73. WEN

Godric’s declaration hits me harder than the shockwave that had almost killed me.

Not that he seems aware of its effect on me. Even worse, it seems he can’t conceive that it would horrify me. When he’d once promised to protect my friends so I wouldn’t be driven to extremes to do it. After the Trials, he was even offended when I thought he was responsible for the bolts arcing between them and the Amulet, and accused him of putting their lives in danger.

But that was when he was in his right mind. At least the mind under his absolute control. Now that’s disintegrating, he sees it as only natural to go to any lengths to assert his feelings for me. Whatever they are, he clearly thinks proving them by killing anyone, including all my friends, is perfectly plausible.

My whole body jerks as his hand sizzles a caress from my jaw down to my neck. But the threat of his intentions, both homicidal and carnal, isn’t what terrifies me most. It’s what I’m feeling. What his touch, and that of his obsession are doing to me. What he always does to me, multiplied tenfold. A hundred.

It must be his blood. I feel it eddying in my bloodstream, tearing me open on a cellular level. Then deeper, deeper, poking at the bottomlessness slumbering inside me, making it stir.

This never happened outside of our Mindscape sessions. Apart from that one time by the underground lake. It fucking talked to me then. But I might have hallucinated it all. I was going insane at the time, unable to rouse the unresponsive Godric. I thought I subdued it then, and it hadn’t made its presence felt in any way ever since.

Now I feel it stretching tentacles of oblivion, reaching out sleepily to revel in the brutality of his power, and the boundlessness of his greed. Both seem to be augmenting its own, and mine, ripping everything inside me apart in a cyclone of dread and desire.

It was already a losing battle fighting his insanity. Adding my own is inching this mess into hopeless territory.

It’s more terrifying when we both seem so lucid. Like the first time I tasted his blood, my awareness seems to be expanding. And the clarity only amplifies the hunger, pushing its needle into the unstoppable zone.

No. I have to stop it. I can’t give in. I have to wrestle us both under control. As the only one not in danger of dying at his hands right now, everything depends on me.

The only thing stopping my own mind from disintegrating is that I can sense that Sarah and the others are alive. I must get a grip on myself, say something that will drag him back from the brink so I can keep them that way.

“Nothing can ever come between us, Godric.”

His hand stills its cosseting pressure on my throat, molten steel welling in one eye, and magma surging in the other.

Oh, shit! What did I say wrong now?

I replay my words, and only then realize how strangled and shaky I sounded, nothing like the soothing authority I intended. I need to placate him like I would a madman cocking a lethal weapon. Since he’s currently both, anything might set him off.

Before I can attempt damage control, his hand clamps my neck hard enough to impede my breathing, and he pulls me against him, imprinting himself over every inch of me, from breasts to shins.

The need to rub myself all over him until that searing tension between my legs snaps, and I vanish beneath his deadly perfection, almost overwhelms me. He documents my trembling efforts to hold back, then pouts with disapproval.

“You shouldn’t have said that.” The fathomless calmness of his voice makes me stop breathing. He’s inching towards total insanity with every heartbeat. I feel it. “Now all I can think of are all the things that can come between us. That can take you away from me.”

Fighting not to let the tremors develop into bone-rattling shudders, I spread my hands over his chest and wince. He’s hot. Literally. His shredded clothes are stopping most of the radiation coming off of him, but where my fingers touch his skin, he burns me.

Damage and regeneration sear through my nerves, coexisting for the first time, their agony only heightening my arousal. Suppressing it all, I press harder into his flesh. If my touch is as mind-altering to him as his is to me, it might counteract the effects of whatever is driving everyone insane.

If it’s my power that’s doing it, though, this might backfire. But I can’t think of anything else to do now.

A groan echoing my own tortured pleasure escapes him as his lids hood, and his other hand rises to map my face, as if committing every detail to tactile memory. Like he’s making up for all the times he’s deprived us both of this unparalleled gratification.

It’s beyond me not to choke on my next words, only hoping he can hear the truth in them. “None of those things are around here, that’s for sure.”

He tilts his head in Sarah’s direction before his gaze targets her and his expression becomes whimsical. “After everything that I’ve confronted, withstood and conquered, all the enemies I have neutralized, vanquished and obliterated, it comes to this. This little abomination becomes my biggest threat.”

My heart leaps into my throat. “Are you talking about Sarah? She’s no threat of any sort, to anyone, let alone you!”

His lips twist in chastisement. “That’s still your opinion after this latest development? It stands to reason. You have a blind spot as wide as your void where she’s concerned. But, even disregarding her little homicidal demonstration, she’s far more dangerous than anyone can imagine. Not that I care about that. I only care that she wants you to stop wanting me. That makes her the ultimate danger to me.”

My fingers convulse, digging into his muscles, caring nothing that I’m intensifying my pain. “I’ll say this once and for all, so you better listen, and you better believe it. I can’t stop wanting you. And she doesn’t want me to. She only ever wants what’s best for me.”

