My attention darts to him one final time before I ease my weight over the edge, but his focus is elsewhere. Face turned up, toward the stars. I swallow around the knot now firmly crowding my windpipe.
In shallow baby steps, I slip down the stone and brick façade of City Hall. It’s beautiful, all sharp corners, pointed like a compass rose, and at its center lies a copper dome, weathered, green, and faded. Rumor has it witches were once tried within these walls and hung on the grounds. Maybe from one of the ancient oaks on the front lawn. I whisper a quick prayer to them, those innocent women who lost their lives hundreds of years ago. All over powers they probably never had.
May they watch over me and guide my steps tonight.
Just as I finish, the silence breaks.
“If I’m afraid of anything, Kaye, it’s of how much I want you.” His voice in my ear is ragged, strained. “Having you this close to me—to my family… It’s like a gun pointed at my temple. To want you is to court the end of everything I know and love. And yet…”
The heat inside me has stoked to a burn with the intensity of each stroke of his words, each forbidden admission. I feel them race over my fingers clutching the rope, over my legs straining to hold my perch on the wall. I’ve stopped moving, stopped breathing as I wait for him to complete that one tantalizing revelation.
“Kaye,” he growls. “The thought of making you my own, of finally being inside you—of feeling you clench around me and scream my name as you come… Of making you loseallself-control and shatter.It consumes me.”
I’ve forgotten how to breathe. I can picture it so easily—splayed before him, naked and wanting, his lust full of hunger,devouring. His touch claiming each and every sense before that sinful, sensual tongue of his?—
“Shit!” I slam hard onto my elbows, the impact jarring my bones, my whole skeleton vibrating with it. When the pain has passed, I check my feet and see the step I missed in my descent. One more foot to the left and I wouldn’t have been able to catch myself.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?” Now that he knows I’m not hurt or dying, a touch of laughter enters his voice.
“Absolutely nothing,” I respond.
I can feel his over-inflated male ego from here as a block of silence stretches between us.
“Did Idistractyou, Kaye?”
I regain my form on the wall, determined not to give him the satisfaction of an answer. I know better than to answer questions when I have no chance of winning.
“Tell me what thought was so captivating that you forgot you were scaling a wall four stories above the ground.” His voice glides into my ear and tingle down my spine, playful and seductive. “I bet it’s delicious.”
“There’s a window on my right,” I say. “I think I can reach it.”
He sighs. “A window, and me…”
I smirk, my fingers at last finding purchase on the cement ledge. And come face-to-face with my smudged reflection in a dingy, dust-covered, old window. The frame is loose. It’s only too easy to pry an inch. Two. And slip my hand into the aperture. It opens with a quietshuck.
“I’m in.”
“I’m in too,” Zane purrs.
I can’t help it. It’s ridiculous and immature, and yet I still smile, my chest a little lighter. “Shut up.”
The sound of his laugh, hearty and full, cuts right to my core. There’s warmth there, and something light and fleeting. Something I want, desperately.
He clears his throat. “I won’t say ‘be careful.’ You’ve done this a million times, and even if you hadn’t, you’reCheckmate, but… if you want this, I want you too. I don’t like risking the ones I love.”
Did he just say he loves me? Lightning crackles in my rib cage, striking my abdomen.
I crawl through the splintered frame, and for the first time, I’m truly not alone.
Inside, cold claws toward my bones with rigid frigidity. It makes my muscles quiver under my skin, pulling the atoms of my being in every direction. I knew coming here again would be different. That I would return as the very thing I worked so hard to keep out of these hallowed halls. The enemy. I just wasn’t prepared for how it would make me feel.
I creep like an insect along corridors that once were warm and open to me. I keep close to the walls, scanning for security and cameras, but I needn’t have bothered. Nothing seems to have changed. My picture is still on the wall, toothy grin, shaking hands with Vanall on the steps somewhere below me.
I put my hand on the earpiece to assure myself the connection is still there, but also to give myself a physical anchor. Some part of me should have questioned it sooner, should have demanded to know what had been said about my arrest publicly, but I assumed someone would have to tellsomeonewhat happened to me. A reporter or beat cop, or hell—a kid wearing Checkmate’s purple insignia.
