"Why?" I choked out.
"Because," she said, her voice dropping to a smoky purr that ignited a secondary fire in my blood. "I want to look at you."
In the doorway, a shadow moved. Anders. He had been watching.
"Bradlee," Anders’ voice cut through the haze, sharp and smelling of control returning. "Bring her back. She needs hydration. And you look like you're about to pass out."
I looked at Tessa. She smirked.
"The authority is calling," she whispered.
"Let him call," I muttered, stealing one last kiss. "He's just jealous he didn't get the view."
But I took her hand. I laced my ink-stained fingers through her pale ones. And together, we walked back toward the fire, leaving the reflection, and the ghosts, behind in the glass.
NINETEEN
Anders
The hallway was a tunnel of shadows, but the figures emerging from it were illuminated by the dying embers of the firelight in the living room.
Simon walked with a stagger, looking like a man who had touched a live wire and liked it. His dark hair was wild, his chest heaving, his scent of burnt sugar scorched so overwhelming it smelled like a refinery fire.
But it was Tessa who unmade me.
She walked beside him, her hand laced in his, but she wasn't the trembling creature who had tried to retreat behind her own eyelids. She was ruined. Beautifully, devastatingly ruined. Her lips were swollen, bit-red and slick. A silk robe hung open, revealing the flush that mottled her chest like a map of the violence we had inflicted upon her. Her legs shook with every step, but her chin was up.
She looked like a queen who had just survived a coup by seducing the executioner.
And she was still burning.
I could smell it from twenty feet away, a sharp, high-frequency spike of blackberry and brine that cut through theheavier, muskier scent of Simon’s claim. The secondary spike hadn't broken; it had just been fed. Biology was a cruel architect; it didn't care about exhaustion. It only cared about completion.
Simon had drawn the art. Daniel had laid the foundation.
But the house was still shaking.
"The authority is calling," she had whispered to Simon.
Authority.That was what I was supposed to be. The shield. The man who managed the logistics so the talent could bleed onto the page. For years, I had defined authority as distance. I thought power meant staying clean, staying seated, staying behind the podium while the girl in front of me fell apart.
I looked at her now, at the messy reality of her need, and I realized I had been wrong.
Authority wasn't distance. Authority was contact.
"You look..." I started, my voice failing me, cracking into gravel.
"Like a mess?" Tessa supplied, coming to a stop near the heavy dark desk that dominated the far corner of the living room, her workspace, the altar where she sacrificed herself daily for the bestseller list.
"Like a riot," I corrected.
I crossed the room. I moved with a purpose that felt foreign to the man in the charcoal suit, but native to the animal currently clawing at the back of my throat.
"Bradlee," I said, not looking at him. "You’re done. Your hands are shaking so badly you’re going to pull her apart."
Simon let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob. "I’m tapped out, Anders. I gave her everything."
"I know," I said. "Go to the perimeter. Stand with Daniel. Don't let the world in."
