Page 212 of Breathe Like Hell

If I didn’t know him, I might’ve tried to go back and apologize. But I did know him, so I knew that was the last thing he wanted me to do.

It wasn’t the same as the gashes on his forearms, his silence when Dakota miscarried his child, his grip on the back of my neck as we admitted truths that were better left unspoken. All of those things he could control. He could keep himself guarded, never let me see him without at least some armor on. I could talk to him about those things for the most part.

But this—the sheer fucking vulnerability I’d just seen in his stare, in his posture, in the choppiness of his breathing—was different.

This was his deepest, oldest wound. And I fucking knew about it. I fucking…

I was the only man Micah had ever let top him, but not the only who ever had.

There was someone before me.

He never gave me details, and I never asked. It’d only ever been mentioned twice in all the years we were together. I knew what’d happened. He didn’t need to spell it out to me. I could see how badly it hurt him, how deeply it affected him, how completely incapable he was of speaking about it, even to me. Even when we were together.

His need for control hadn’t come out of nowhere.

It stemmed from a single moment, a moment where he’d had none at all.

And he knew he never wanted to feel that way ever again.

I slowly went to the bed and laid down, then held perfectly still until I heard him move a few minutes later. He shut the door to his bedroom, and I heard the shower turn on.

Sleep didn’t come for a long time.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

MICAH

I was out of the house before the sun had even touched the horizon, unwilling to put myself in a position to be ambushed by Mason. Last night was horrible, and I was in zero mood to discuss it with him. The questions I’d seen lingering in the depths of his eyes for weeks had finally made their way to the surface. Questions I’d never want to answer.

The tires of my truck rumbled over the road as I drove aimlessly. There was almost no one on the streets at this hour, the damp asphalt reflecting the faint blue of morning. I didn’t have a real plan; I just needed to be away from him.

Pine trees blurred past on either side of me, the sky slowly lightening in the gap above the road. Every now and then, my headlights caught a veil of mist drifting low across the road before it disappeared into the darkness again. My fingers flexed on the wheel as I swallowed the panic that’d been clawing at my throat since last night. Blades didn’t fix my problems anymore. The physical pain was too fleeting to surpass the mental pain, healing too quickly, never really lingering.

But without that, I couldn’t unscramble my thoughts.

I couldn’t get the reprieve I needed to straighten myself out. Couldn’t have something else to focus on.

I considered doing something Mason would do, like jumping off a cliff and landing on the rocks below, or crashing my car at its top speed, or finding other angels to fight, but the ideas didn’t sound appealing to me whatsoever. Being shot by him was about as far as I wanted to deviate from slicing my skin open—not that I even had interest in doing that again.

And Mason was the only angel I wanted to fight.

So, I was back to square one. Unable and unwilling to speak.

Square zero, even. Since now I couldn’t carve into my flesh to grant my brain the clarity it needed to keep control.

I didn’t want Dakota to know about that. Mason had seen it recently, but he was different. If Dakota saw it, she’d inadvertently see it as something worse than it was. This wasn’t the same as a human doing what I did. Sometimes I wondered if it would be worth it to explain to her how angels actually acted in Heaven, and all the things humans did that angels never considered. Not because they never thought about it, but because it felt pointless.

I could also tell her how I’d never met another Sigeian who used their powers how I did. How I’d never heard of a Thrausian being dampened by Sigeian power, and the idea only came to me because I was fucked in the head and obsessed with Mason Ashborn, too stubborn to see that what I wanted wouldn’t work.

Each mile I put between myself and my house didn’t seem to make a difference in my emotional state. I could run, but never far enough to change what was coming.

I should’ve known he’d try that eventually, should’ve predicted my reaction to it.

But I’d been distracted by Dakota, already failing to hold myself together as strong as I wanted to when we stumbled up the stairs last night. And realizing that, right in the middle of it, was like slashing a rip in the fabric of time and plummeting straight though into a terrifying memory.

And while Mason knew part of the reason for that, he didn’t know it all.

Beams of dim sunlight broke through the branches in pine trees, flickering as I sped along the road. Wind rushed into the car, but it didn’t make a difference. There wasn’t enough neon on Earth to fix me.