95. The Stranger
Chapter Ninety-Five
The Stranger
D on’t kiss anyone else.
Just the memory of her voicing the entreaty makes my chest swell as I rest on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
Seeing the way that boy looked at her after everything we shared in Paradis?.
.?. I came so close to embracing the part of me that would make her hate me if I crossed that line into the most savage and possessive part of myself.
She’d never forgive me if I killed the one who came too close.
Waving my hand, I let the surveillance spell hover over me, showing her sleeping in her own bedroom. She tosses and turns as she does. On edge, little fae? I know the feeling.
My thumb rubs over the bracelet on my wrist, remembering Paradis and the weekend we spent together with only a glamour between us.
Does she know that no one has ever given me a gift before? Not once? I was never a person to them, always a tool, a weapon, never a child, never a man. Yet in a single moment, Summer swept her arm over my past and wiped it clean.
If it weren’t already clear that this obsession had crossed into love for her, it would have been in that moment.
When she held out that bracelet, her eyes darting away as if she were embarrassed, the ache in my chest took my breath away. Thankfully, she seemed to miss my confusion, not quite sure what she was doing. A gift? For me?
How many times in the past have I marveled at the gifts given to others, never understanding why I never received any myself?
As a child, no one thought I was worth presenting with a gift.
Then, as I grew into adulthood, I became too powerful, too terrifying, too deadly for anyone to see me as someone who would welcome a gift, even if my hands weren’t covered in the blood of their family and friends.
Until her.
It’s just one more way she’s changed me, and another reason I cannot lose her, especially to my own temper and jealousy.
I slam my fist into the bed beneath me, the spell vanishing with the burst of my power. How much longer can I hold myself back? Especially after the taste I had of what we would be like together while we were in Paradis.
There isn’t a moment I don’t remember the way her lips felt wrapped around me as she sucked my cock, or the sweet sound of her orgasm as she came apart on my fingers. I remember it all, and it is not nearly enough.
I need more.
I need to feel that tight pussy squeezing me as I fuck her without mercy. I need to break her beyond repair and put her back together with my tongue. My cock. My broken and shattered heart that beats only for her.
Idly, I let my power swirl around my hand, feeling the death slide through me, the malevolence waiting to be unleashed.
Death has always lived in the palm of my hand, life in the other.
There was a moment when I looked into her eyes as she raged at me, her anger a tempest just unfurling, that I saw both life and death in her eyes, and I marveled at the recognition.
Usually there is only ever one. At their core, people want to live. They will cling to life like a disease. Even immortals fear the unknown that awaits them. Only a few times have I truly seen the longing for death in someone’s eyes.
And Summer Tuatha De Daanan was one of those few.
Normally, once death lives in your eyes, once it haunts your steps and controls your mind, it never relinquishes you. Once dead, you remained dead.
But that day, when I saw one eye filled with life and the other held death, I should have known I loved her then. Yet it wasn’t until she told me she wished I were the one who had died that the truth finally dawned on me.
Even as she wished me dead, I realized I had never loved anyone more.