed and my heart hurt with how hard it was beating. I tested him; he tested me.
“You wanna scare me, baby?” he said. “I’ll scare you right back.”
I twisted my arms around his neck tighter, still trembling with adrenaline. “Don’t do that,” I said shakily.
“Don’t kill yourself in front of me.”
“I knew you wouldn’t let me die.”
“I could’ve.” His voice was dark, menacing.
“But you wouldn’t have.” It sounded like I was trying to convince myself my own words were true. If I’d been clinging to any small amount of hope that I would survive him, it’d entirely dissolved now. He didn’t have limits. He might do anything to me.
He rolled over onto his back, letting me lay on his damp chest as he tipped his head back towards the clouds. Rain spattered down on his face, dripping over his full lips and straight nose, darkening his eyelashes. His wings held us strong in the air, keeping us in a flat vein of air.
“No,” he said, arms looping more tightly around my waist. Firm, unyielding. “I wouldn’t have. Everything of yours belongs to me, and that includes your death. You don’t get to take that from me. The only way you’ll ever die is if I kill you myself.”
He flipped us back, holding me underneath him with my back to my chest. I could just barely see our reflection in the ocean below, the darkness of his wings stretched to either side of us in slashes of black on the broken surface.
I extended my arm, letting my fingertips skim over the surface, watching the disturbance of the water trailing behind me.
He pushed us faster and closer until the ocean was just a blur below us, so close that the tallest waves almost lapped at my legs and chest. Rain ran down my face in rivulets, dripping off my chin and nose.
If I shut my eyes, I could convince myself that his wings were mine. I was soaring miles away from land, surrounding myself with thunderstorms.
Mason pivoted, bringing us upward, higher and higher, until we were breaching the clouds, our chests pressed together again. Our hearts beating together.
Everything was colder in the clouds and I felt tingling all over my skin, prickling shards of electricity tickling my flesh. My eyes widened as my hair started to float around my head. Electricity buzzed and hummed in the air, lifting the hairs on my arms, tightening the muscles of my core.
“Am I about to get struck by lightning?” I asked shakily.
“No,” he reassured me. “You are the lightning. We are.”
I stared at him, noticing white flickers dancing around us through the clouds. The lightning sharpened his features. His dark hair and dark eyes, his brows drawn together.
“Just don’t let go of me and you’ll be fine.”
“What does that mean?” I blinked the rain out of my eyes.
“Your body can’t handle the amount of electricity coursing through it. Mine can. The longer we stay, the stronger it will get. And once we leave the cloud, we can’t keep the electricity,” he explained, his powerful wings beating like a storm, keeping us here.
“It will strike,” I inferred.
“Yes.”
“How long can we stay here?”
“As long as you want.”
I turned my face down, pressing my forehead to his sternum. I still couldn’t quite breathe right, a numb ache crawling through me, drowning out everything else. Even in his arms, there was a wall I couldn’t climb.
“What if I want to stay here forever?”
“Don’t be difficult.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” My head whipped up and I glared at him, my lower lip wobbling. I just almost killed myself for you.
Why would I do that? What the fuck am I doing?
“Did you get what you wanted from this, Dakota? Are you happy with what you’re seeing?”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, fuck me? You love saying that, don’t you?” Electricity was skating along the edges of his wings now, white light glistening on the wet black feathers, his eyes glinting with cruelty. His muscles rippled with each movement, strong and immovable.
I should’ve felt closer to him. Instead, I felt far away and small, smaller than ever. I’d given him everything, my entire life dropped into his palm, and all I’d been given in return was proof of how much bigger his darkness was than mine.
I’d wanted closeness, and what he’d given me was proof of power. Those two weren’t the same thing.
And it still didn’t make a fucking difference. I still needed him.
“You say that I can’t hide from you because I’m like you.
” I jammed my index finger into his chest, right over his heart.
I was so hungry for closeness I felt insane.
Desperate, choking, angry, brokenly obsessed.
Throwing myself at his walls again and again, never breaking through.
“But that means you’re like me too. So you don’t get to hide, either. ”
He didn’t answer.
My stomach dropped when he banded his arms tighter around my back, then let us fall again.
“Fuck!” I shouted, hating the feeling of the drop, my teeth clenched.
We plummeted headfirst out of the clouds, his wings tucked close around us. I held my breath, nails digging into his warm skin. I wish I was standing on solid ground again. I don’t want to do this anymore. I tried to be the person who could handle him, but I wasn’t capable of it.
The brightest lightning I’d ever seen in my entire life exploded off his wings and back and a scream punched out of my chest. Six white bolts anchored in the ocean, flaring and crackling in the air.
His arms were solid around me, feeling my waist, my hip, fingers sliding up the back of my skull, hands all over me like he needed me.
I stared up at his face, so focused and determined. His jaw was tense, his neck straining.
“Does that hurt?”
“Yes,” he panted.
“You didn’t have to—”
“It hurts trying to control it. If I let myself fracture, just let go, I’ll kill you in an instant. I’m working really hard not to let that happen.”
“How do you control it?”
He just shook his head, lips pressed tight together. He wasn’t going to tell me.
The lightning flickered away and we were soaring over the ocean again, rain whipping against my face, my hair slick on my cheeks, my body trembling. Mason wasn’t a storm-veiled danger.
He was the whole fucking storm.
