CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I could bury it. I could shove it all down so far he couldn’t see the rage. I could be the perfectly honed tool he demanded. I would.
I hurtled through Beck’s door at a run, my vision so blurred that his image swam as he jolted upright in the bed.
He was across the room in an instant, his hands clamping over my waist. “What happened?” he demanded. “Did he hurt you?”
I flung my arms around his neck and crushed my body against his. His heart stampeded against my chest. My lips found his and I dragged my fingers through the soft strands of his hair, absolutely desperate to lose every single shard of myself in the oh-so-familiar pieces of him.
“Fuck me, Beck,” I gasped against his mouth. “Fuck me and make everything go away.”
He jerked back and put inches between us that felt like an ocean. A deep, dark ocean that drowned me in its unforgiving depths. “No. Lydia—no.” He pushed me to arm’s length, his chest heaving. “You can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this.”
I sank to my knees. “Please, Beck. I don’t want to talk. I just want to forget. Just for a little bit.”
He knelt in front of me and piled our hands in his lap, his thumbs tracing circles across the backs of mine. “Hey. Sparks.”
He hadn’t used that nickname in years. I suddenly hated it.
“You can’t keep running from everything. Or—or using my dick to obliterate it.” He tilted my chin up with a finger. I focused on his nose, unable to meet his gaze. “Talk with me, please.”
“I didn’t come here for your words, Beck,” I spat, rejection sinking her talons deep in my gut. “And if you won’t give me your body, then you have nothing to offer me right now!”
He rocked back on his heels and sat hard against the cold stone, his eyes searching mine.
He finally shook his head. “No. Not tonight, Lydia. Not when I need you to tell me what the hell is going on here. I don’t understand a single thing that has happened.
” He shook his head again. “Not when you’ve got me in the dark and won’t let me in. ”
“Please come in,” I begged, desperation clawing at my belly. He was a salve and I was burning. Burning in flames that even I couldn’t control. “I’m literally on my knees begging you to come in.”
He sighed and slid a palm down his face. “You know damned well that isn’t what I meant.”
“So, your answer is no? You’re abandoning me when I need you as badly as I ever have?”
“I’m not abandoning you, Lyd. Ever. But I need you to need me for more than just my body. For once in our lives, need me for my words. Or my presence or comfort, or literally anything but mindless sex.” His hands rose to cup my cheeks. “Need me for anything else and it’s yours.”
“I don’t need anything else,” I hissed. I gripped his wrists and dragged his hands off my face.
His expression shattered. But he was asking for something I couldn’t give. Not now.
Maybe not ever.
I lurched to my feet and stumbled to my room, the sharp crack of the slamming door bouncing around between the thousand raging thoughts in my skull. I paced at the foot of the bed but there was no escape—no hiding from the horrible truths that battered at my crumbling walls.
I darted back into the hall and barreled toward the guards. They parted and let me pass. The first staircase I found spiraled up and up and up until it disappeared into darkness. I flung myself up the stairs, my racing heart and lungs and mind colliding in a way that was going to rip me apart.
A door finally came into view and I burst through it, the frigid evening air blasting into my face. I gulped it down as the world tilted. I stumbled and gripped the railing, my already ragged breaths morphing into shards that raked down my throat. I was so high.
I forced my eyes wide and stared straight down over the edge, shoving every ounce of terror into every corner of my mind. Over every feeling. Every errant thought that threatened to send me to my knees.
“Lydia.” His breathless voice cleaved through the noise and I jumped back from the railing.
He stood framed in the doorway, his chest heaving from running up the stairs.
He stepped closer to me, his presence flooding the balcony and stealing my breath.
“I know you don’t enjoy killing,” he rushed out.
“I just wanted you to hear yourself say it out loud.” Chaos thrashed in his eyes. “What do you need?”
“Escape,” I gasped. I tapped the side of my skull. “From here.”
He looked over the edge of the railing. “And you came up here because…?” His brow cocked as he turned back to me.