“She believes I am anything but that. She said that, in a life filled with ‘horrific shit’, I’m ‘the worst thing that ever happened’ to you.”

“Don’t quote her back to me when she wasn’t even in her right mind. It’s the Angelescence or whatever it is that’s driving you all fucking insane!”

“Maybe. But …” His hand presses my throat a little tighter even as the other descends to my buttocks, massive enough to cup both, raising me off my feet, and grinding me into his erection where my core is weeping for him. “She was right. I am the most terrible thing that you couldn’t have imagined happening to you.”

“I already knew that. I am the same, to you. But you’re also the absolute best and most incredible and unbelievable—host of things I never thought existed, or that I could possibly deserve.”

His gaze deepens and heats over my face, as if trying to burn its way into the last hidden corner of my being.

He ends up shaking his head, even as he starts undulating against me. “It’s what you feel now, in the exigency of your cravings for me. But as long as she lives, she’ll never let you forget the parts of me that hurt you, and would no doubt continue to do so. She won’t rest until they’re all you can see when you look at me, all you can feel when I touch you and take you. It will foment and fester, until you resent me. Hate me. I will not allow that.”

My heart clenches at the inevitability he’s solidifying with every thought and word. My consciousness wavers with the need to ride him until I come. My whole body cramps with resisting the building dread and mindless urge.

Ignoring the pain, I clamp my legs around his hips, stopping his lazy undulations before I explode. “I don’t need any external influences to resent you, Godawful. I’ve been resenting the Hell, Heaven and Earth out of you from the moment you crash-landed in my path. And if arresting me, choking me and dragging me around the Academy on a leash didn’t make me hate you, nothing ever can.”

His eyes travel to Sarah again with a serpentine coldness that makes my bones rattle within my flesh. “Then that one’s name is Nothing too, it seems.”

I try to grab his hair to bring his gaze back to me, but it’s too short. The tormenting bastard cut it again. I end up digging my nails into his ears instead.

His growl of pained pleasure almost makes me black out as he releases my neck, only to slide his hand down, joining the other one in kneading my aching flesh and grinding me into his hardness with the exact force I need.

Fighting a breaker of pain-wrapped pleasure, I press my nails harder into his flesh. His gaze still slithers to Sarah, and I smack his face with both hands with all my strength. His eyes snap wider and an amused, aroused huff escapes him. He likes it rough, too? Figures.

“Keep those freaky peepers right here,” I hiss, the words a serrated knife through my still swollen throat. “Eyes on me, Godawful.”

“That’s one thing you can be certain of, my ruin. My eyes will never, ever waver from you.”

“Yeah, ditto.”

His amusement fades. “That’s not true. I only have one eye of yours, if that. The other one, or perhaps both, are Sarah’s. Discounting her influence on you isn’t serving your case. You should know better than using such a patently false argument to dissuade me.”

“It’s not false,” I wheeze, urgency suffocating me harder than he did. “I know this is brand new to you, and Hell, it is to me, too. But I discovered I can care about two people, in totally different ways, but with the same depth and ferocity.”

He scoffs. “Your every decision and action, no matter how ill-advised or potentially fatal, have always been dictated by your fear and love for her.”

“You can say that, because you weren’t here when I was taking ill-advised, potentially fatal decisions and actions left and right because of you.”

“That’s because she was safe. If it were a choice between us, you’d choose her.”

My latest choice, when I thought they’d succeed in killing him, was him.

But since I had no chance to act on my desperation, if I tell him this now, it would probably sound like an empty claim. I need only solid facts.

I give him the one I have. “It was a choice between you and her in the Trials Realm, and I refused to possibly sacrifice you for the certainty of saving her. The only choice I’d ever make is sacrificing myself for either or both of you.”

He gives a dismissive grimace. “I would not let you do that for her, and certainly never for me. But if that’s off the table for you, and a choice has to be made, it will always be her.”

My head spins with the crowding objections, and I shake them away as I yank his face closer to mine. “She was everything in my life….”

“Yes, and a lifetime of codependency is impossible to compete with.”

“We’re not codependent!”

His shrug waves me off. “It was imperative, a survival mechanism on both your parts, and I’ll admit your dynamic has drastically changed along with your growing scopes and powers.” His gaze sweeps back to her, drilling her unconscious body in its searing coldness. “But she will always remain your priority.”

This time I don’t drag his attention back to me. I’m busy choking on the realization. Something I never expected I’d come up against, especially from him.

Up till this moment, I thought his antipathy towards Sarah was fueled by her manic declarations and behavior.

Now I realize it’s something more complex, which has been brewing inside him for far longer. Since this unfathomable thing we have between us started taking root. His loosening brakes just let it belch to the surface.

I don’t want to come to the conclusion. But it’s the only thing that makes sense in this deadly parody I’ve fallen into.

Godric considers my best friend his rival!