I’d thought the wings would mean something, that if I forced him to show me, it would make him mine, but it was just another twist on our lethal gravity.
I jumped, he caught me, and nothing opened up between us except me.
Nothing changed. The wind ripping, the storm breaking, his arms around me, and nothing was different.
I still needed him, and he still refused to give me the pieces I yearned for.
I kept my eyes squeezed shut, biting my tongue, hands clenched into fists, pretending I was anywhere else in the world, until I felt us slow over the beach.
Mason set me down on my feet on the dark sand as his wings tucked tight to his body. He rolled out his shoulders. Both of our clothes were entirely soaked through and the nostalgia of that, the memories of standing on this exact beach with him, dripping wet and cold…
I spun on my heel, stalking away from him to hide the tears stinging my eyes.
If I knew now what I knew then…
This was supposed to be our turning point, the moment when I finally reached him, when I finally was allowed to crawl inside his ribcage and curl around his heart, see the inside of his skull.
But all I’d done was prove to myself again just how far I would go for him, prove to myself that I’d never really know him the way I wanted to.
My desperate, self-destructive plan had been painfully naive.
Mason grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face him, just as I knew he would, and I didn’t resist him.
“Dakota. Don’t leave. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter as long as I’m far, far away from you.”
“You saw my wings. You saw my electricity. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
I blinked back my tears. “You know it’s not. That was the most superficial show of power you could’ve given me. And I know it’s not the same—I know that, but I understand what it’s like to be born broken, too.” I just jumped off a fucking cliff to make you open up to me. What sane person does that?
“Drop it,” he ordered and I didn’t care enough to fight him anymore. If he wanted to keep me out, whatever. I don’t care. Everything is going to keep spiraling out of control no matter what I do. And yet, I still want you.
He walked me over to the large rock I liked sitting on and laid me down on my back, situating himself on top of me, his wings held over us to block the rain.
“Do you really want to know what my first real memory is?” Mason said, harsh and kinda quiet.
I swallowed my fear, staring up at him in the dark shell he’d constructed around us, not saying anything that might scare him out of telling me this.
“It was finding out I’m fucking Thrausian as a child.
You don’t—you don’t understand what angels in Heaven think of Thruasians.
It’s not good. I don’t even blame them, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept. ”
“Why would they hate you for something you have no control over?” I whispered.
Mason’s jaw flexed and he hung his head for a second. “Dakota, you hate me sometimes. They’re not all terrible people. I’m hard to deal with.”
“But you can’t explain it more to me?”
“No,” he breathed, shaking his head.
I wish I could help you. I wish you would let me.
I was grateful he’d told me at all, but his walls were still up, and they were all too tall to climb. I was too tired to keep trying.
“What do we do when this isn’t enough anymore?” I asked. How much closer to death could I actually get without crossing the line? How would we continue to escalate this? What would happen when mimicking started to get boring? There were so many reasons Mason and I weren’t sustainable.
“You’ll always be enough for me.”
“You’ll get bored of me. Once you’ve done everything to me, there won’t be any reason for you to want me anymore.”
“If you think that’s true, you don’t know me at all.”
I shook my head, hating him for saying it, because I wanted to know him.
“Dakota,” Mason murmured, holding my face. “Please don’t hate me. I need you.”
“Why? Why do you need me?”
“Because—fuck. You do something to my brain. You’re in my head and I won’t survive if you leave it.”
“Something to do with being Thrausian? What does fracturing feel like? How do you stop it?”
“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you any of this, baby. Please don’t hate me for that. You are the only good thing in my life right now and I don’t want to ruin this with what I am.”
But I was so dissociated at this point that his words meant nothing to me.
I couldn’t hold another feeling without shattering.
Silent tears slid down my cheeks and I didn’t bother to wipe them.
I just stared at him, heart aching, thoughts numb.
Something deep inside me would always reach for him, no matter what I did, no matter what he did—or didn’t do. I hated that.
“I’m sorry,” he said, low and agonized, as he pressed his mouth to mine. I let him kiss me, my body responding to his touch against my will.
It was an endless cycle between painful desperation for him and terrified rejection of him. Back and forth, back and forth, until all that existed was this. Bleeding, crying, needing, hating, breaking, slipping away into a void.
If I knew now what I knew then, I still don’t think I could stop myself from doing it all over again.
Mason kissed me deeper. I wished I knew what he was hiding from me.
He was almost a hundred years old. What lives have you lived?
Who have you loved? What is it like inside your brain, and why won’t you show me?
Did somebody break you, too? I don’t know anything about you.
It’s been months and I don’t know a single thing.
My brain was fighting, struggling to come to terms with the very real thing I’d just done without an instant of hesitation. I could’ve died. How did Mason keep putting me in these situations, and how had I started to accept them as normal?
It was horrifying thinking about how far I’d come since the day I met him.
I hardly recognized myself anymore—or, I recognized myself more than ever before.
All my bad thoughts, all my depraved darkness, the worst parts of me, those were the things controlling my actions now.
Like an unstoppable train barreling down the tracks, brakes screeching but never slowing, metal grinding on metal, a broken bridge fast approaching, the promise of oblivion racing ever-closer.
All I could do was watch it happen, watch the end of the tracks getting nearer, stare into the void beyond.
My body arched up into Mason’s, the rain still falling around us, pattering on his wings, wetting the black feathers. He was so warm, so strong.
And I would’ve done anything he asked, just to know him.