44. One year after I gave him my life
One year after I gave him my life
Nothing in my life ever stopped. There was no rest. No pause. No reprieve when things got stressful.
Emmett became representative soon after I left Charles’s body for the Council to find and they pieced together that he was the killer. I gave the new representative a wide berth to keep him out of my affairs.
I spent the entire year examining each piece in the Prague collection and only made it halfway through. Damek Bartos agreed to give me another year to explore its mysteries—for another million dollars. The price was worth every cent to continue hunting her.
Rook never stopped either—not the messy, possessive thing between us. Sometimes we went weeks, even months, without seeing one another. Other times, we hid away and fucked for days, then held each other in the dark. He was fickle and unpredictable. I was stubborn and committed to my work.
Despite all of it, an unseen force tethered us together, a grip that refused to loosen.
I don’t know why I hesitated at his door on my birthday. It shouldn’t matter to him, and I shouldn’t be here uninvited. No one knew what day it was, and my father forgot, which seemed to happen more with each passing year.
I knew how to get through every ward and lock on his house, but I didn’t need to when I possessed the key he’d given me six months ago to make up for the fact that he kept breaking into my penthouse.
I turned it in the lock and pushed the door open.
It was six A.M. He’d be home from the fights by now.
He looked up from the book he was reading on the couch, both legs propped up on his coffee table, and I realized it was the one I’d given him. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
“This is dry as fuck for an adventure novel,” he said, marking the page with his finger halfway through the book. He couldn’t have hated it too much if he’d made it that far.
That wasn’t what made my breath catch. It was the fact that I entered his apartment in the wee hours of the morning after three weeks apart from him, and he did not even flinch.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, eyebrows pinching as he finally set the book aside.
“It’s my birthday.”
“Oh.” The wrinkle scrunching his forehead smoothed out and he patted the couch next to him. I sat down close enough that our arms brushed. “What are you doing for your birthday?”
I snorted and stroked my fingers over the back of his hand. “You, preferably. Everyone else forgot.”
“Shit. Why didn’t you tell me?” He pulled his legs in and angled himself toward me.
“It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d want to know.”
“Bullshit. You know I care more than that.”
“Do you?”
Moping on my birthday in Rook’s living room wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I showed up there, but he was giving me what I wanted, wasn’t he? Someone had to care, and I wanted it to be him.
“Yes. Now, what do you want for your birthday? The sun’s almost up, but I could fuck your ass until mid-morning and then we could order breakfast. Unless you have to work?”
I reached for his hand and we locked our fingers together. “I’m taking the day off, and I would like that.”
He made me like it—every kiss, every inch, every moan. As we lay in his bed afterward, my head on his chest and the sheets bunched oddly around us from our activities, I sighed.
He twisted a lock of my hair around his finger and said, “What’s wrong?”
“There’s one more thing I want for my birthday.”
“Name it.” That finger kept twisting aimlessly as he waited long enough for me to work up the nerve to ask.
“Say it.”
He didn’t stop playing with my hair, but the muscles of his chest tensed under my cheek, like he forgot to breathe for a second. “What if I don’t mean it?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and the edges of my eyelids prickled with impending tears. “Say it anyway and pretend you do. I just…I didn’t want to spend my birthday alone.”
He jolted upright abruptly and sent me sprawling onto the side of the bed I always slept on. “You don’t have to be alone. You know that.”
Indignation crawled up my spine. I pushed up onto my elbows. “What is your bloody obsession with me giving up everything I worked for to be with you?”
“It’s not about that,” he said. “I don’t care what you do for a living. I care that if it came down to it, you would never put me first. Have you stopped looking for Death yet?”
“Of course not.”
“Because you’re bloody obsessed. I don’t want to be third or fourth on your list of priorities. I want to know that if it ever came down to a choice between keeping me and chasing her, you’d pick me, because I’d sure as hell choose you.”
“You’re such a bastard.” I scrunched the sheets back until my legs were free and started pulling on my clothes. “Happy fucking birthday to me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Don’t be so cold.”
We stared at one another until he finally gave in and said, “I do love you, Austin. Happy birthday. Now get the fuck out.”
He threw me out on my birthday with my heart cracked and my insides boiling with rage.
We were back together a week later.