Chapter 24 Cooper #2
Reed steps over to embrace me, his hand tightening on my waist. "He's home. Where he has always been meant to be."
"Fine," she sighs, her eyes darting towards the cookies.
"Fine! You're happy. You're homicidally happy.
But if I get a call that you've been arrested for turning a city councilman into a throw blanket, I am not giving your eulogy.
But you can bet your ass I'll be in that courtroom and mouth 'I told you so'. "
I grin, leaning into Reed's warmth. "Deal."
"Good," Ava says, a look of relief spreading across her face. "Now, which one of these skull cookies has the most sprinkles? If I am going to be an unwilling accomplice in the knowledge of your homicides, I'm at least going to get a good cookie out of it."
Reed chuckles, the sound tickling my eardrums. "The one with the pink icing. Cooper made that one special."
"Of course he did," Ava mutters, picking it up. "It's probably poisoned."
"It's not poisoned," I say innocently. "Just has an all natural food dye."
Ava freezes, the cookie halfway to her mouth.
Candace lets out a sharp laugh. "He's joking. Probably." She winks, and Ava shakes her head, taking a resigned but heavy bite.
The warmth is so real, so absolute. I cherish every moment of it.
It's the last stupid, beautiful lie my brain will ever tell me.
The heat leaves my body, replaced by a vast void. The cozy kitchen, the banter, Reaper—it all dissolves like sugar in water, the image fading away until my vision returns to the dark roar of the river.
My body has stopped shivering. The paradoxical heat has faded into numbness. I can't feel my toes or fingers. I can't feel the mud beneath my cheek. My brain is slow for once. My thoughts slugging along like thick syrup.
Carson… I'm coming…
A final image flashes across my vision. Reed's face. Back in the ER. I have his forearm in my grip, my heart races. His gaze burns through me. It's cold and focused. Like a predator sizing up its hunt.
Then a pressure interrupts my trance.
It's real. Not a figment of my fucked-up brain.
A hand slides around my neck. Fingers press into my frozen skin, landing against my carotid. They press down, seeking a pulse. Do I have one?
A growl slices through the river's roar and the dull static occupying my skull. It's furious.
"No."
The word is laced with heat. "I did not pull you from the jaws of a Baptiste to lose you to a patch of mud and bad weather, Cooper. Look at me."
I can't. My eyelids are leaden. It's impossible to open them.
He shifts his grip, his hands—so wretchedly, blessedly warm—frame my face, his thumbs rubbing against my cheekbones. The agony of returning sensation is blistering. It's brutal and merciful at the same time.
"Open your eyes," he whispers as hard as steel. It's a command from the man who has never accepted my refusal, my surrender, or my death wish.
With a Herculean effort, I force my eyelids to flutter open. The world is a fog of darkness and the faint, dim light of the moon, but at its center is his face. Reed's face. Etched not with fear, but with a raging, possessive fury. His eyes are black pits of determination.
"There you are," he rasps, his voice low and deadly. "You do not get to leave. You do not get to see your brother. You belong to me."
Before I can muster a response, he rips his own coat open, then the shirt beneath, buttons scattering around us like fallen stars. He gathers my frozen, limp body against the blazing furnace of his bare chest, pulling me into his lap, wrapping his arms and the insulation of his coat around me.
The shock is immense. It's like my body is plunged into a bonfire. Every nerve ending screams back to life in a harmony of piercing, crackling pain. A choked, pathetic sound escapes my throat.
"I know," he murmurs, into my ear, his hand cradling the back of my head. "I know it hurts. But pain means you're still here. With me."
He rocks us slightly, a steady motion while the pain ravages my body. "You are mine, little mouse. I cannot afford to lose you. Accept the pain. Let my warmth bring the life back into you. We have so much to do. So many delinquents to end."
I try to mumble, but the sounds don't make it past my lips. I accept his heat. My saving grace. A man that has taken so many lives for the Grim Reaper, but refuses to let me go.
It's perfect.
It's brutal.
It's a wonderful night. It's everything that I've ever wanted.
He loves me so much…
He loves me so much that my potential death wouldn't be a tragedy, but a personal insult to his ego. An unacceptable failure on his part. He's salvaging his favorite possession. The one thing that he cannot lose in this world.
This is his love. It's the rage in his snarls. How he stampeded my body with his violent heat.
He loves me so much that he'd rather see me in agony, screaming through the pain of returning life, than to let me slip peacefully into the quiet. My comfort is irrelevant. My pain is a sign that he's winning. My suffering is proof that I'm still his to protect and own.
A normal person would call this monstrous. And they would be right. But they wouldn't understand that this is the only kind of love that I have ever craved. I don't want him to ask for permission. I want him to strangle me with his chokehold and be reckless with his kisses.
He loves me so much that he's willing to be my personal devil, fighting off my personal angel of death.
He's not saving me for God or for my parents or some greater good.
He's saving me for himself. To continue the chase.
To have someone to murmur good boy to after our next kill.
To have a partner in domestic and homicidal situations.
This is the love I was begging for on those trails. Not roses and chocolates, but a man that would rip the beating heart out of my chest and put it back in.
God, isn't this the most precious thing anyone has ever done for me?
He lifts me as if I weigh nothing, his forearms cradling me with an impossible gentleness against the rigid tension of his rage. As he stands, carrying me out of my frozen despair, he leans his head down, his lips caressing my forehead in a kiss that warms my heart.
"Let's go home," he murmurs.
As the warmth of him truly begins to warm the marrow of my bones, pushing back the remnants of the calling void, a realization washes over me. My fairytale isn't ending.
The monster is bringing his prince back to the castle.
My tale has just begun.