Chapter Thirty-Two Pax

Chapter Thirty-Two

Pax

The barest traces of light flooded in from the crack in the heavy drapes that covered the window, nudging me from sleep. It was always fucking disorienting, going from asleep to awake. From the battle of Faydor to the quiet calm of a room. From the howls of the depraved to the lapping shadows that played in a deceiving peace along the walls.

Heart still beating a manic pace when I woke up alone in bed.

Unless I’d been burned and awakened writhing in pain and fighting the screams of anguish that I held bottled in my chest.

There were things I’d learned to survive in this twisted reality. Things that helped me fade into the background. Things that allowed me to skate along the fringes of society without drawing too much attention to myself.

Rule number one had always been to never be so stupid as to fall asleep beside anyone.

Ever.

If I slept with some girl? I always made sure I was long gone before night fell.

Not that there was really a chance of that, since those interludes were always detached. Someone I met in passing. Someone I found in the seedy places I slipped into as I hunted the sickest, most warped of humanity. Someone who’d been morbidly compelled by the darkness they could feel vibrating around me rather than repulsed by it. Someone who was also looking for a physical connection without anything else.

I’d allowed myself that simple pleasure.

The physical.

And it was never anything more than that.

A release from the violence that streaked through my veins. A distraction from the constant torment that battered my heart and mind.

I never made attachments and had always known that I would travel this life alone. The freak loner, the way I’d always been.

Now my eyes blinked open to the dimness that covered the motel room and landed on the face of the one person in this world who had ever left a mark on me. On the one who was scored so deeply inside me that I didn’t know if it was possible to exist without her.

Written on my soul and inscribed in my being.

Aria was still asleep, and her eyes twitched frenetically beneath her lids as she continued through Faydor, the only place I was ever supposed to know her.

Except she was wrapped in my arms, and her body was pressed to mine, our legs and spirits tangled the exact same way we’d been when we’d drifted to sleep last night.

That kiss still burned on my lips and played on a loop through my mind. I would never get over the way it’d felt to experience her like that, the way my heart had sped and my spirit had leaped. The way every inch of my body had come alive. And for those fleeting moments, my soul had howled that she and I were meant for more.

Touching her that way couldn’t be wrong.

Then she’d begged me to take it further, and I’d come slamming into a brick wall of reality. I couldn’t have her that way.

Yet still, I couldn’t let her go, hadn’t been able to all night, and I drew her closer right then.

Heat flamed where we were connected, and my stomach was balled in a fist of need.

My insides quaked as I thought of the hunt last night. How we’d failed at picking up a trace of the deviant. Funny how that tragedy had lent a speck of peace for us right then since no one had come for her during that time.

What left me really fucking unsettled, though, was whatever had gone down in Aria’s mind right before I’d awakened. The way she’d seemed to get locked into some kind of trap. Unable to move or process. No doubt, all this bullshit pressure was getting to her. The strain was too great for any one person to suffer.

I felt the shift in her. When the rigidness of her muscles eased and she became light in my arms. As if she floated through the nothingness, through time and space and eternity, one moment before the palest gray eyes fluttered open to me.

They were already aware, no shock at finding me lying beside her, like she’d already known I was waiting for her as she fell. Ready to catch her even though she’d been in my arms all along.

Her tender gaze traveled my face.

Gently tracing.

Softly memorizing.

Shivers raced like tendrils of fire when she reached up and ran her fingertips through the stubble on my jaw, and my heart thundered harder.

The air was thin.

Shaky and turbid.

My voice was gravel when I spoke, grinding through the tension that strained between us. “I’m sorry we didn’t find it last night. But we will. I promise you, we will.”

“There is nothing for you to apologize for, Pax.” She hesitated like she was going to say more.

“What is it?”

Her head barely shook. “Nothing. I’m just thankful to be right here. Right now.”

My hand went to her head, fingers weaving in the locks of her long, black hair, caressing down until I was holding her by the back of the neck. “I just want to take care of you. Protect you.”

“You are. You are right here. Exactly where I need you.” The words were wisps, and the fingers she had on my face traipsed lower until she had them curled in my shirt. She drew me closer as she pressed her chest against mine. Desperate to erase the space. To fill the void that ached between us.

“I need you.” She whispered it like a prayer.

