I swipe at another tear.
“Don’t let Rafe come between us.”
I grab the page off the counter and lift it in the air. “He’s not the one coming between us. You know he’s not.”
Jude glares.
I glare back. “The ruby brought you to life after I poured my love into it. Now it’s using my love to feed on you.”
He yanks the henley over his head.
“You heard what Rafe said?—”
“I don’t care what Rafe says!” he shouts, so loud I startle.
And in the wake of it, his chest heaves.
My own feels like it’s being split in two.
I look at the page—the blasted page—and inhale deeply. All the courage and determination I do not feel. “I’m not going to be the reason you slowly die.”
Jude takes my face in his hands. “All of us are slowly dying, Selah. Every day that we’re alive.”
I wrap my fingers around his wrists and for a moment—one selfish moment—I close my eyes and bask in his warmth. The heat of his body. The strength of his presence. Then I look up into his face and peel his hands away. “I won’t be the one to kill you.”
A storm rolls across his expression.
His jaw goes hard as flint.
He snatches his coat off the ground and sweeps from the store. The door slams behind him so hard, the windows rattle.
32
AN UNLIKELY ALLIANCE
Istand on the bank of the pond, its mossy rim caught beneath a skin of ice. At the far end, the water narrows beneath a crumbling bridge. A rowboat drifts beneath it, loosely tied to a post, and near the tree line, a pavilion slumps around a bench made of black marble.
Simon laid his dying sister upon that bench.
Now he’s imprisoned alongside my mother. Vorat is hunting humans. He’s kidnapping the innocent. Collecting souls. Wearing the ruby. Using my love to feed on Jude’s life.
My lungs burn.
The oxygen inside is like steam in a kettle.
I ball my hands into fists and shout across thewater, “I know you’re here! What do you want, you greedy piece of?—”
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
I spin around.
Rafe leans against a tree, the same way he did when we first met in the family graveyard.
“I can’t kiss my mother,” I tell him, quickly wiping my eyes with the back of my sleeve. “I haven’t been able to for nine years. And I was going to sayvermin.”
He prowls closer with his head slightly cocked. “You’ve been crying.”
I swallow the knot in my throat and hold my ground. I refuse to give him an inch. But then he lifts his knuckle like he intends to run it down my cheek. I step back and glare.
