Chapter 62
Mason
“Don’t be mad at her, Micah,” I snarled, staring at him down the upstairs hallway.
Shadows drifted through the house, bathing everything in darkness and quietness.
He was better at hiding his bad moods than I was, but he’d been a stormcloud the entire day.
I didn’t want to watch him like that, watch him holding a grudge against a girl who’d done nothing except get herself accidentally trapped in my orbit. Well…
“I am fucking mad at her—”
“Be mad at me, instead,” I cut him off, anger tightening my grip on the door frame to Micah’s guest bedroom—my room, for now. My palm pressed into the wooden trim, indentations carving into my skin.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m mad at you, too.” He pointed his finger at me. “Both of you.”
“How long is that going to last?”
“Until Aamon’s dead and I can get rid of you for good, then get her to myself,” he answered, solidifying all my fears.
Maybe parts of me had hoped he’d want to get rid of both of us, then Dakota and I could be together away from him, but he didn’t want that.
He’d keep her and kill me in the process.
“And what is that timeframe, Micah? What if I don’t?”
“I already told you what happens if you don’t.” I’ll push you over that edge so fucking fast…
“If you do that, you’re defenseless. Aamon will kill you without me in the way,” I reasoned, releasing my hold on the door frame and stepping into the hall, towards him. “What are you going to do without my protection?”
“You’re not the only Thrausian on Earth,” Micah said, the words jamming into my chest like ice, dripping down and sizzling against the fire in my stomach.
The muscles of my shoulders tightened, flexed, warmth searing the outlines of my scars.
“Don’t you think any other Thrausian would die to get a taste of my unbreakable control the same way you did?
They probably don’t even know it’s possible, what can happen when a Sigeian is willing to be an anchor for their instability. ”
He was stripping away pieces of my soul with all the shit he was saying.
“Do it, then. Get another one and let me fucking go.” With her.
“Why would I do that,” he took a step towards me, “when you’re so fun to fuck with?”
“Is that how miserable your life has become?” I questioned, also moving closer to him, the darkness magnifying in my periphery, becoming something insurmountable. He was the only real thing in this midnight void. “You have to resort to torturing someone you left to die? You’re that bored?”
Something about my tone flipped a switch in him. “Do not blame me for what happened with us.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Micah,” I said and gritted my teeth. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to react when you’ve convinced yourself I’m the root cause of every problem in your life—when you act like I forced you to make the decisions you made. I didn’t do any of that.”
“And you act like I’m some supervillain with no justification for my—”
“Why didn’t you let me talk to you?” I asked, interrupting him.
I didn’t need to clarify my question for Micah to know what I meant.
The end. When Micah had left me, he’d left me.
He’d cut himself out of my life in the blink of an eye, and hadn’t spoken to me again, not giving me a chance of getting any closure.
Everything I’d ever cared about, gone. Just like that.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.
We were standing too close now, too close for people that hated each other the way we did, and I wasn’t sure when that’d happened. Who’d moved.
Wind blew outside the house, creaking against windowpanes, whistling over the roof. I still remembered how cold the wind had felt on that day—the day Micah when made what he likely considered to be the biggest mistake of his life. Cold and violent and brutal, ripping over my bare skin.
“You don’t get to say it doesn’t matter, because I deserve to know.” I stared at his face, but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes drifted to the side, seeing something in his memories, some part of our tangled past.
“But it doesn’t matter. Not now.”
Irritation bristled through me, but I knew he was right, in a way. Having this conversation now wouldn’t change the past. It wouldn’t change how I felt about him now. Wouldn’t give me back the years of darkness I’d suffered after him.
If Micah didn’t want to tell me something, I couldn’t make him.
We didn’t work. We never would. We’d tried for a long time, and talking about it again wouldn’t make a lick of difference. Our end was inevitable. It wasn’t the same as me and Dakota—it couldn’t be. She and I were destructive, but it wasn’t so cut and dry.
“Fine. I’ll kill Aamon, but you’re not keeping Dakota from me,” I said, turning and stalking toward the bedroom.
“I’m going to make her choose.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, dread making my heart sink to my feet. Rage and fear and panic and desperation crashed over my mind in a tidal wave. “No. You won’t.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I will wreck your entire life before I let you take something I love away from me again,” I gritted out.
I was practically shaking, vibrating with my fury.
I love her. I loved him. He can’t do this to me again.
“Your threats are empty, but mine are not. I don’t have a life to go back to—there’s zero reason for me to care about any collateral that falls on me.
All I want is her. And I will destroy you if that’s what it takes. ”
I lunged forward, slamming my palm over his heart and channeling just about as much electricity as I trusted myself with straight into him. Instantly, he stumbled backward, the breath knocked from his lungs as he suffered through what was essentially a heart attack, clutching his chest.
I didn’t stop my advance, though.
Grabbing his throat, I slammed his head backward into the wall hard enough to put a hole in the plaster. It felt good to touch him so roughly.
“I love her,” I growled. “And you don’t get to do that to me twice.”
“You think I don’t? You think I don’t love her as much as you do?” He shoved me off him, sending me tumbling backwards into the opposite wall, a picture frame crashing to the ground, glass shattering. Something in the air was changing, shifting, as we spoke words aloud we’d never admitted before.
We both loved the same girl. Dakota Masters.
Heat seared up my abdomen, curling under every inch of my skin.
