Chapter Twenty-Five - Evie #2
Topher wasn’t going upstairs. He wasn’t going to sit on a couch and let someone hand him a glass of water. He wasn’t going to stand under a shower and pretend hot water could make that mountain leave his skin. He was just… gone. And I questioned if he was ever coming back.
The hotel loomed above us, mirrored glass catching the purple edge of dawn. After everything we’d just witnessed, it was too tall, too clean, too perfect, like it belonged in that realm, and I suddenly hated it for still being here when Destiny wasn’t.
Luc’s hand hovered near my back again, still not touching. Still asking. And everything in me felt flayed open. And now the world just expected me to just go inside.
By the time we made it upstairs, I was running on whatever came after empty.
I barely remembered the elevator ride or even the lobby.
The penthouse opened around us in warm light and polished quiet.
It was just like I remembered, but all of it was too soft, too beautiful, too untouched.
Luc shut the bedroom door behind us, and the sound of the latch catching made something in my chest tighten.
We were alone, and at any other time, that might have meant safety. Now it just meant there was nowhere for either of us to hide.
He turned toward me carefully, like he was approaching a frightened animal.
His shirt was still torn in places from Heaven.
His wings were gone now, glamoured back into his magic, and now he looked more like a man in the quiet of his own bedroom, helpless to stop the trembling of the woman he loved.
“Let me take care of you,” he said softly.
The words nearly undid me, not because it was the wrong thing to say. Because I wanted them too much.
I stood there for a second, just staring at him, my body still full of adrenaline and grief and the wrong kind of silence.
Dust from the mountain clung to my feet.
The white, draped fabric Cindralis had glamoured for me still hung off me, stained at the hem and feeling wrong, like I had dragged a piece of that place back with me.
Luc moved first, past me. He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Water hit tile in a hot, rushing hiss. Cabinets opened. Towels rustled. He was doing what he’d done for me before, trying to make comfort out of practical things.
The sound of the running water filled the room, and my whole body went cold.
Hot water. Fresh towels. New clothes. The Votaries. Preparation. The memories were still so fresh I almost gagged. Before I knew it, my mind was back there at once, in the pattern of it.
Their hands on my body. The golden robe. The waiting. The way they had touched my hair and skin and made me clean for Him like fear was something that could be brushed smooth if they made me pretty enough first.
“No.” The word came out sharper than I intended.
Luc appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, one hand still on the frame. “What?”
I took a step back before I could stop myself.
“No,” I said again, and this time my voice shook. “No, I—I’m not going in there.”
His face changed immediately. First, it was concern, then understanding, and then… a quiet horror. He disappeared and shut the water off at once. The silence rang out too loud.
He came out of the bathroom slowly, steam slipping past his shoulders, his eyes finding me with the kind of care that made everything worse.
“Evie,” he said, like even my name might bruise if he put too much weight on it.
I shook my head too fast. “Don’t. Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That.” I gestured at the bathroom, at the towels, at all of it, suddenly furious in the way only panic knew. “I know you’re trying to help, I know that, but I can’t, I can’t do that right now, I can’t go in there like… I just… can’t—”
The words broke apart. My throat closed around the rest. But Luc stayed where he was. Thank God he stayed where he was. If he’d taken one more step toward me just then, I might have come apart in a way I didn’t know how to come back from.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
That should have helped, but it didn’t. Because the gentleness in it hurt too much.
I turned away from him before I had to watch his face do that awful, careful thing again and crossed to the bed on unsteady legs.
The second the backs of my knees hit the mattress, I folded and collapsed sideways across it and curled in on myself, still in that damn white dress, still breathing too fast, one arm across my belly like I was holding something in.
The bed was too soft. The room smelled too good, too much like Luc and that dark warmth my body still wanted even while nausea turned slow circles inside me. Everything about the room was comforting—the light, the sheets, the way he was trying so hard not to frighten me. It made me want to scream.
Luc stayed by the bathroom for one long second, maybe two. Then I heard him move, slow and cautious, as if the whole room had become fragile, and he was trying not to put his weight in the wrong place. He came to the side of the bed and stopped a few feet away. I felt him there before I looked up.
