Chapter Twenty-Three Aria

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aria

It was strange not having a real destination. We were simply driving, although it was clear Pax wanted to put as much distance between New York and ourselves as possible, so I assumed we were going to end up somewhere on the West Coast.

We’d driven all day and well into the dark, and it was past ten when we pulled into another crummy motel about fifty miles on the other side of Saint Louis, Missouri. This one was two stories, the doors also accessed directly from the outside.

Pax said it was safer that way; it was best if we weren’t trapped inside a building if we needed to make a quick escape.

We climbed the exterior steps to our room on the second level, each of us loaded down with bags, plus I carried a large brown sack from a local burger place where we’d gone through the drive-through.

Pax slid the key into the lock, and he again went inside and searched the room before he gave me the all clear and I shuffled in.

It was much the same as the last one, though here the interior was a dingy, dust-tainted blue.

Two beds on the left. A table directly to the right.

I dumped my bag onto the farthest bed before I placed the paper sack on the small table.

Grease saturated the bottom, and the heavy scent of french fries floated into the air.

My stomach grumbled.

“You’d think I hadn’t fed you all day.” That low voice slipped over me from behind. So close that it sent a rash of chills skating over my flesh. I did my best to shake it off. To pretend I wasn’t affected. To act like my body didn’t shiver and my spirit didn’t ache.

I wondered if he could feel it.

If he ever had.

If every time I entered Tearsith, he could see the wash of what radiated from me.

This love that felt trapped inside, a secret shrouded in our mystery.

“I guess I’m making up for when I was in the facility,” I told him, lifting a shoulder to my ear as I tried to play off the reaction I had to him.

That reaction had only grown in the distance we’d traveled today.

Today I’d had time to just ... study him.

Watch him as he’d driven for countless miles, the man hedged in a cloak of armor so hard he might as well have been covered in jagged, unpolished steel. His attention rapt and never failing.

But there were moments when that ferocity would slip.

For the barest moment when he’d glance at me. As if he found some kind of solace that I was there. Real and whole and safe.

During that time, I’d tried to process the events that had happened over the last twenty hours. To catch up to the change and to prepare myself for what was to come.

“Good. You need to keep up your strength.”

“I know.”

Pax moved around me and pulled out the contents of the bag. Two cheeseburgers and two orders of fries. “Sit.”

I complied, pulling out the chair and sitting across from him. He didn’t hesitate to dig in, wrapping his mouth around the burger before he began to chew. The muscles in his jaw flexed as he ate, red lips almost hypnotizing as I stared.

A tiny scowl pinched between his brow since I was just sitting there, and I dove in, groaning a little when I bit into my burger.

“I always wondered what it would be like if I met you,” I finally chanced once I’d eaten half. I took a fry and dipped it in ketchup, watching him from over the table as I placed it into my mouth.

“Don’t quite add up to what you’d imagined, do I?”

In contemplation, my teeth raked my bottom lip. He tracked the movement with that searing gaze.

“I think you’re exactly what I imagined. Fierce and brave and wearing the kind of chip on your shoulder that only someone like us could earn. Walking around with an edge of aggression. Suspicious. Never trusting a soul you meet.”

“That’s because people can’t be trusted.”

I popped another fry into my mouth to buy myself time before I tilted my head as I looked at him. “You believe that of everyone? That they’re fundamentally bad?”

He grunted as he took another bite of his burger.

I wondered if it made me a freak that I wanted to reach out and run my fingers through that rough sound.

It wasn’t as if I had any experience in that or had anything to compare this feeling to, but I knew well enough that I could never feel this way with anyone else.

“I think people are easily swayed,” he answered. “Deluded into what they want to believe. Opening themselves to wickedness anytime they want something badly enough. Excuses conjured in their feeble minds as vindication for their actions.”

Air wisped from my nose.

Pax arched a severe brow. “You don’t agree?”

“I think humanity is more complex than that, and our survival instinct often presents itself as greed. I felt it distinctly when I was in the facility. When I could feel the emotions radiating from everyone around me. The desperation to survive, while the hopelessness to do it was all consuming.”

