“I don’t know how to do this.”
I wait, and when he finally speaks again, his voice is barely more than a whisper.
“I’ve never…” He lets out a quiet, humorless laugh. “I’ve never done this before.”
My heart aches at his admission. Because a man like him should have been loved long before now. He should have known what it felt like to be looked at without fear. To be touched without expectation and to have someone choose him without asking him to become something first. Instead, life had made him a killer. Just as it had made me something I was never supposed to become.
“Neither have I,” I murmur, watching as his eyes widen in surprise, searching mine for the lie in them, or trying to decide if he’d heard me correctly, I’m not so sure.
“You’re a virgin?”
Heat floods my face, and I look away before he can mistake it for anything else. The question catches something inside me, and my gaze involuntarily dropsto the floor, shame blooming beneath my skin for reasons that shouldn’t exist. Not because of the question itself, but because the answer belongs to monsters who never deserved to have it. A silence settles between us, his fingers slipping from beneath my chin, not to pull away, but to give me the space to do the same if I wanted.
“It’s okay,” he says quietly. “You don’t need to hide from me. You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to.” He gently brushes the back of my hand, and my eyes lift back to his. There is no judgement waiting for me there. Only patience.
“Tell me your name?” I say the words before I can stop myself. They linger between us like something fragile. Something honest. Until now, he’d only been Death. A shadow wandering forgotten graves. A dark angel draped in black. A silent promise whispered into the night whenever I begged the universe to send him a message. To tell him to find me and to take me away. I know there are many names for him. A different name. A different face. A different story. But I’d never stopped to wonder whether the man sitting before me had been given one of his own.
“Raven. Raven King.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
RAVEN
She repeats the words back to me, and the sound of my name on her lips steals the air from my lungs with far greater force than any weapon ever could. Not the gravedigger. Not the reaper. Not the title men have called me for years because they were trying to get a rise out of me. Or because it was easier to remember. They were correct, but that’s beside the point.
I don’t know what she sees when she looks at me. Part of me doesn’t want her to see me at all. Because the truth behind the lie is, I’ve done things far worse than she could even fathom, and despite her newfound strength, I can’t risk the thought of her walking away because of who I am. I warned her years ago that she should be afraid and she never was. My little ghost has always been the strange exception to the rule, the rule being that sooner or later they run from me.
I’d never been with a woman. My life doesn't permit such luxuries. I’ve always thought the risk was too great if anything were to happen.And it always almost does. The thought of her getting hurt because of me short-circuits my brain. People like me don’t get to have something this precious without the world demanding payment for it. It always finds the one thing worth taking. The one person capable of bringing a man to his knees. I’ve watched it happen too many times. Men far smarter than me. Far stronger. They all made the same mistake. They loved someone. The wrong person noticed. Then they took them.
I can survive another bullet. I know how to endure those things. I’ve been trained to. I don’t know how to survive watching someone use her to get to me. The thought alone is enough to hollow me out. Because the people who want me dead. The people out there waiting to seek their revenge for all the wrong I’ve done, even if it was in the name of something much, much bigger, they wouldn’t hesitate. The second someone realizes she matters to me, she stops being my ghost. She becomes leverage. A weakness. A message waiting to be delivered in blood. It’s the reason I’ve kept her at an arms length all this time. The reason I can’t bring myself to follow through with killing her, because I know exactly what doing it would cost me. Not just her life. Mine too. Because I refuse to live in a world where she doesn’t exist.
The admission is heavy, one I’m glad I didn’t verbalize, but it’s still too heavy to take back. Toohonest to pretend I don’t mean it. I watch her, staring into my eyes and not at the blood that stains my body. Not the scars scattered across my hands. Me.
The silence lingers between us until I begin wondering if I’ve disappointed her in some way, but then, she moves. One careful, slow movement has my heart skipping a beat. She says nothing as her hands rise slowly, giving me the chance to stop her before they come to rest against the fabric of my shirt. She searches my face, looking for something she will not find because there is nothing in this world, other than her, that will stop this moment from happening. Even if there’s a part of me that knows this will only end one way.
Her brow raises, and I nod once. That's all I can manage. Only then do her fingers slip over the fabric, deftly undoing the first button before moving to the next. There is no urgency in her touch. No hunger. Only a tenderness so foreign it has my knees weakening. Her knuckles brush my chest as she works, and I swear she feels my heart threatening to beat straight through the bones that cage it. When the last button comes free, she parts the shirt just enough to ease it from my shoulders. The fabric catches against my arms before sliding the rest of the way down, leaving me sitting before her with far fewer places to hide.
I don’t remember the last time a person looked at me without the armor I’d spent a lifetime wearing,and I don’t mean the physical kind. She gathers the discarded shirt in her hands before laying it beside my jacket. When she looks back at me, there isn’t an ounce of fear in her expression. Only the same impossible assuredness that’s been dismantling me since the moment she first walked through my front door.
Outside, the wind presses softly against the old windows, the fire downstairs settling with a distant crackle. The rest of the world continues as though nothing about it has changed. Everything has. Everything has changed because the woman who has occupied my thoughts for far longer than she’ll ever know takes a slow step backwards, never once breaking eye contact, before her fingers find the hem of the oversized shirt she’s wearing.
My shirt.
One of the ones I handed her without question. The one she’d disappeared into turning something as ordinary as fabric into something I know I’ll never be able to look at the same way again. She draws in a quiet breath, her movements unhurried, as she slips the shirt over her head. It falls through her fingers, whispering itself against her skin before it settles onto the floor between us. My body reacts before my mind can catch up. Every muscle tightens, my breath catching somewhere in my throat as I gaze at the apparition before me. The light spilling in from the hallway gathers around her, illuminating her skin in awarmth I feel everywhere. My nostrils flare as she looks over at me, her blue eyes like violets in the low light, unknowing of what she’s doing to me. I want to give her everything she’s ever wanted. Every kindness she was ever denied. Every moment she never thought she’d have. Every tomorrow she thought would never come, because something is telling me she didn’t get to have those things. Because right now, nothing beyond these walls matter. Not the blood on my hands. Not the orders waiting for me that I’ll eventually have no option but to follow.
Nothing but her.
My eyes catch on the scars that taint her ribs, the dark shadows that paint her otherwise flawless skin. They pull at something deep inside me, each one a reminder that while I was watching over her from a distance, the world still found ways to hurt her. Hurt what’s mine.
I don’t ask where they came from. That’s a story she can tell me another time if she chooses.
The urge to reach for her is almost unbearable. Not to count them. Simply to erase whoever the fuck laid a hand on her in the first place. Suddenly, her elusiveness starts to make sense to me. The reason she couldn’t answer wasn’t because she didn’t want me to know, but because she was afraid of what would happen if I did. The hunch I had the first night she got here had been right. Someone is pulling thestrings when it comes to her. Forcing her silence. Forcing her to comply. I could tell in the way she carries herself. Differently than she had years ago. As if something inside her had finally snapped, and it was all in the name of survival. Her words crawl over my skin as they sink into me.
I make a silent vow to myself that I will find them. That I will rip them from whatever hole they live in. One by one. I won’t ask permission. I won’t ask questions. I won’t leave whoever did this behind for the world to remember their name.
The hands that taught her to fear.
The boots that left her broken.
