Chapter Twenty-Four
Legend
She’s under the oak like a weapon someone dropped and forgot about. My brothers are taking a lot longer than the five fucking minute countdown I gave them.
I think it’s messing with her mind.
I stop at the field’s edge, watching her rip grass from the earth in violent little fistfuls. Each blade she destroys makes my chest tighten—not because I give a fuck about the landscaping, but because she’s this close to detonating and I’m not the target.
That bothers me more than it should.
Her head snaps up, those green eyes finding me through thirty yards of space like she can smell my thoughts. The hostility in her face shifts to something worse—resignation. Like she’s too exhausted to fight me right now.
Good. I’m too exhausted to fight her either.
I cross the field and drop beside her without invitation, my shoulder brushing hers as I stretch out on the grass.
She doesn’t move away. Doesn’t move closer either, but the fact that she’s not currently trying to stab me counts as progress.
Maybe, for once, our little conversation from a few minutes ago will actually hold after the moment ended.
“Don’t let Creed get to you.” The words come out before I can stop them.
“Why? Because you’re the only one allowed to fuck with my head?”
“Because he doesn’t understand you.”
“And you do?”
“No.” I turn my head to look at her profile—sharp jaw, sharper tongue, sharpest edges I’ve ever wanted to cut myself on. “But I’m trying to.”
Something in her face cracks. Not much, just a hairline fracture in all that armor, but then—fuck me—she smiles. Not her usual smile that promises violence and tastes like blood. This one’s soft. Real. Small enough that if I blinked I’d miss it.
It destroys me.
The smile vanishes as fast as it came, but the damage is done. My ribs feel too small for what’s expanding in my chest—this vicious, consuming need to stand between her and anything that might dim that expression. To hunt down whatever made her learn to hide softness like a fucking shame.
She’s a pain in the ass in the best and worst ways, giving me a little and taking it back. Only to give a little more the next time. She’s creaking, and each time she does, that gap fills with a little more of me.
I want her to break open until half of me makes up the other half of her.
“What?” She’s studying me now, and I realize I’ve been staring.
“Nothing.” It’s anything but nothing.
“Bullshit. You look like someone just told you your favorite torture device got discontinued.”
“Maybe they did.” I reach over and pluck a blade of grass from her hair. She goes still, not even breathing as my fingers brush her temple. “Maybe you’re it.”
“Your favorite torture device?” She lifts one perfect brow.
I shrug. “The only one that works anymore.”
She turns to face me fully, and we’re close enough that I can see the color of nature in all that green. “That’s either the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard, or you’re having a stroke.”
“Can’t it be both?”
Another smile threatens the corner of her mouth. “You’re genuinely disturbed, you know that?”
“Says the girl who killed someone with their own finger last week,” I tease.
“Allegedly.”
“We all saw it, didn’t we?” Because she didn’t necessarily hide it.
She holds my eyes. “Prove it.”
This. This is what makes her, her. The way she can discuss murder like foreplay, violence like vocabulary, and still somehow make me want to burn down the world just to see her laugh. Not smile—laugh.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she says, lying back on the grass beside me. Our arms touch from shoulder to elbow, and neither of us moves away.
“You’re not thinking loud enough,” I whisper, annoyed with how tight my throat feels.
“Trust me, Royal, you don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
I prop myself up on one elbow, looking down at her. “Try me.”
She meets my eyes, and for one second, all her walls drop.
What I see there—the exhaustion, the loneliness, the rage that mirrors mine so perfectly it hurts—makes me want to kill everyone who’s ever made her feel less than fucking extraordinary.
Because that’s what she is, and not even the fucking Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could take her from me.
“I’m thinking,” she says slowly, “that your brothers are right about me.”
“My brothers are idiots.”
She sighs. “They’re trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection.” I lean closer until I can feel her breath on my face. “Especially not from you.”
“You should.” Her hand comes up, fingers tracing the edge of my jaw with surprising gentleness. “I ruin everything I touch.”
“Perfect.” I catch her wrist, pressing her palm flat against my chest where my heart is trying to punch through bone. “I’m already ruined.”
She laughs and I swear my fucking heart flatlines. Why can’t shit be simple? She feels like home. No, that isn’t right. She feels like coming home to your house on fire, but being fine with living in the debris because having her in little, fucked-up pieces is better than not having her at all.
“You’re completely fucked-up,” she says, but her fingers curl into my shirt, holding on.
“So are you.” My lips brush hers, because if I don’t feel her on me I’m gonna kill something.
So what if your mate is more like mutual destruction?
The need to protect her hasn’t lessened. If anything, it’s grown a taste for blood. But now I understand it better.
I don’t want to protect her from everything.
I want to protect her right to destroy it whenever she wants to.
“Legend?” Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it.
“Yeah?”
“Your brothers are going to try to separate us.”