“Not to fucking jump,” I snapped. “I’m afraid…” I gulped, “of heights. I thought fear might…my normal avenue of escape fucking said no and…I just…” I slammed my eyes shut. I couldn’t get her damned face out of my head. Her warm blood sluicing over my boots.
“Do you want to fly?”
My eyes snapped open. “What?”
“Fly,” he said slowly. “You have wings now. If you’re afraid of heights, there’s an easy way to get really, really high.” He pointed to the sky.
My gaze darted upward. A whole new fear thrummed in my chest. “I’m still terrified of what I am,” I whispered.
“If fear is the point…” He shrugged.
“What if I fall? What if I shift in the middle of the godscursed sky and fall?”
The wildness in his gaze stilled, his dark eyes boring into mine. “I’d catch you.”
My breath hitched and I looked toward the thin layer of low-hanging clouds, blotting out all but Etain’s moon sitting low on the horizon.
“Carry me instead,” I blurted as I turned back to him.
His brows darted into his waves, the sharp lines of his jaw softening as he looked at me.
“I wouldn’t be able to shift back,” I prattled on. “My mind…” I shook my head. “It’s a mess. And I don’t want to hurt you again.” Through the howling in my skull, I realized it was true. I didn’t want to hurt him anymore. My eyes popped wide at the thought. “Oh gods, your back. Neverm—”
Griffon shifted, his wings taking up most of the balcony. He gripped my waist and pulled me against his chest. “I won’t let go,” he promised. One arm slid across my back and the other hooked under my knees before he launched us off the edge of the turret.
We plummeted toward the ground, my scream lost in the buffeting wind that stole every wild thought and ripped away my tears before coaxing new ones from the corners of my eyes.
I gripped his neck as the ground consumed my field of view.
My muscles clamped in anticipation of my body breaking against it.
Griffon’s chest and shoulders shifted beneath me and we surged upward, the ground falling away as quickly as it had risen up to crush us.
The turret zipped past, and we cleared the roof to an endless sky and the valley falling away far below.
A laugh bubbled up my throat. Griffon’s arms flexed in response, tucking me even tighter against his chest.
He carried us higher and higher, until the air grew thin and I couldn’t pull enough of it into my lungs. But the view. Gods, the view was worth every shallow breath and thrum of fear that rattled through my chest.
“Can you go higher?” he asked, his breath tickling my ear.
I clutched him harder but nodded. My stomach sank to my ass as he angled sharply upward and darted into the clouds.
Moisture slicked my face and I licked my lips, the taste clean and a little bit wild.
We broke from the clouds and I gasped, Griffon’s wingbeats the only sound as he hovered just above them.
Three of the moons bore down on us, an array of dazzling stars just visible through their blinding light.
The top of the clouds stretched out in an endless plain of pure white disturbed only by the top half of the monolithic mountains.
They speared the darkness, the only other interlopers on the celestial gathering spread out before us.
I almost expected to see the phoenixes darting amongst a cosmos as pure and vast as they were.
And then we were falling, back through the damp clouds and toward the ground far below. I squeezed my eyes shut and let my head fall into the crook of Griffon’s neck, a sense of weightlessness setting every brutal thought and caged emotion free.
My eyes popped open at the sound of rustling leaves.
I barely had time to register how close we were to the trees before Griffon tucked his wings and plunged through a break in the canopy.
His wings unfurled again, their heavy beats thrumming against my ears, before his feet struck the ground hard.
After a few running steps and an abrupt halt, he gently set me down.
His fingers lingered on the small of my back.
I twirled in his arms and fisted my hands in his shirt as I peered up into his face, my breaths quick and shallow for an entirely different reason now.
His eyes were wild and alive, the starbursts around his slightly oval pupils consumed by those midnight centers.
He snicked them shut and a shudder wracked his gorgeous features, traveling over his chest and down the arms that were still wrapped around me.
He shifted and looked down at me in a way that ignited me.
“Why couldn’t you have just been a fucking prick, like I expected?
” My voice cracked on the emotions that battered my ribs and wrapped a stranglehold around my throat.
