Chapter 67
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
DAKOTA
Micah brushed my hair to the side, laying it over my shoulder so my back was exposed, shower water trickling over my skin. His fingertips skimmed reverently along the scars.
He was the one to give these scars to me. He was the one to give me my wings.
Micah was inscribed on every smoky feather, twisted into my muscles, threaded through my scars.
It brought me comfort, knowing he’d made me like this.
I would always carry a piece of him. I wouldn’t know who’d set me on this course as an infant, but Micah was the one to bring me back to life, to transform me now.
I turned around to stare at his face, seeking out his emotions in his eyes.
I could maybe reach into his brain, but he’d know the instant I did it, and he would shut down. So, I wouldn’t use my aspect. I would stare into his gray irises, trying to decipher his secrets there, allowing myself to be lost in every complexity.
He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight against his chest so I couldn’t look at him anymore.
We hadn’t talked much today. I’d been so hopeful that bringing him back would solve our problems, but every tense hour was proving otherwise.
I’d gone through nine months of grief, nine months of adjusting to my new life as an angel, but Micah was still on the side of that road, kneeling over my bleeding body.
He couldn’t meet me where I stood now. He didn’t know this version of me. He hadn’t been there to watch me change.
We were trying to hold each other across nine months neither of us could cross.
I’d imagined our impossible reunion so many times that I’d forgotten one simple truth: Micah coming back to life wasn’t the same thing as him coming back to me.
In our last moments, I’d screamed at him, argued with him, then walked angrily away from him.
When he looked at me now, that was what he saw.
And as much as I didn’t want to, I saw Mason when I looked at him.
I saw cruelty and trauma. Control and distance.
I’d wanted him alive so badly that I’d never stopped to wonder what being alive again might cost him. This wasn’t easy for Micah. He’d stepped back into a world where his shield had already been stripped.
I kissed his wet skin. His chest, his collarbone, the base of his throat.
Micah held the back of my hair, tilting my head back so our faces were close.
“You’re Sigeian,” he said, his deep voice almost lost to the sound of the shower.
“Yes.”
“You learned how to be an angel without me.”
“I always wished you could help me, but I had no choice. I was really scared,” I whispered, my ribs hitching on an inhale.
“I could help you now.” His thumbs stroked along my cheeks, the soft light from the ceiling bulb glistening on his skin. “What senses can you take?”
“Only voice and taste.” I scrunched up my face. “Taste feels pointless.”
“Well, you know sometimes the air has a taste in Heaven.” He tilted his head.
“Oh. I didn’t think about it.”
“They’re both useful,” he commented, eyes flicking all over my face.
“I wish I was like you.”
“I like you how you are.” The corners of his mouth pulled with a frown. More strength comes with more expectations, more responsibility, more weight. “I don’t want you to be like me. The more power I use, the less moral I become.”
“Can you still do it? Use your aspect?”
“I haven’t tried.”
After a moment, I felt the familiar brush of his consciousness exploring my mind, the same shadow-whisper sweeping over my painful emotions. Looking in his eyes, I tried to penetrate his own brain. His grip tightened on my jaw and he shook his head.
“Don’t.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “I won’t.”
But like when I’d felt for Mason’s emotions the very first time, it didn’t take me long to understand the landscape of Micah’s brain. Only a second in his mind, and I could feel the shadowy shape of his emotions. It made my heart hurt so much I wanted to cry.
“Don’t do that again,” he said. “Not unless I tell you it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”
Don’t touch me.
I know more than you think I do.
I understand how you’re feeling. More than you expect.
Bad things happen in Heaven, too.
I understood all of it. Understood why he wanted control, why letting me navigate any part of his labyrinth terrified him into hurting me, why he’d refused to touch these topics with me. And I loved him more than words.
We weren’t the same—not in the way Mason and I were the same—but a similar thread was stitched through both of our souls. He carried a wound like mine. Different origins, different coping mechanisms, but the same shade of vulnerability tinted by shame.
Micah turned off the shower, then wrapped me in a towel before grabbing his own.
We got dressed in pajamas then got into his bed.
He picked up the remote and turned the TV on, then waited for my input.
I didn’t really want to watch anything other than him, though.
Micah put the remote down and rolled on his side to look at me, my head laying on the pillow.