I paused before I asked, “What about this woman, Maria? Are we going to trust her? Contact her?”

The piece of paper with her number on it burned in my pocket.

Uncertainty crested in his spirit. “Not sure that we can trust her, but I think we need to at least try to figure out what she was trying to tell us.”

“It feels insane that someone recognized us.”

Pax chewed on a fry. “I know.”

He wavered before he continued, “You felt it, didn’t you? Earlier? The Ghorl who was feeding thoughts into that trucker’s mind?” The question grated, Pax finally giving voice to what we’d both known when we fled from the motel earlier this morning.

I was being tracked.

Hunted.

“Yes.”

“How?”

My head shook with uncertainty, with the vestiges of what had swelled in the frigid air that had gusted across the lot.

Palpable.

A darkness that had enclosed and covered me in a slick of corrosion.

I swallowed around the clot of dread that threatened to close off my throat. “It’s like a ... new sense. Like it’s pulling at my flesh and digging at my spirit. A shout of silence. An intonation of depravity. If I’d have gotten closer to him? I would have heard what he was thinking. And I know if I would have touched him, I would have seen exactly what had been in that man’s mind. I’d have seen the Ghorl telling him exactly how to hurt me.”

A low growl reverberated in his throat. “I won’t let anyone get near you.”

“How did you know?” I asked, attempting to distract him from the rage that gathered like storm clouds in his pale eyes.

It took him a moment to answer. “You chase evil long enough and it becomes easy to recognize.”

With the way he seemed to calculate what to say, I could tell he was leaving something out. That there was something more to him than he was letting on.

Pax suddenly pushed up from his chair and leaned over the table in my direction before I had the chance to delve deeper. A white, shadowy flame.

A dusky luminosity.

He hovered over me, the oath grinding from his mouth. “Until we figure out how to keep you safe? Permanently? As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be treating every person we cross as a threat.”

We remained there, held by a tether that blazed, a string tugging so hard at my chest that I couldn’t breathe.

Pax finally blinked and stepped back, as if he was berating himself for getting so close to me. “I should take a shower,” he said toward the floor, roughing a palm over the top of his head.

“I’ll be right here.” It was my own promise. Trying to assuage the fear that radiated from him. The fear of letting me out of his sight.

With a tight nod, Pax strode across the floor and into the bathroom, and he clicked the door shut behind him.

A second later, the pipes squealed as the shower was turned on. The walls were so thin that I could hear the rustling on the other side, the pounding of the water onto porcelain, the swoosh of fabric, the jangle of a belt.

I squeezed my eyes against the visions that assaulted my mind.

Because I couldn’t picture him that way. Naked as he stepped beneath the spray.

I couldn’t keep from wondering what it might be like if he saw me the way I saw him.

From wondering if he felt it.

I knew I was being foolish, lost to a child’s crush, to a bond that resounded with so much strength that it could easily be distorted and confused. But I wasn’t a child anymore.

I could only imagine the way he’d spent his human life. There was no way he hadn’t ...

Jumping from the chair, I clipped off the thoughts because that was something I refused to think about.

Devolving into it would only hurt.

It wasn’t his fault that I’d always thought of him as mine, but I had no claim on him here.

I stuffed our burger wrappers into the paper sack and shoved it into the garbage; then I climbed onto the small twin bed and leaned against the headboard, trying to slow my breaths. To calm the ravaging beat in my chest. But the harder I tried to clear it, the more I seemed to focus on the sounds coming from the bathroom. The shower when it turned off and the squawk of the metal curtain hooks being dragged against the rod.

I’d worked myself into some kind of anxious frenzy by the time the door finally snapped open, and there was no stopping the gasp that slipped from between my lips when he stepped out, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and rubbing a towel over his wet hair.

He was shirtless, chest and shoulders and abdomen bare, and in the dull light, my eyes raced to take him in, hungry as I searched for every scar beneath the designs that covered his skin. The dark images swirled and played over his flesh like sentient entities.

Muscle bristled beneath, packed and hard and rippling with that sleek strength he emitted.