“Let me help you,” he said quietly. “I’m going to touch you now, okay? Just enough to sit you up.”
He waited. Even then, giving me time.
When I didn’t pull away, he came closer and slid one arm behind my back, the other beneath my arm, lifting me with an almost unbearable kind of gentleness. My body felt boneless and wrong in my own skin. I hated that he could probably feel how badly I was shaking.
“Let’s get this off you,” he murmured, fingers catching the white dress at my shoulder. “You don’t need to be in that anymore.”
I turned my head and saw one of his black T-shirts lying beside me on the bed.
“You can wear this,” he said. “It’ll be softer.”
He eased the straps down my shoulders slowly, watching my face more than the fabric, stopping every time my breathing changed.
He peeled the dress away from me like he wanted it gone, like he hated it as much as I did.
When the fabric slipped down my body, he crouched in front of the bed and worked it the rest of the way off with reverent hands before tossing it away.
“Arms up for me?” he asked softly.
My throat tightened, and I did it.
He pulled the shirt over my head, guided my arms through, and drew it down over me with careful tugs until I disappeared inside the soft black cotton and the smell of him. It was stronger now, closer, wrapping around me until my eyes burned again.
He looked at me for one second after that, just enough for something broken to move across his face before he hid it again.
Then he pulled the blankets up and tucked them around me with hands that were trying so hard not to frighten me.
And something in my belly tugged as I lay there looking at him.
The way he made himself smaller for me. The way every movement said he would rather cut his own hands off than be careless with me now.
When he finally met my eyes, his voice was quiet enough to bruise. “Tell me what you need,” he said.
I almost laughed because what I needed was impossible. I needed Destiny not to be dead. I needed Topher not to be falling apart. I needed Mara not to be trapped in that shining fucking nightmare. I needed none of this to have ever happened to us.
I pressed my face harder into the blanket. “I don’t know,” I whispered.
It was the truth, which made it worse.
For a second, I thought he might try again, ask another careful question, offer another careful comfort. Instead, the mattress dipped very slightly, but it wasn’t beside me. It was near enough that I could feel it, but far enough that I could still breathe.
When I finally looked up, he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose between them, like he was trying to make himself smaller.
Or safer. Like he was trying to make himself less like a man with power and more like someone who would stay put if I told him to.
And that killed me more than anything else because Luc didn’t know how to be small, but he was trying anyway.
My eyes and nose burned. “I hate this,” I said, voice breaking around the words. “I hate that you touched my hair, and for a second it felt like—”
I stopped because I couldn’t finish it.
Luc went perfectly still. “I know,” he said after a moment, and his voice was so rough it barely sounded like him. “I know.”
“No, you don’t,” I snapped, sudden and sharp and already ashamed of it. “You don’t know what it feels like to want someone so much, to want to be in their arms so badly, and then have your own body turn around and make you afraid of it.”
The silence after that was terrible. Because I knew, the second the words were out, that I’d hit somewhere I didn’t mean to. Why had I even said it?
Luc looked down at his hands. When he spoke again, it was very quiet. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”
I thought it would make me angrier, but instead it finally made the tears spill. I shoved myself upright too fast and wiped at my face with the heel of my hand like that could somehow erase what was happening, so I turned toward him.
“I was glad,” I said, hating how wrecked I sounded. “In the van. I was glad. I was so happy to be back in your arms, and then you tucked my hair behind my ear and I—”
My breath hitched. “All I felt was Him.”
Luc didn’t move, but I saw that land across his face, like a wound he would rather take into his own body if he could.
“It’s not you,” I said again as I reached for his hand because I suddenly needed him to understand that more than I needed oxygen. “It’s not.”
“I know,” he said, but his eyes had gone too bright, and that made my chest cave in.
For one ugly second, I thought I might just start crying and keep crying until I drowned in it. Destiny. Mara. Heaven. Topher. It was too much.
But what came out was anger. I was angry at everything. Every fucking thing.