His hand slid under my shirt to rest on my waist, his thumb stroking back and forth against my skin.
“Are you in pain now?” I whispered.
“It’s not unmanageable.” His voice was soothing. “My veins burn a bit, and my muscles ache, but I’m mostly just tired. I feel better than I did last night.”
Micah leaned down and brushed his lips against mine, pulling me closer by the hand on my waist. I softened for him, my eyelids fluttering shut, my lips parting, my heartbeat speeding up.
He slipped a hand down my hip, pushing it under the elastic waistband on my sleep shorts, stretching them down a bit as his tongue swept along the seam of my mouth. I lifted my hips so he could push my shorts all the way off my legs, parting my lips for his tongue.
Micah held my wrist and brought my hand to his clothed erection, pressing my palm into his length. He was breathing harder.
He sat up and pushed his boxers off, pulling me onto his lap and lifting my shirt over my head.
There was a brief pause in his actions once I was naked on top of him.
I held his face in my hands, watching him through the darkness.
Anything he wanted now, I would give. No unnecessary questions, no strangeness. Only me and him, together in the dark.
“I love you,” I breathed, tipping our foreheads together, my thumbs stroking over the black veins staining his cheeks and jaw. They were slowly fading, but still visible even in the dark. “I love you so much.”
“Masters,” he whispered, fingers tightening on my hips as I aligned myself over him.
“Is this okay?”
He nodded quickly. “Yeah.”
Slowly, I sank down onto his length. Inch by inch, he filled me. Pushing inside of me, his body as close to mine as possible, touching the most vulnerable place in me, touching my tenderness and love for him.
He’d breathed life into my lungs. Now he could help my heart beat beside his again.
The door to the bedroom quietly opened behind me, spiking my pulse.
Micah’s body stiffened, his arms wrapping so tight around me I could hardly breathe. He wasn’t breathing either. I turned to glance over my shoulder, to look where he was looking. Mason stood in the doorway.
His gaze stitched to mine, so much devastation in his irises I had a lump in my throat.
Please, I mouthed.
He gave a short nod, then disappeared out of the room.
I turned back to Micah, holding his face in my palms. His eyes were shut, his eyebrows pulled together. I didn’t move my hips, didn’t move at all.
“Do you—”
“I can’t do this,” he said quickly, cutting me off. “I need to…”
“It’s okay,” I breathed, shaking my head, taking my hands off his face and moving off his lap so I wasn’t touching him at all. I held my wrists behind my back. “I’m yours.”
“Okay,” he mumbled after a brief moment of silence. “I’m just going to…”
He stumbled across the room, rummaging around for his black bundle of rope. I laid flat on my back and pressed my wrists together, offering my submission on his sheets.
His fingers fumbled with the rope, as if he’d forgotten how to construct the elegant knots he used to, or as if his brain wasn’t connecting with his hands as well as he wanted it to.
But he didn’t stop, and I didn’t mention it.
He untied the rope, loosened it, straightened it out again, then began retying me.
I held still, staring up at the beauty of his face.
Once my wrists were secured to his headboard, he tugged on the rope to ensure it wouldn’t slip, then sat back to inspect his work. I laid flat on the bed before him, my heart full to bursting with love, and my mind full to bursting with terror.
I still couldn’t trust that he was really here, and here for good.
Maybe he would be stolen from me in the next moment.
“I’ll tell you if I’m not okay. Understood?” His eyes held mine, a familiar sternness freezing over the blue. I nodded. “I want this. I know…you know something about me, but please don’t decide how I should deal with it. I don’t want you to pity me.”
“I don’t pity you,” I whispered quickly. “You can do anything you want to me. Or nothing to me.”
Knowing Micah’s past made me sad, but I would never pity him. Never sympathy, always empathy. I was right there with him.
He hadn’t chosen for me to learn about his past, hadn’t opened up to me about it, but Mason had.
Whether or not it was a bad decision was irrelevant because I could live with this.
I had the closeness I needed, and Micah never had to say the words.
I wondered if part of him was grateful for that.
Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe all of him just hated Mason.
He dragged his lips up my stomach and over my ribs, sweeping his mouth along the curves of my breasts, then up to the hollow of my throat.
My pulse was fast, fluttering hopelessly against the press of his mouth.
I was putty—less than putty. I was melting into the mattress, bending for him, opening for him, blooming for him.
