I turn away, my cheeks burning, my heart kicking against my ribs. “Don’t make this into something it isn’t.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“It was grief. And adrenaline. And fear. And?—”
“Yearning,” he finishes. “Call it weakness, a mistake, a fucking wrong turn if it makes you feel better—but you want me, Max.”
I suck in air. “Don’t.”
“Why?” His voice breaks. “You think I haven’t been losing my mind over it all day?”
I bury my face in my hands. “It’s confusing as hell. Craving the touch of someone who doesn’t have a pulse.”
A soft growl escapes him, and he pushes himself flush against me. “You think you’re frustrated? I want to touch you again, but I can’t, and it’s driving me insane. I want to kiss every smartremark out of your mouth. I want my hands on your hips, your throat, tangled in that wild hair of yours while you come apart for me.”
He exhales hard, and a powerful light blares into the room. The sunshine within him condenses into liquid gold, reaching for me in slow, molten strokes, smearing over every place he wants to touch. Every place I’m not supposed to want him to.
I track the golden speckle of light as it reaches my collarbone, spills over my breasts, curls around my waist, and lower still.
The sun is the deadliest of all fires. I should melt from this impossible caress, but my own flames rise eagerly to meet his glow.
“I want to leave marks on every single inch of you. Proof that I exist, and that you belong to me. I want you waking up sore and flushed and happy and thinking about me before your feet even touch the floor.” His voice drops an octave. “And instead, I have to lurk in the darkness. You have no idea what that does to me.”
Heat floods my face. The graphic images swirling in my head tug at something low and intimate beneath my belly button, a thread that reaches deep between my legs.
I can picture all of it and more, and a shudder racks my body. “Stop.”
“If you’d only reach for me again—” His light vanishes abruptly, his voice thick with hope and fear.
Hope that I might slip into this madness. Fear of rejection. Beneath it all, his hunger simmers.
Gods, I want to reach for him. The devil on my shoulder screams for me to fling all caution to the seven hells. I feel more alive in the company of death than with the living. Does that make me wicked? Is that what a witch is born to be—irresistibly addicted to her own self-destruction?
Is that what E has become? The embodiment of everything I’ve tried to suppress, something the witch inside me craves beyond reason?
Hide. Shrink. Obey. Stay safe.
That’s what I’ve been taught passes for a life, but is that yearning—that constant need for more—really so wrong?
It feels no different from the urge to heal a patient with blood magic. That thirst to bend the rules is always there, buried deep, lurking beneath the surface. And once you indulge it—once you reach into the dark parts of yourself and drink from that forbidden lake—it becomes almost impossible to stop.
Wanting E feels like that. Like standing on the edge of something I can’t see the bottom of.
“We can’t,” I finally manage.
“You don’t have a fiancé anymore.”
I shake my head. “That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
I hesitate, searching for words that don’t make me sound as shaken as I feel. “You probably have a—” I stop myself from sayingwife, the word too sour on my tongue. “Someone you belong to.”
A long, quiet sigh whistles out of his lungs. “We still don’t know for sure that I’m featured on the tree upstairs.”
“Even if you’re not, you had a life before this. Before me. It wouldn’t be fair on anyone to explore our…whatever this is. Not until we know more.”
The shimmer in the glass disappears.
