Chapter Twenty-One - Evie #2
“Then why ask me?”
His gaze held mine. There was no humor in it now. No smugness. No performance of divinity. Just that same terrible, impossible softness that made me want to bare my teeth and growl.
“Because it would give Me some comfort,” He said.
I felt my anger rise. “Comfort,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
I looked away again, jaw tight.
That was what He wanted. It was almost worse than wanting my body or forcing my obedience. He wanted… comfort.
Any idiot could see this was intimacy dressed up as innocence. Tenderness offered where I had no real way to refuse it without turning myself into the cruel one.
Or was I just being unfair? Too harsh? Maybe it was exactly what He said it was. But even that was somehow more unsettling.
I picked a thread loose in the blanket and tried not to think about the last time He’d touched me gently, His palm warm and steady at my back while my body betrayed me in every possible way.
I tried not to think about how good the relief had felt.
I tried not to think about the way my pulse hadn’t kicked up with panic and fear when He tucked my hair behind my ear just now, but with something much more complicated and therefore much more dangerous.
“Why?” I asked quietly.
The word came out smaller than I meant it to.
His expression shifted, just slightly. It was more relief than surprise that I had asked instead of immediately cutting Him open with whatever sharper answer I probably should have given.
“You were suffering,” He said. “And I could not stop all of it.”
The admission slipped through me like a hidden door unlatching, because One who was supposedly omnipotent shouldn’t be confessing His own edges, especially to me.
“But I could ease some of it,” He continued. “And afterward…” His gaze lowered for a second, then came back to my face. “Afterward, I found that I did not want distance from you.”
Something about that should’ve sounded possessive. It probably was. But there was something raw threaded through it too, unguarded enough to make me uneasy.
I swallowed. “That’s not really an answer.”
A faint sadness touched His mouth. “It is the truest one I have.”
I let out a slow breath through my nose and stared at the opposite wall. The same stupid smooth marble. The same wall I could open. The same wall hiding secrets with enough truth to ruin my life at least six different ways.
Everything in this place had a second face. Why would He be any different?
I should’ve said no. I knew that. I should’ve turned to Him and told Him to go comfort Himself somewhere far away from me, somewhere else in His holy little dollhouse, and leave me out of it.
Instead, I sat there, tired down to my marrow, confused by His kindness I didn’t want, and too aware of the strange hollow ache in the room whenever He stood up to leave.
That was the part that made me hate myself most. Not that He wanted comfort. That some part of me understood it.
“What would that even look like?” I asked, my words small and fragile, still staring at the wall.
“I… would hold you in my arms,” He said simply. “And nothing more would be asked of you.”
Nothing more. I wanted to laugh at that. As if being held by Him wasn’t already asking too much.
I turned then, slowly, and looked at Him. He hadn’t moved closer. He hadn’t reached for me again. He was just sitting there beside me with all that impossible stillness, waiting.
Fuck, I hated that He waited, that He asked, that He waited for my answer because it just made everything messier. If He had demanded, it would have been easy to hate Him cleanly. If He had taken, I could have sorted Him back into the right place in my head.
But this… careful request, this softness after I’d been half-dead in the bed with His magic in my stomach and His manna under my tongue, this was a blade wrapped in silk.
“You really expect me to believe you’d just hold me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It is not convenient.”
“No?” I looked down at my hands. “Then what is it?”
He was quiet for a moment. When He answered, His voice had gone lower. “It is longing,” He said.
The word slipped through me before I could brace against it.
I looked up sharply as my body leaned toward him without thought, and He didn’t look away.
Something hot and confused moved under my chest, anger, maybe, or grief, or just the simple humiliation of being witnessed when I was too tired to defend myself properly.
I shook my head once as I tried to straighten myself. “You don’t get to sound tragic.”
A faint, aching smile touched His mouth. “I imagine there are many things you feel I do not get.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
He inclined His head slightly, like conceding the point. Then He said nothing else. Just waited and watched me.