I will be anything you need me to be.
One of his hands slid between my legs, fingers stroking lightly, as if he needed to remember how I felt.
“You’re so perfect,” he murmured against my mouth, sliding one finger inside of me, the tension easing from his body as he did it. “Here, and everywhere else. So soft.”
He knelt between my thighs, replacing his finger with his cock.
“Fuck,” he groaned as he pushed deeper.
The scent of his kapnos wrapped around me with its darkness, its fullness. He was every part of the forest all at once. Being an angel, I could smell it even better than I could before, and it filled me with beautiful shadows.
Micah pumped into me, thrusting harder for a minute before slowing.
All his movement slowly melted into stillness, into a moment of shared breath and nothing else. I didn’t angle my hips, didn’t try to make him start fucking me again as he slipped out of me. Our sex wasn’t about orgasms tonight.
He was grasping for normalcy. I was grasping for him.
Micah laid on top of me, still holding most of his weight with his forearms, and I tried to encourage him to relax.
I was strong now, almost indestructible.
Slowly, his heavy body relaxed into mine, his muscles going lax, his breathing evening out.
He turned his head to lay his cheek against my collarbone.
I wove my fingers through the hair on the back of his head, lightly scratching with my nails, tracing along his neck.
“I love you,” he mumbled, wrapping an arm around my waist, pushing his hand between me and the bed.
“I love you, too,” I whispered back.
“You brought me back. What did you do?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. It couldn’t have been as simple as the shark teeth or my desperation or my tears—none of those things worked in any of the previous months I’d been trying.
“Why did you?”
Tears welled up in my eyes and my breath hitched, a sob rapidly claiming all the air in my lungs. Micah easily slipped his other hand around my waist and rolled us over, so he was on his back, and I laid on top of him, my cheek against his warm chest, his hand molding to my skull.
“Because I needed you here. I can’t live without you,” I said quietly, soft cries infiltrating my words. I didn’t mean to cry, truly, but it was difficult not to.
“But you did live without me.”
“No. I didn’t. And neither did Mason. I’m not strong like you are, and I can’t help him as well as you can.” I sniffled, curling my fingers against his chest. “I don’t think we would have had much time left,” I admitted, feeling the weight of the truth in every word.
Mason and I wouldn’t have had many months left, had Micah not come back.
I’d been doing my best to help him through every fracture, pull him up from below the surface of the water when he became unable to push back against his nature, but it wouldn’t last forever.
He seemed to get slightly better for a few months, enough that I could breathe sometimes, but it only got worse again.
And what do Thrausians do?
They wait to die.
Micah’s words, in my head. Spoken a lifetime ago.
“I’m really proud that you could do it at all,” Micah murmured, stroking his hand along my hair. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just wanted to know why you’d care to keep trying for so long.”
“Because I’m not done loving you. Okay?” I lifted my head, my teary eyes meeting his. “I will never be done. I had to keep trying to find you.”
Micah continued to hold my gaze, but he didn’t respond.
He didn’t need to.
The amount of love I felt in his eyes could move mountains, level forests, and part the sea. Galaxies full of stars, labyrinths full of secrets.
I leaned up to kiss his mouth, my wet hair cascading around my face like a curtain, blocking us off from the rest of the world, trapping me in the safety he made me feel. I could be held in the palms of his hands, protected there. I wanted him to feel safe with me, too.
Predator saves prey.
Prey saves predator.
A doe, running into a dark forest.
“Why didn’t you tell me that would happen?” I asked, a few more tears squeezing out from below my eyelashes as my face hovered over his. “That I could become an angel? I didn’t know you were gone when I went to Heaven. I didn’t know how it happened.”
Micah hesitated for a moment. “I thought it might upset you. I had immoral plans about it.”
“Oh.” I pressed the pad of my index finger to his chest, laying back down. “You would use your aspect, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “A dying angel, but still. It would’ve very likely been a traumatic experience for you, which is why I didn’t bring it up right away.”
I really had no idea how I wanted to respond to that.
I was happy I hadn’t needed to selfishly take the life of a random angel, but I’d still needed to take Micah’s. For nine long months.
Thankfully, he didn’t seem to mind my lack of response.
He pulled the comforter up and tucked my body against his side, my head resting on his shoulder, and our conversation disappeared into sleep.