He stopped right outside the door.

We both froze.

Locked.

Ensnared.

“You can’t look at me like that, Aria.” The gnarled warning cut into the severity that writhed between us.

My attention snapped from the barren wasteland tattooed on his abdomen and chest to meet the white fire in his gaze.

“I don’t think I could stop looking at you.” The admission flooded from me on a needy breath. “How could I when you’re like looking at my truth? For the last ten years of my life, I’ve been told you were a figment of my mind. A piece of my warped imagination. That I was delusional. And here you are with blood pounding through your veins.”

“Aria.” His molars ground so hard I felt the force of it crack in the room.

“You are so beautiful.” It scraped out without permission. “Your body that has kept your scars, those eyes that hold your secrets. And I know your heart is, too.”

The air in the small room grew dense, every molecule enclosed. Trembles rocked through it. An awareness that thrashed and begged in the space between us.

“I’m the last person you should see that way.”

“You’re the only person I could see that way.” I figured I didn’t have time to be shy or modest. Not when this might be my only chance at confessing this.

My only chance at confessing what burned inside me.

I didn’t know how many tomorrows I had left.

The words were a whisper of desperation from my lips: “How do you see me?”

A groan curled up his thick throat, and he tossed the towel he was using to dry his hair to the floor before he took two steps to bring himself to the end of my bed.

His movements were slow. Filled with caution. With a reservation that rattled him to the bone.

“I see the one person who has ever meant anything to me. I see the one I’ve been sent to protect. I’m looking at my purpose, Aria. But it has to end at that.”

“Why?”

He choked over a pained, disbelieving sound. “You know why.”

“And maybe I don’t care. Maybe I want to take one thing for myself. Just once. I’m eighteen and I’ve never been kissed, and I might die tomorrow.”

I couldn’t believe I was telling him any of this. That I’d laid all my insecurities and inexperience at his feet. But it all left me in a bid of gravity.

“Don’t fucking say that,” he spat as he surged forward. He dropped to his knees at the side of my bed.

I moved, drawn, sitting up and draping my legs over the side, because the only thing I wanted to do was erase that space.

Heat blasted from him.

The man was a furnace.

“Don’t fucking say that.” It was a whispered plea this time. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“And what if it would kill me if something happened to you trying to protect me?”

He took my hand between both of his. “You’re worth any cost. I’ve known it my entire life.”

Tears blurred my eyes, and he reached up and wiped away the one that slid down my cheek.

“I would never ask that of you.” Except I had, hadn’t I? My spirit had beckoned him through the darkness. Shouting to be rescued when I’d been trapped.

“You don’t have to ask for what has already been committed.” Fingertips trailed down my cheek, gathering more moisture before barely brushing over my trembling lips.

Shivers rolled, a flash fire that made me shake, and the love I’d forever feel for him flailed from within, begging to be acknowledged.

The brittle ice of his eyes had gone soft, a lapping sea as he stared, though his muscles were taut with restraint as he kept brushing his fingertips over my lips. “How is it possible no one has ever kissed you?”

“Who would want to get close to someone like me?” It quivered out.

The loneliness of the life we lived.

Solitary confinement.

Not that anyone could have gotten close to me anyway.

Not when my soul only wanted him.

“Any man would be lucky to get close to you, and I would give anything for that, but you know I can’t. I’d be a bastard for touching you. I won’t taint you. Won’t take that risk. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

My throat tightened. My heart a riot that bashed against my chest. My mind a spiral of the things he’d given me.

I would give anything for that.

I won’t taint you.

God. Did he somehow think he wasn’t worthy of me? That this man who’d risked everything—his freedom and his life—wasn’t good enough?

I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t make any sounds come from my thickened tongue, and Pax slowly stood, his gorgeous body towering over me, a fortress.

He reached out and cupped my cheek.

“We have to go back.”

Each time I’d slept, I’d done it out of sync with our Laven family, and I had hidden in the sanctuary of Tearsith while they fought.

My nod was weak, but he was right.

Faydor was calling.

And we couldn’t resist it any longer.