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He'd made it clear he needed space, even if he hadn't actually used those words. Pushing him now would be selfish, particularly when I couldn't give him the truth underneath everything that had happened.

I couldn't tell him I was a dragon.

I couldn't tell him I was lifebound.

And I absolutely couldn't ask him whether what he felt for me was real when he didn't even know there was a reason I might doubt it.

The thought made something inside me recoil.

That was the problem I kept refusing to look at directly.

Ash believed the danger between us was that I might not want him enough.

I was terrified of the opposite.

I wanted him enough that every rule I'd lived by since I was seventeen was starting to feel negotiable.

My father had told me to be careful, and he'd meant it as a warning about Ash. Sitting here in the silence of the hotel suite, though, I wondered whether Ash was the person I needed to be careful with or the person I'd been waiting fifteen years to stop running from.

I picked up my phone and opened his contact, then stared at his name without typing anything.

For once, Melanie wasn't the problem I needed to solve.

Ash was.

And unlike all the others, the thought of him eventually slinking away into the background of my life didn't bring relief.

It terrified me.

Chapter seven

Rush - A quick offensive attack as players move the puck up the ice toward the opposing goal.

Ash

“My mom killed herself.”

I went still as Max looked away, his gaze settling somewhere across the room as though saying the words were difficult enough without having to watch me hear them. But I knew that. It wasn’t hidden information.

I’d come as soon as he said he needed me. I always would, but I hadn’t expected this.

“My dad and I haven’t really spoken in years. Not properly, anyway.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It was always between us.”

I knew Max was still talking, but his words began to fade beneath the sudden rush of blood in my ears.

I understood what it was like for a mother’s death to become something that sat between a father and his son, poisoning everything that came afterward.

The difference was that Max hadn’t killed his mother.

But I’d killed mine.

The memory came with the same brutal clarity it always did, dragging me back to when I was seven years old and my mother’s hand had been wrapped so tightly around mine that her rings pressed painfully into my fingers.

“Quiet, sweetheart,” she whispered.

We lived on the third floor of an apartment building then, in a place that had always seemed enormous to me as a kid but probably wasn't. I remembered the suitcase sitting beside the kitchen door and Mom moving around without turning on any lights, even though it was dark outside.

She'd packed one suitcase, which confused me because whenever we went anywhere, we always took more than that.