16. Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

S he heard the footfalls, soft, the heels of his boots clunking along the stone floor, echoing along the curved ceilings of the undercrofts. Not hurried, but methodically coming closer.

She had no doubt it was Thomas.

It would be useless to try to scurry away into deeper shadows now. It would just make her look even more the fool.

Her only option to sit frozen, her face buried in her arms.

Why had she opened her mouth?

Cracked open her chest to bleed all over the man?

She was here for one thing, to keep him safe, and now she was hiding in the underbelly of the castle, not doing her job, dragging him into her own darkness that she very specifically never let see the light of day.

Maybe Hector was right. Maybe it was time she moved on from the Guardians. Maybe her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Maybe she couldn’t perform her job like she needed to.

The Guardians of the Bones was the only place she’d ever belonged and Hector thought it was time to for her to leave. It had only been dumb luck that Callum had wanted her for this job, giving her a respite from Hector cutting her free.

She had to set her spine to steel, erase everything of her past if she was ever going to prove her worth again.

The footsteps slowed. Stopped.

The pause was long, and she didn’t bother lifting her face to him. He was going to say what he was going to say, she had no doubt. And why shouldn’t he? It was his castle, after all. His life that she had infiltrated.

Three more steps, directly to her left side, and his presence swallowed her whole as he turned his back to the wall and slid down next to her.

“Rats.”

The one word, low and haunted, cut into the dank air. She lifted her head, her eyes finding Thomas in the dark shadows. The only light a flicker from the sole flame in the lantern he’d set on the floor a distance away from them.

Her eyebrows lifted at him.

“Rats.” His gaze shifted off of her to the stone wall across from them. He pulled his knees upward, mirroring her position as he set his forearms on his kneecaps, his thumb and forefinger picking at his left palm. He’d stripped out of his coat and waistcoat that he wore at dinner, the sleeves of his white lawn shirt rolled up at his elbows, and she stared at the thick cords of muscles along his forearms that twitched with every movement of his fingers. There was a long, ragged line of scar tissue running across the muscle that reflected the scant light brighter than the rest of his skin. So ragged, it had to have been a deep cut when it happened.

“Rats.” He cleared his throat, his voice low and heavy. “It was the last thing I’d held myself against, the one thing desperation would not drive me to do. The one thing I swore I would not succumb to, for it would mean I was beaten, an animal like all the rest.”

He heaved a sigh, his chest filling the space in front of him. “And then one day I found myself there. Killing the little monsters. Eating them. Raw.”

Her eyes went big, her stomach flipping.

What in the hell had happened to him when he was missing?

Her lips parted. “When?”

His eyes closed for one long second, then he shook his head and continued on, ignoring her question. “Once you’ve lived like that—forced to be nothing more than an animal trying to survive—you never forget it. It gets in your bones somehow. Then it’s always there, carving you into the person you are from the inside out. Never fully letting you be. Never fully letting you be free of it, no matter how far in the past it may be.”

His head turned to her, his eyes searching her face, then meeting her stare. Eyes that were haunted, just the same as hers. And hard—they hadn’t lost that edge of terror he always had about him, ready to wield. Yet somehow that was a comfort—how that gritty edge that would allow him to survive anything was ever-present about him. “You’ve lived the agony of hunger. Done unthinkable things to survive. And you will always be itching…dirty…deep inside from it. An itch that will never let you go.”

A pained wince cut across her face. His words striking so close to what she never admitted to herself, that it physically set her nerves on fire to hear it.

She couldn’t hold his stare any longer and her head dropped, her chin hitting her chest as words crawled up her throat in a choking whisper. “Don’t do that. Don’t know me. Don’t tell me things I don’t want to know. Don’t want to admit.”

“If it hurts, it means you’re still alive. I’ve come to discover pain is the best indicator of that. Sometimes the only indicator of it.”

Her head stayed bowed. “Except one needs to be strong to handle the pain.”

“I am fairly well convinced you can handle the pain, Izzie. I’m fairly well convinced you can handle anything.”

Silence swallowed the thick air between them, until his left hand slid in along her right jawline, his thumb curling under her chin to lift her face to him.

Her stare stayed downward, her eyes nearly closed, until it became clear he was waiting for her to look at him.

She lifted her gaze, and there it was, that impenetrable edge in his eyes that ate into her, devouring her with one simple stare. His voice went raw. “We are alike, you and I, in ways that I never could have imagined. In ways that people should never be alike. But we are. It is what life has handed us.”

His stare on her a pulsating, living, breathing thing that stole her breath away.

It didn’t need to be said. How they were kindred in such a visceral, soulful way that just existed, not needing examination.

The fact of it hung in the air between them, heavy. A poison that neither one had the antidote for.

It was only instinctual that their lips fell together in that instance.

His mouth landing on hers, blazing hot, like fire and brimstone had been delivered straight from hell to consume her. And she had no defense against it—because she needed it, just the same as he did. Her lips instantly succumbed to his, pliable under his onslaught.

Her acquiescence only drove him onward, his tongue breaching her lips, his hand under her jaw prodding her mouth to open wide for him so he could deepen the invasion. His soul reaching hers in a way that words could not.

But she understood every swipe of his tongue, every guttural groan that vibrated up his throat as his right hand drifted down her body, his thumb cupping the bottom of her breasts, then running up and over her nipple through her dress. She understood how his breath on her face quickened in response to the guttural moans mewling from her chest.

He wanted to devour her. Devour her and everything that she was.

The terrifying part was that she wanted him to do that very thing. Devour her until she didn’t exist anymore. An escape from everything she was.

Just when she was about to lose herself completely in him, a vicious growl suddenly ripped from him and he tore himself away from her body, his hands jerking away from her. The side of his right fist slammed into the wall above her head and he shoved himself onto his feet.

“My apologies, Izzie. I did not mean to…to touch you.” His words hard and clipped.

He spun, his boots fast and angry against the stone floor as he removed himself from her presence, from the undercrofts.

He left the lantern for her.

The faint light of it illuminating the shadows she’d been so sure she was safe within.

She stared at the flame flickering in the dark.

She was in far, far over her head. Drowning. And she wasn’t even sure when she’d fallen overboard.