The room seemed to tilt around the space of that waiting, around the shape of the question He had placed between us and refused to force. I looked at the bed. At the blanket beneath my hands. At the place beside me where the mattress dipped under His weight. Then I looked at Him again.
And against all good judgment, all self-respect, all the instincts I should have trusted more than I did, I heard myself say, “Only for a minute.”
The relief that crossed His face was so immediate it nearly made me take it back. He moved slowly, giving me every chance to flinch away or change my mind. He pulled the covers open and then eased back onto the bed, opening one arm.
I hesitated. Because once I crossed that small, stupid distance, there would be no pretending I hadn’t.
Because this was insane. Because when Luc found out, he would hate me as much as I did right now.
Because I was about to let a god who kept me prisoner hold me because He’d said the word longing like it cost Him something.
I thought to myself, My life had become offensively weird. Then, hating myself a little, I lay down. I did it carefully and stiffly, as if I kept enough tension in my spine, I could somehow preserve the moral integrity of the situation.
His arm came around me with infuriating gentleness. It was warm and steady and close, too close, settling around me like He was afraid I might vanish if He held too tightly.
I stared straight ahead at the wall. Every part of me was aware of Him.
The heat of His hard body at my back. The heavy weight of His arm over my waist. The scent of myrrh and beeswax, with just a hint of ozone beneath it, as if even His softness had lightning buried in it.
The way He seemed to go stiller somehow once I was there, like even His breathing changed.
I waited for disgust, for panic. For the urge to shove away.
But what came instead was so much worse—relief.
It wasn’t emotional. I wasn’t insane. But I felt physical relief.
My exhausted body, the fucking traitorous thing that it was, recognized warmth and stillness and being held without effort and wanted to melt into it like it had no principles at all.
I hated it so much I could’ve screamed.
“Don’t read into this,” I muttered toward the wall.
His breath moved softly through my hair. “I would not dare.”
“That sounded facetious.”
“It was… affectionate.”
I shut my eyes. “This is stupid.”
“And yet,” He said quietly, “here you are.”
I wanted to elbow Him for that. But I lay there in that golden hush, furious at myself, furious at Him, furious at the stupid flutter low in my body that had nothing to do with desire and probably everything to do with being too tired to hold myself together anymore.
His hand shifted once against my belly, barely, just enough to settle. Then, after a long silence, He pressed His mouth very lightly to my hair. It was soft. A thank-you, almost.
And somehow that was the worst part of it all. It made my throat tighten. It made Him feel real in a way I didn’t want him to. And mostly because I couldn’t tell where His cruelty ended and His sincerity began, and I was starting to fear the answer was that they lived side by side.
I lay there very still in His arms, staring at the wall, and thought wildly, helplessly, Luc would hate this. And underneath that, quieter and somehow more painful, He’d hate me for letting this happen. And so did I.
His arm stayed loose around my waist for a few quiet breaths, so gentle it almost felt accidental. Then His hand moved.
At first, it was nothing, just the slow shift of warm fingers against the sash at my middle, the lightest drag over the fabric of the robe. I went stiff instantly, every muscle in my body locking so hard it almost hurt.
He didn’t stop. His hand slid lower, slower, finding the slight gap where the robe crossed over itself. Warmth pressed through that opening, then skin. My stomach clenched.
For one vile, fleeting second, my body reacted to the heat of His palm like it was comfort, something soothing, something steady against the ache and exhaustion still living low in me. And I hated myself even more for it immediately. Because my mind was nowhere near comfort.
My mind was ice. It was terror. It was the violent, blaring instinct to jerk away, to scramble out of the bed, to spin around and shout What the fuck are you doing?
It was every alarm in me going off at once while the rest of me lay there frozen, pinned by the awful, impossible fact that He was being so careful.
But at the same time, it was too careful. He knew exactly how not to make this look like force. He knew exactly how to make my stillness look like consent.
His hand rested against my bare belly now, broad and warm and devastatingly possessive in how calm it was, as if it belonged there. As if I might let myself believe that because He wasn’t rough, this was somehow not a violation.
My chest tightened. Do I let Him do this to me?