Page 222 of Breathe Like Hell

She shook her head again and again.

“No. No!”

“No isn’t an option,” I told her as firmly as I could.

“I don’t want to leave you!” Fresh tears started rolling down her cheeks.

“Dakota, baby, you’re going to have to fly. I can’t take you all the way up. You have to get to Heaven, baby. You can’t breathe here. Please try to move your wings. Please.”

She looked like she was about to pass out. When she tried to move her wings, her face contorted with pain and she screamed again. All her muscles were still tender from being shredded open, and they had yet to grow around her new wings.

“You have to. You fucking have to. I know it hurts, but you’re going to die if you don’t go.” I was starting to panic.

“I want you to hold me.”

I wrapped my arms securely around her waist, holding us steady in the air. “Stretch your wings out behind you. Just extend them.”

She was going to suffocate to death in my arms if I didn’t push her now. As much as I fucking hated it. I didn’t want to see her so terrified and in pain like this.

“Do you see the entrance?” I asked. I wouldn’t be able to see the entrance, but she’d be able to. “It should be like a tear in the sky.”

“I don’t know,” she said through the agony in her voice.

“Look up. Please, baby. Please.”

She tilted her head at the same time as she stretched her wings. She could hardly inhale now.

“I’ll throw you, but you have to try. Okay? I love you so much.”

I didn’t give her a chance to answer me before I used as much strength as I had to literally toss her up into the air as high as possible. Her limbs flailed, a weak scream carrying on the wind, before her wings finally caught on the air and she soared a few feet before disappearing.

Just like that.

I didn’t have time to waste, though.

I plummeted back to Earth in a blur, arrowing straight toward the ground, feeling like my soul was ripping apart into a million pieces. He couldn’t be dead. Micah wouldn’t just die. That wasn’t how this worked.

I was supposed to be the one to die.

Not him. Never him.

So many thoughts rushed in my brain I could hardly make sense of any of them.

Dakota was gone. She was an angel. A Sigeian angel.

And she was in Heaven now, where she would be loved and cared for in a way I’d never be capable of. She might not come back. Why would she?

I can’t breathe.

She’s going to fall to Earth for me and she’s going to end up regretting it just like he did.

She’s going to give up safety and happiness and a full life in Heaven for someone who’s going to kill her.

My eyes stung as I flew through the clouds.

I saw the red flame of neon burning on the ground and every muscle in my body instantly jammed, my synapses misfiring, my nerves sparking with the worst fear I’d ever felt in my life. My wings were tucked tight to my body as I dropped headfirst, wind ripping around me, a nauseating tightness in my chest.

Kill.