A plea that I felt like a punch to the gut.

“Aria.” It was restraint. A promise. A warning.

I knew I needed to unravel myself from where we were tied. Push her away and stop this recklessness before it spiraled out of control.

Before I did something I knew we would both regret.

But in that second, I could barely breathe. Could barely think. Everything was skewed by the greed that ran rampant.

It howled in my ears. Clouded my mind. Laid siege to my senses.

I was consumed with what it would be like to peel her from her clothes. Touch her. Sink into her.

Like she’d witnessed every salacious thought blaze through my mind, Aria whimpered a tiny needy sound, and her plump, swollen lips parted.

She arched. The peaks of her small tits were hard and pressing at my chest.

Electricity crackled and snapped, a bolt of lightning that shocked through the room.

Thunder came from a place that shouldn’t exist, and I swore I felt the ground tremble.

My palm spread wide as I let it rove down her shoulder and skim her side, and my fingers dug into her hip, somehow both pushing her away and drawing her closer. “You’re everything, Aria. I don’t think you know the way you changed everything the first time I saw you. Standing there in the doorway of your room in the facility ... when I looked at you?”

My fingers burrowed deeper as the words scraped like shards from my mouth. “It wasn’t like being reborn. It was realizing why I was born in the first place.”

“You were the truth inside me when I never knew what was real. My hope. The hollow place inside that only you could fill,” she whispered.

Shifting, she dragged her leg over the top of mine, and those eyes flared as she purposefully rubbed herself over my cock, which had hardened to stone.

She gasped at the contact.

A thousand flames leaped.

Fuck me.

She’d barely brushed against me, but I thought I might pass out from the feel of her.

Sparks of pleasure shot up my spine, and lust rolled through my insides like liquid steel.

“And kissing you last night?” I said. “It’ll probably go down as the single most perfect moment of my life.”

Her teeth raked over her bottom lip like she could taste it. Like it was going to be the most perfect moment in her life, too.

Still, I was forcing out, “But we can’t do this, Aria.” The words were coarse. Gravel that scattered between us. “I crossed a line last night I never should have crossed.”

The promise I’d made to Ellis echoed through my mind.

“ Protect her while awake. Stand at her side until we see this through. We will find it and destroy it here. But you must leave her then. Once this is finished. And you must never give in to what I see in your eyes. ”

Aria peeled herself back.

It felt like I was being cut in two.

Both hurt and understanding were etched into every line on her face as she looked at me for one second before she rolled away, and the bed creaked as she sat up on the side, facing away from me.

I flopped onto my back, and I turned my focus to the ceiling like it might be able to staunch this ache. Soothe the way it felt like my chest might cave.

Or maybe ... maybe if I looked hard enough, I might find a cure for who we were and who we were supposed to be.

When Aria’s words broke into the tense silence, they were so low, so quiet. “I was meant for you, Pax. We might have been told it’s wrong, but I know all the way to my soul that it’s not. How could you ever be wrong?”

Energy swirled around us, that connection that followed us into the deep. Into the darkness, and now into the light.

It crashed as it crested.

Wave after wave.

“I don’t know how many days I have left, but I do know that I don’t want to spend them in regret.” Her words were so quiet that they barely broke the air.

I was on my knees behind her before I had given myself permission to make the move. I wound one arm around her left side and across her chest as that hand went to the right side of her jaw.

I had her boxed against me, but it was Aria who had me caged.

My mouth dropped to her ear. “Don’t speak in days, Aria. Not when I will give it all so you have a life. A real life. A future. Peace. Love. A family, if you want it. Whatever makes you happy. Whatever brings you joy. It’s the only thing I want for you.”

She shifted enough to look back at me from over her shoulder. Gray eyes glimmered, a sea of glittering silver in the slice of sunlight that cut through the slit in the drapes. “I already have love, Pax. It’s bold and bright and never-ending. It’s always lived inside me, hidden in my dreams. It’s you , where you’ll be forever written inside me.”

Then she unwound herself from my arms, and through the shadows, I watched as she walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.

It felt like she was trying to put a barrier between me and her confession.

There was no chance of that.

It whispered on the connection that bound.

Rode on the tether that tied.

One so fierce, I was sure it was going to follow me into death.