Page 12 of Loved By the Gargoyle

He’d fallen at an awkward angle. And yes, those had been wings I’d peeked at, and he’d landed right on top of them, one of them folding in half, appearing to have broken beneath him.

“Xavir! Are you okay?” I hissed.

His body twitched like a bug’s.

Did I kill him?

Did my compliment about his appearance end his life?

I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope, if that was the case.

“Please don’t be dead,” I whispered and yelped as his body twitched a second time.

But still, he did not get up.

Perhaps, if I did not remove myself from where I had fallen, some type of black magic would create a portal that would swallow my crumpled body and spit me out into the darkest depths of the Underworld where I belonged.

Perhaps facing the king of hell would not hold as much humiliation as this.

It could not have been helped, my body’s reaction to her words. It had been far too much of a surprise, and I had lost control of my limbs.

Beautiful.

Beautiful?

Beautiful, me?

Surely, she jested.

Yet I knew Mia Song. I knew her jokes, and her soft face had been sincere, openly honest and raw. I knew what it was to have her on paper, so I had been caught off guard to experience that expression in the flesh for the first time.

Her reaction had not been one I was expecting.

For weeks, months, I had convinced myself she would fear me. That my face was a thing of nightmares. Nazzar had led me to believe their sensibilities were fragile at first. That she would fear me. And watching, I had thought the same, knowing I was not built like human males of her world.

And yet she did not look at me with disgust.

Her lids hooded, and she had smiled at me. It felt like looking at the presence of an angel herself.

And now I was on her floor, with a likely-broken and twisted wing, my body throbbing, and yet…

None of it compared to the storm inside me. The heart in my chest pounded faster and faster at the thought of her and me, of us. I was no longer in the shadows. She knew of my existence.

But I would first muster the bravery to stand and face her right then.

“Xavir?”

Her timid voice pulled me from the confines of my own thoughts.

My body twitched as I struggled to stave off the humiliation in my bones.

“Please don’t be dead.”

It was the hopeless fear in her voice that pushed me to finally move. I did not like the sound of her voice in distress. It brought an unwanted sensation to my chest, a discomfort I was intelligent enough to understand for what it was.

I cared for her. My wife. And I wanted nothing if not her happiness.

I could not be the cause of her distress.