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He lifts a hand to caress my cheek, his gaze filling with the emotion I least expected to see. It’s the same look that filled me with warmth all those years ago, spreading out into his irises like a tropical ocean. I sigh, melting into his arms.
“I needed to come here,” I whisper. Telling the truth is the most natural thing because this isn’t just the man who shot a guy in the face right in front of me. He’s also the boy who felt like home to me before I was adopted. This is the feeling I’ve been chasing all my life and finally I found it in the same person who gave me the first taste of it.
“Things started coming back to me at the club. Maybe it was the shock, or the terror, I don’t know. I just knew I had to come to this place, because there was this irresistible pull.” I shake all over as Zayne closes his arms around me. “I knew you’d never bring me here, and after what you did at the club–”
“It’s all right,” he says warmly as I drop the teddy bear and bury my face in his chest. I breathe in his scent, the whiff of citrus and the tinge of danger. A cocktail of emotions courses through my body as his presence becomes solid reality under my hands.
I can’t help stroking my way up his powerful arms to his broad shoulders, wanting to take in everything he is, from the broken boy to the killer. Wanting to absorb it all into me, lock him in my soul and keep him forever nurtured and loved. Something in my reaction must surprise him too, because he goes perfectly still for a few moments until his body responds. His adamant muscles relax, reveling in my touch. Letting me explore him, breathe him in.
“I don’t blame you for running away from me.” His voice is a brush of black silk over my senses. “I can’t deal with it, and I probably won’t let it happen, but I understand the attempt. I would fucking run away from myself if I could. But just so you know, you were the first and most beautiful thing in my life. I may not have been aware of it, but my body remembered the moment I laid eyes on you at The Rite. The craving that punched into my chest, the jealousy, the desire to be the man whose face you came on, it was all born of that memory.”
“Like muscle memory,” I whisper against his chest. “I felt it, too. It’s why I wanted you so badly, despite, you know...” I trail off, unwilling to taint this moment with the memory of how the two of us came together.
But the harm is done. Zayne goes taut under my hands.
“I used you like an animal when we first met.” His voice is laced with pain. “I fucking deserve to have the skin burnt off me again for that.”
“Don’t say that.” My fingers claw into the back of his sweater. I plaster myself tighter to him. “I know who you are, Zayne. The boy I met all those years ago, he’s still in here, I know it. I can feel him.”
That beautiful, pained face smiles down at me as I press myself against his chest.
“We both know that boy is dead and buried, Sirenna.”
“I can bring him back,” I whisper, tears streaking down my cheeks. I can taste their saltiness and, with it, the ache of the decades in which we were apart. “They say love can work miracles,” I continue when his thumbs wipe the tears off my face. “And I really do believe that.”
“You didn’t a few hours ago, when you stormed out of Rose Tower, using the only opportunity you knew you’d ever have to get away from me.”
I grip his arms tighter, as if that could force him to believe me. They feel like concrete under my palms. “I told you why I did it.” I keep staring into his eyes to make him see the truth, blinking the tears away. “I left because I needed to remember, and everything in me screamed to get to this place. I can’t explain it, but it called to me. It was never my intention to leave you.”
“Not even after what you saw? After you finally saw the monster?”
“I don’t condone your methods, and I don’t agree with most of your decisions in how you deal with your enemies. But I know that your essence is good. And I know better than anyone. After all, no one has known you longer than I have.” I reach up and cup that sculpted jaw in my hands. “You were the first person who ever loved me, Zayne, and I loved you back. That divine feeling, it never went away. We bonded with each other on levels that are impossible to break.”
“They are.” Darkness spills into his voice. “But our bond is a shackle, forged of the anguish and sorrow of two children. Of orphans who never knew the warmth of a home. Those first years of our lives shaped us, and nothing is going to change what they turned us into. In my case, a murderous monster. Nothing can undo that damage, not even the balm and healing that you give me.”
The words smash my chest like rocks.
“A shackle. Is that what this is to you? You feel imprisoned by what we have?”
“Don’t you?”
I open my mouth but then close it, not sure what to say.
“Of course you do,” he says. “Because I made you mine against your will. I used force when you rejected me, I took your for my own, all in a desperate attempt to brand myself into you the way you’d branded yourself into my fucking bones. Ever since The Rite, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I manipulated the whole situation with Joseph so that you’d seek me out. I would have loved nothing more than to kill him, you know?” He strokes my face gently as he continues. “My love for you is a prison I wouldn’t want to break out of even if I could. It’s a drug.”
He bends his face closer, nearly taking my breath away. “Like the drugs you thought you’d find in here.”
I blink a few times before I realize he just switched direction.
I definitely care about the drugs, about the children he supposedly performs clinical trials on, but deep down I know the truth.
“You’re not actually doing that,” I state. “You’re not testing drugs on kids.”
“How do you know?” He lifts an eyebrow. “You saw the monster that I’ve become. I could be capable of anything.”
I shake my head. “Not of that.” I run my thumbs over his perfect cheekbones. I’m starting to understand that I’ll never get enough of his face, and I’m done fighting it. “It’s not your style. Not what you stand for.”
“What do you think I stand for?”
