Chapter 66
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
MASON
I didn’t sleep the entire night. I’d promised Dakota I wouldn’t, because I knew she wouldn’t be able to rest unless I reassured her everything would be fine with Micah.
So, I sat in a chair, watching Micah sleep for hours, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest like his continued breathing was the only thing keeping me alive, too.
He wasn’t wrapped around Dakota the way he usually was.
She slept restlessly but never woke up fully.
When morning came, pale blue light bleeding over both of them, Micah was the first to wake.
His disorientation was obvious from the moment he opened his eyes, but I didn’t go to him.
I had a sense my presence would only make him feel worse, so I remained sitting, my hands flexing on the arms of the chair.
Micah pushed up from the bed, the covers falling off of him, twisting lines of onyx stretching the length of his naked body. He looked at me, then Dakota, then himself in the mirror over the dresser. When I focused, I could hear his heart. Beating, pumping blood and ichor, keeping him alive.
But it was hard to hear anything over the rush of my own blood in my ears.
I hadn’t learned how to stop missing him overnight, wasn’t able to turn off my grief in a blink. My guilt didn’t disappear with the sound of his heartbeat. I’d already buried him in the graveyard of my heart.
But he was alive.
Kill.
Somehow, Dakota had brought him back to the tree where he fell, rescuing him from whatever void he’d disappeared into when his body burned.
For months, I’d prayed for death, wishing I could’ve traded my life for his, barely surviving, drowning under the weight of his absence, and now he was standing not ten feet from me.
His hands shook slightly as he took a pair of boxers from his drawer and stepped into them, then left the room without saying anything to me.
I stood up and followed him.
The past nine months had hurt so much more than the twenty two years before them.
Those two types of pain were almost incomparable, like a gunshot to the heart versus crashing his car at two hundred miles per hour and breaking every bone in my body.
My soul ripping in half versus shattering completely.
I thought I’d known how it felt to lose Micah Killshaw, but I’d been wrong.
He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water, then drank all of it.
My eyes traced the scars carved into his back, slanting from his shoulders towards his spine. I wanted to touch him just to prove he was real. But I couldn’t make myself move.
“She said it was nine months,” Micah started, still facing away from me. His voice was hoarse.
“It was,” I confirmed.
“You didn’t go to her graduation, did you?
” He turned his head just enough for me to see his side profile.
The straight bridge of his nose, the cruel perfection of his mouth.
The black veins snaked up his throat and ran along his jaw.
Every time I saw them, I remembered how his body had looked engulfed in flames.
“I didn’t.” Those words were quieter. I wasn’t proud of it.
“And is she still working?”
“At the gas station. Mostly everything is the same as before, except she’s now a full Sigeian. She went to Heaven, then fell the day after.”
Micah didn’t say anything to that. He got more water, then opened his fridge, finding it almost entirely empty.
The pantry was the same. He crossed the room and sat at the table, resting his head on his hands, his ribs expanding and contracting with each slow breath.
I joined him at the table, sitting in the farthest chair possible. He kept his head down.
“She knows,” I said, my voice low. “Just so you’re aware.”
“Knows what?” He lifted his gaze and stared at my face, his eyes as intense and sharp as ever, despite the exhaustion smudged dark beneath them. Glacier blue, frozen over, holding endless barren tundras.
“That we were together. Knows how long, too.”
Micah was quiet for a minute. “I suppose she also knows I was the one to leave you.”
“She would’ve known that even if I hadn’t told her.
” I thought of our conversation on the beach, when I’d finally confessed to her my fear of being left, back when she was a human.
Even without that, she would’ve been able to figure it out by my actions.
Sometimes it felt like I had it stamped across my forehead, everything I did colored by this central wound. Abandonment issues.
I deserved it, though.
“What details did you tell her about the end?”
“Not many.” I glanced away, focusing on the trees outside the window to avoid looking in his eyes again. “But you know.”
“No. I don’t know. I’m going to need you to spell it out for me.”
“I told her that I—that I almost…whatever.” I dared to look at him, the tightness in my throat like shards of glass. “What I almost did to you.”
Almost.
That word held so much weight. But how much of a difference did it really make? And was it even true? Maybe I’d actually forced myself on him before he could get away from me. I’d been wrestling with that possibility every second of his absence.
“Why the fuck would you tell her that?” Micah questioned, his voice harsh enough to make me flinch. “I don’t want her to know that.”
“You were dead, Micah.” I swallowed against the regret and guilt threatening to suffocate me. I should’ve known, but all I ever did was fuck up. I’d spent nine months begging the universe for one more chance to apologize to him, and I felt as if I’d already ruined it.
“So you thought you’d taint her view of me?” His eyes slashed to mine, the slightest shine gathering around his eyelids.
His words gutted me.
He hated himself more for what happened than he hated me.
“Taint her view of you? No. What are you talking—”
“Don’t fucking give me that. Just don’t. It was hard enough for me to tell you that. And now—” he cut himself off, voice strangled in his throat. He hung his head, fingers gripping the edge of the table. “And now she knows it, too. Knows I’m…whatever.”
“No. I did it because I needed to be punished for it. I didn’t want that to die with you, for her to be with me without knowing what I was capable of doing—of how I’d hurt you.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“What part of you being fucking dead doesn’t make sense to you?