“That’s exactly what I—”
“You’re wrong,” he bit out, muscles rippling in his forearms as he clenched his fists. He was getting mad now, slipping into the kind of possessive insanity that was my signature. Losing his composure.
“I’m not. You aren’t capable of love. Only manipulation. Only protection. It’s not the same thing—but you’ve never been good at telling the difference.”
I’d been trying to tamp down my emotions, to keep them as shallow and surface-level in my brain as possible, because I didn’t want to give Micah that much potential power over me.
But when it came to Dakota, all I could do was drown in my obsession.
The depth of emotion she made me feel rivaled the Pacific.
And each additional inch the strands of need for her gained in my brain, the further Micah could go. But he was losing the battle, too.
Tension in the air thickened, tightened.
“You’re going to tell me I’m not capable of love?” he spat, leaning towards me. “Do you even know how difficult it is to try and love someone like you? How much damage you caused me?”
“And yet, you’re the one who got to walk away whole.”
He shook his head, tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek, tension in his sharp jaw.
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes.”
I rolled out my neck, stiffness aching through my muscles. I was wound too taut, like a rubber band stretching tighter and tighter, bound to snap. The potential of more physical contact with Micah’s body was scattering sparks through my body.
Something violent.
I fought against the memories threatening to surface in my brain. Sometimes Micah would get turned on by nothing other than my recklessness. He’d get addicted to watching me like that. I was so opposite of him, and he couldn’t stay away.
Don’t.
He would feel that way about any Thrausian.
“You’re delusional,” Micah started, eyes flicking back to mine. “You have such a misguided view of the things you think I desire. I’ll love Dakota better than you can.”
“No.” I shook my head vehemently. “All you want, Micah, is to own the wreckage. You’re addicted to the aftermath of someone destroying themselves and then coming to you to fix it. To fix them. But you can’t fix people; you can only take parts of them away. That’s not what people need.”
He dragged a hand through his hair, messing it up, bicep flexing.
My body felt hot, old lust burning through me.
What people need…What I’d needed from him…
Micah knew how to fuck.
If nothing else worked in our relationship, at least there was that. Even then, it’d been a power struggle ninety percent of the time, but I liked that shit. I liked it messy and rough and nasty and hateful.
He could withstand so much of me.
“But she’s not people. She’s not you,” he said, taking a step towards me, boxing me in against the wall. My shoulder blades pressed into the plaster, broken glass crunching under my heel, cutting me. “You may be broken beyond repair, but she’s not.”
Heat rushed to my dick and my gaze dropped down to Micah’s mouth before I dragged it back up to latch onto his own.
Blood dripped from my heel onto the wood, the edge of the carpet.
I could smell his sweat, his kapnos. He could probably smell mine too.
Ocean and forest, irrevocably intertwined, mixing in their darkness, brutal forces of nature.
Clearly we were both still affected by such close proximity, by the secrecy of nighttime.
Everything is easier in the dark. Blood and ichor pumped hot and heavy in my veins.
Fuck, I miss him.
I would never belong to him the way I used to, and he’d never be mine again. I didn’t want that. But that didn’t mean my body hadn’t been craving his during every second of absence. Micah was a physical need.
And I wasn’t the one who’d chosen to end things between us.
“You only want her because she’s broken, Micah,” I said, my cock getting hard in my shorts.
I had to force myself not to look down and see if he was hard, too.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do if he was. Rip all his goddamn clothes off so I could finally touch him how I wanted to.
It was so dark in the house, and he was standing so close, and I knew all the things he liked to do in bed.
He knew all the things I liked, too. Everything I’d want done to me, everything I’d want to do to him.
“You only know how to love something if it’s already bleeding. ”
His pupils were so wide, so dark, and he was staring at me. He was breathing hard now, chest rising and falling faster, abdomen flexing.
He knew what I wanted. He could feel it in all my thoughts.
It was getting harder and harder to deny.
Watching Dakota suck my dick, fighting me, grabbing me, spitting in my mouth.
I was about to do something rash. I needed to leave.
But I didn’t.
I wasn’t going to.
Micah dropped his tone, “Say whatever you want about me—but you know what you do, Mason?” He leaned closer, heat pouring off him in waves, his kapnos smothering me, fogging up my thoughts. Shadows fell across his face, making his eyes even darker.
“What? What do I do?” My voice got lower, my whole body sparking like a live wire.
Micah inclined his head slightly, so close now that we were practically inhaling each other’s exhales.
My eyelids were heavy and I couldn’t stop looking at his fucking mouth.
My hands ached to grab him, feel the strength of his body again, the weight of his cock in my hand, on my tongue.
The tight squeeze of his fist around my length.
Or the tight squeeze of his throat. Of his ass.
I tipped my head back, skull pressed to the wall.
“What do I do, Kill?” I whispered, hardly breathing. A groan rumbled in his chest at the name. “Tell me.”
Electricity hummed in the air, crackling.
“You, Ash,” he started, his voice so rough, his eyelids lowered, his gaze fixated on my lips. Heat knotted low in my gut. Time suspended, hanging off his tongue, caught on his exhales. I rolled my head to the side, looking at Micah, my cock aching with need.
A+K. Ash and Kill.
“Tell me,” I breathed, coaxing him again, wanting to see him be the one to break.
“You love everything to fucking death.”
He grabbed the back of my neck and crushed his mouth to mine.
To be continued in Book 2…