“Let them try.” I lower myself back down, pulling her against my side. She doesn’t resist, just fits herself into the space like she was carved for it. “I’ll kill them all before I let them take you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Want to bet?”
She’s quiet for a long moment, then, “I’m a little scared.”
I freeze on her words.
She continues. “Of what I might become with you.”
“And what’s that?”
“Worse than I am now.”
The smile I give her probably looks like a threat to anyone watching. Good. Let them watch. Let them see what happens when you give a monster his favorite snack.
She kisses me, and it’s nothing like the violence we trade in daylight.
Her mouth is soft, searching, and I let her take what she wants even as my hand finds the back of her neck, fingers threading through her hair.
She tastes like a battlefield, and when her tongue slides against mine, my grip tightens.
She makes a sound—fuck, a tiny broken sound—and I swallow it whole, pulling her closer until there’s no space left between us.
My other hand spans her waist, feeling the way her breathing hitches when I angle her head back, when I take control of what she started.
When she pulls back, we’re both breathing hard through swollen lips.
“Your brothers are right about one thing,” she says against my mouth with a smirk, and I feel the words more than hear them.
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to destroy you.”
I grin. “Can’t wait.”
…
Haide
He’s ridiculous and completely serious. His next words prove it when he reaches out, his knuckles gliding along the slope of my breast.
“Fuck the little flower quest,” he purrs. “Let’s stay here instead,” he purrs, pressing closer.
“Don’t push your luck,” I whisper, but my voice is already betraying me.
“Worth a shot.” He smiles, slow and pleased. Two fingers press lightly over my sternum, where that strange pull always seems to live when he’s near and where my body reacts in ways my mind doesn’t understand.
“Are you mine, monster?” he asks, voice low and gravelly. “Can you feel me here?”
My breath catches hard at his question. They’re words I’ve heard from him before, asked or said in different ways, but still familiar from his lips.
This time, though, anxiety curls through me, tight and bright.
Excitement.
Fear.
Hope, which is the most disgusting of all.
Because the answer is complicated, and I don’t have language for it.
Admitting anything feels like handing someone a blade and turning my back.
Never in my life would I have ever thought such a thing would sound appealing, yet my fingers twitch to do just that.
To take the blade from my sheath and place it in his palm, if only to see what he’d really do.
To prove to myself what I already know?
I swallow.
I don’t answer, but step in to him instead.
I rise on my toes and kiss him. Not the rough kind of kiss that I now see as ours, that dirty, frantic territorial kind of kiss that tastes like violence and hunger. I’ve become obsessed with the way his lips devour mine. Maybe even obsessed, but this…shit.
He’s kissed me like I was breakable before. Once. But only a fool would pretend that this one right here isn’t something brand fucking new.
It is.
It’s a kiss I’ve never given anyone because I didn’t know I could and I never had the urge to.
Legend makes a sound that vibrates into my mouth, and his hands find me like they’ve been searching for permission—one sliding to my waist, the other cupping the back of my head, holding me with a careful reverence that makes my throat ache.
Like he’s terrified of breaking me.
Like he’s more terrified of losing me.
My fingers curl into his shirt, pulling him closer, and the heat between us rises fast, thickening the air, turning the space into something private and dangerous.
Legend deepens the kiss with slow patience and time we don’t have, like he’s trying to brand the moment into both of us before the world drags us back into blood, questions, and death.
When he finally pulls back, his forehead presses to mine.
His breath is warm against my lips.
His voice is rough.
“There,” he murmurs. “That. That’s why I don’t know how to accept the risk.”
My chest tightens, and I hate the softness clawing its way up my spine.
I try to cover it with sharpness. “You’re dramatic.”
“I’m honest,” he corrects, and his mouth brushes mine again, quick and controlled, a promise clipped short by restraint. “And you’re walking into something that I don’t know how to control. What if it reaches for you?”
My jaw ticks. “Let it reach.”
His grip on me tightens just slightly. “If you get hurt,” he says, quieter now, more lethal, “I will turn Rathe inside out.”
I should tell him I don’t need saving, remind him who I am, and what I survived. But the truth is, the idea of him being that furious on my behalf does something wicked to me. It makes me feel…chosen.
And that is its own kind of danger, because to want is to lose.
Maybe, for once, it doesn’t have to be?
I don’t know the answer, but it’s as if something inside me does.
I give him a small, infuriating smirk. “Then don’t let me get hurt.”
Legend’s mouth curves, fierce and satisfied, and for a second I see the possibility of us. How ridiculous it is that I can stand here and let him touch me without immediately reaching for a blade.
Legend kisses my forehead and steps back with clear reluctance.
“After,” he repeats, eyes burning.
“After,” I agree again, and the way his pupils flare tells me he’s filing that word away like a vow.
Then he turns, and the moment shifts.
The noise of his family floods in the second he opens the door. I follow him inside with my chin high, heart racing, and that single word still lodged in my mouth like a promise.
After.