” I shouted. “I watched you die!” My voice cracked on the last word, panic and fear and grief swelling in my chest, crawling up my throat.
“I. Watched. You. Die. And I’m sorry I made the wrong choice after that.
I wasn’t fucking thinking. I didn’t know you would ever be back. ”
“Your punishment was living with that knowledge on your own,” he bit out. “You don’t get to tell her to assuage your guilt.”
“That’s not what I was doing!”
“That is exactly what you were doing, Mason. If you only wanted to protect her, you should’ve let her go. But you can’t bear to think about actually doing what’s best for her, what will keep her safe, so you tell her truths that aren’t yours to share.”
“I barely told her anything. I wanted her to leave me.”
“You knew she wouldn’t.”
“I fucked up! What do you want me to say? I’m sorry, Micah. I obviously would’ve kept it to myself if I thought you’d ever be back. But I just needed—”
“To be honest, I don’t give a shit about what you needed. That wasn’t your pain to share. Is that all you said?”
“I didn’t mention a word about Heaven. That doesn’t have anything to do with me, and I wasn’t telling her because of you. I told her because of me. I told her to leave. She might know anyway, but that’s not because I said a word about it. She’s perceptive enough to understand you.”
“You—” He cut himself off, both of us noticing in the same instant that Dakota was now awake. Micah’s lips pressed together and he exhaled sharply through his nose. We listened to her footsteps darting panicked down the hallway, racing down the stairs, stopping at the entrance to the kitchen.
Dakota instantly burst into tears when she saw Micah, and he pushed his chair back so she could climb onto his lap, tucked up into a little crying ball while he held her. He stroked his hand down the back of her head, gripping her low back with the other to keep her body pressed to his bare torso.
“I’m still here,” he murmured.
She was crying too hard to answer him, all her words lost to strangled gasps and choking sobs, her arms wrapped tight around his neck and her face shoved against his stained skin. His eyes slid shut and his throat bobbed when he swallowed, his exhales trembling slightly.
They belonged together.
And I felt like the person who’d accidentally wandered into someone else’s miracle.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d still need me at all anymore.
She had him back, and he was better for her than I was; his death had proved that—as if I hadn’t known it already. You’re a terrible person.
She’d been the one to bring him home. What had I ever done except lose him? What had I ever done except hurt her? What could I possibly give either of them that they couldn’t find better in each other? I used to think I understood Dakota better than he did. I didn’t think that anymore.
I thought I was fucking stupid.
Dakota sat back to look at Micah’s face, his thumbs wiping her tears.
She traced the tip of her pointer finger along one of the inked lines stretching across his chest, her gaze falling to his body.
“Does it hurt?” she breathed.
“Not too bad.”
“Are they going to go away?”
“I’d have to assume they will fade, but I don’t know for sure. This is new to me.”
“Do you know what happened? Why you are back?” Dakota sniffled. She hadn’t looked at me once since arriving downstairs. She was the center of my universe, but Micah was the center of hers. This truth had been a long time coming. I’d pushed it off as far as I could, but no more.
“I don’t know anything, baby girl.” His voice was low, his eyebrows pulled together as he stared at all her beautiful features.
Teary eyes, flushed cheeks, runny nose, sad mouth.
“I don’t have any memories. From the moment of my death until the second you hugged me in the forest, there’s nothing.
And I don’t know what caused me to come back to you. ”
“I’m scared this isn’t real,” she whispered.
“It’s real,” he reassured her.
Neither of them were paying attention to me or reaching into my mind, but the fact that both of them could made me uneasy. I couldn’t hide from either of them.
“Wait,” Dakota said before hopping off his lap and running upstairs. She returned a minute later with her phone, then climbed back onto Micah’s lap, straddling him. She held her phone up to take a picture.
“You need a picture of me like this?” he questioned.
“I just need a picture of you. I had none.” Her lower lip trembled as she looked down, clicking her silver locket open to show him the inside.
“You took that from my lecture slides? I’m sorry you had to go through such lengths to find a picture of me.”
“I have another picture to show you.” Dakota’s thumbs swiped across her phone screen, her lower lip trapped between her teeth.
She tapped on a photo, then turned her phone to show Micah.
I didn’t catch more than a glimpse, but I could tell what it was.
Her graduation day. Dakota, sitting on the steps crying, but holding her diploma.
He hugged her tightly.
“You know how fucking proud I am of you? You have no idea. You’re incredible. You did it without my help.”
Micah’s eyes slid across the table to glare at me. The pit in my stomach only grew heavier. I didn’t have an excuse for not going to her graduation other than I was really fucking angry after he died. Angry at Dakota. Angry at him. Angry at the world.
I knew it was a big deal. I just…
“You have a beautiful brain, Masters. So beautiful,” he said, holding her face.
But even with him like this, being so caring towards her, I could sense the unease in his expression, his body language. He hated what Dakota knew. He was bracing for the day that painful truth decided to rear its ugly head. He loved her, but he was fighting the urge to try and avoid her, to hide.
Dakota might’ve been too grateful to have him back to see it just yet, but I could see it plain as day.
Micah sacrificed his life for Dakota not only to save her, but also because he wanted to die. And that shit didn’t go away in the darkness.