A warm, wet trickle ran down my chin.
“If you were singing forme, beautiful sparrow,” Elian breathed, his eyes blazing once more, “I wouldn’t allow an audience.”
His tongue darted out to trace the path of the blood from my chin to my lower lip, but that’s as far as he went.
All too soon, he turned away, severing the last of our momentary connection.
Jax pulled out and gently set me back on my feet, wrapping his arms around my middle. His release slid down my thighs.
I leaned back into his embrace, anchoring myself.
Elian sighed. Held my gaze for a thousand years, a thousand mysteries burning in his.
Only one thing was clear.
Between the three of us, everything had just changed.
No one spoke.
And when Elian finally turned and stalked out that door without so much as a backward glance, it felt like I’d lost him all over again.
32
JAX
Tell me something, angel,” I said. “Why him?”
We were standing in the shower after that crazy shit with Saint, my hands gliding up and down Haley’s soaped-up curves as she slathered conditioner through her hair.
She twisted it into a loose knot on top of her head, then stepped close, sliding her hands up over my shoulders. Her nipples hardened against my chest, and when I palmed her perfect backside, she grinned.
She looked sad, though, and I didn’t know whose ass I wanted to beat harder—Saint’s, for breaking her heart all those years ago, or mine, for asking about it now.
It was none of my business. But before I could tell her to forget it, she sighed and said, “it may be hard to believe now, but the Elian I knew back then was kind and sweet and funny. I mean, yeah, he’s always walked on the dark side. But he was… I don’t know. Different before. Not so jaded and selfish.”
Selfish wasn’t a word I’d use to describe Saint, but I wasn’t sure what to call him, either. In the time I’d known him, he’d shown a strong sense of self-preservation, coupled with a razor-sharp ingenuity that was just this side of dangerous. That combination often spelled disaster for anyone crazy enough to get caught up in his bullshit, but it could just as easily save someone’s life as wreck it.
I’d been on both sides of it. Still was.
Like most of the dark, damaged, and depraved of Midnight, Saint was a complicated fuck.
“Sometimes he’d just sit in the dark with me,” Haley said, “breathing with me, letting me listen to his heartbeat. It always brought me back from the edge.”
Her eyes flooded with tears, and my heart squeezed.
“The edge of what, angel?”
Despite the hot shower, a shiver rolled through her body, and she drew closer to me. “Have you ever felt completely broken? Like you weren’t even a whole person, but a collection of jagged pieces, some of them missing, some of them smashed beyond repair?”
I didn’t know what the fuck to say to that, so I tightened my hold on her.
“There have been times in my life…” she said. “I mean, it’s never totally gone, but it’s not as bad now as… Anyway, back then, a lot of times I’d slip into these dark moods where I was convinced I was just this broken, unfixable thing. But Elian… He never made me feel that way. Never treated me like I was a burden just for having feelings or expressing shitty thoughts. Never told me to look at the bright side or be more positive or any of that bullshit people throw at you under the guise of helping when all they’re really doing is trying to make themselves more comfortable with your pain. He didn’t try to glue me back together—and it wasn’t because he agreed I couldn’t be fixed. He just never believed I needed fixing at all. ‘Falling apart doesn’t mean you’re broken,’ he used to tell me.” She sighed. “Sometimes that was all I needed. That one little reminder, and I knew it would be okay, even when it hurt.”
“Why thefuckdid he leave?” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but loud it was.
“I don’t know, Jax.” She blew out a breath, hot mist across my chest, then pulled back. When she looked up into my eyes again, I thought she might say something else about it, but then she just shook her head and lowered her gaze. It landed on the tattoo over my heart—a skull weeping blood, mouth full of roses.
“Hudson has the same one,” she said softly, reaching up to trace the outline.