“I’m so confused. I’m supposed to hate you, not—” My hands clenched tighter.
“It was so much easier when you were just the bastard who stole my family.”
He crumpled, his body sinking down mine until his knees struck the ground at my feet.
His forehead fell against my navel. “I didn’t kill your family.
” He looked up at me, his eyes drenched in so much pain my breath hitched.
“How can you still believe that?” His hands clenched where they still rested on my hips.
I fell to the ground in front of him, my knees landing between his.
“Because I saw you, Griffon.” The words ripped my heart out, but they were true.
They just were. For the first time in fifteen long years, I desperately didn’t want them to be.
My fingers shook as I raised my hand and brushed them against his cheek.
He leaned into my touch. “I saw you.” A sob crawled up my throat and one choked, broken whimper forced its way out before I could stop it.
I sucked in a tight breath and held it, trying to keep the emotions locked in my chest.
Griffon’s hand folded over mine and brought it back to his chest. His heart.
It thrashed against his ribs. “But what did you see? Cut through the bullshit, Lydia, and the lies you’ve been told for half your life.
Everything you need to know about what really happened that day is here.
” He tapped my forehead with his free hand. “Think.”
“No. I know what I saw,” I gasped. “And the Pact. You said—”
He raked a hand through his hair and loosed a half-wild growl, then grasped my hips and dragged me closer to him.
“I carved four lines through that asshole at Dray’s when I was in Stone.
There was only one on your family, and I wasn’t holding a knife!
Fuck, Lydia, what did I look like?” he demanded. “What did I say? Think!”
“No. No, no, no, no, no.” I slapped my hands over my temples to keep it at bay but that cursed memory, pinned just beyond my consciousness for so long, unfurled in my mind and devoured me.
I sprinted through the streets, the sounds of death funneling between the houses and slamming into me with enough force to jumble my heart and tangle my feet.
But I was almost there. I could see it; my house, standing proudly on the corner.
The two streets that ran past it were empty, save the cries that shattered the frigid night.
I burst through the door and drew up short.
A gargoyle righted himself from where he knelt beside my sister, his boots squelching in a deep puddle of blood as he rose.
My feet were rooted as I stared at Lynnix, her throat gaping with one, clinically precise slash.
A bright red drop splattered across her pale cheek and I jerked back.
I tore my gaze to the gargoyle—to his hand that was smeared with enough of her blood that it dripped off the tips of his talons.
He held his hands open at his sides and my eyes darted up to his face.
I couldn’t breathe, my chest seized by the kind of horror that was too big to contain.
The kind that just exploded and left you in pieces in its wake.
The gargoyle’s eyes were wide and lips slack as his head bobbed between me and the bodies at his feet—bodies that meant nothing to him but were the sum total of my life.
His frantic gaze settled on me. “I was too fucking late.”
I barely heard the words through the roaring in my mind. His head shook as he backed away from me, toward the door that still hung open at his back. He turned and fled. I blinked with every heavy beat of his wings, my eyes settling on a different piece of my shredded heart each time they opened.
My knees struck the ground.
And I combusted.
My eyes snapped open to Griffon staring at me, the look on his face not so different from what it had been then. I panted as I stared back.
A single tear streaked down his cheek. “When that arrow struck your leader, Davina sent me to find you. I didn’t know why—didn’t know that you were one of us—but she did.
They were already dead when I got there.
” His voice broke and his chin fell to his chest. “Except your sister. She had a few breaths left. I tried…I tried to stop the bleeding, but…” His gaze fell to his open palms, then darted back to me.
I was rooted, his voice the only thing that kept me anchored to this world—to any semblance of sanity.
“I was maybe thirty seconds too late,” he choked out. “I went to the wrong house first. Everything you’ve suffered is because I was too fucking late.”
“Griffon.” That horror pulsed in my chest, an errant thought away from detonation, but my voice was steady as a sheet of iron. “Who killed my family?”
He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. Archon Davina—”
“Take me back,” I demanded. “Now.”