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“So why are you giving up now?”
“Because she also said I had to earn it. I had to be worthy of it. I’ve always held myself to a standard to do just that, and now I see why. If I had let myself fall to my baser urges, I wouldn’t be who I needed to be.” He finally turned to meet my gaze. “If I do it now, I’m just as bad.”
“You’re not. You don’t become your maker just because you do what you need to do to survive. You aren’t hurting anyone.”
“Troy?”
“He’s hereoffering. Don’t try to use him as an excuse for you to give up. Life sucks—trust me, I know. Do you think Iwantedto be what I am? Because if I could opt out of this whole reaper thing, I would. You really think I didn’t have a moment of doubt afterward? That I didn’t sit there in my room in Lucifer’s palace and wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just…give up?”
Anger flashed in his eyes, as if the thought of me not being there were the worst thing he’d heard.
“When Lilith killed Gran, when I sat in that room alone—so damn alone and feeling like a failure, a freak, useless—I was ready to be done. I didn’t care if Lucifer killed me, if Lilith came back. It was too much, and it felt easier to just stop.” I tore my gaze from his, the intensity too much. “So, yeah, I get it.”
He reached out and set a hand to my cheek, the chill of his skin shocking. “I’m tired, Ava. I’ve lived longer than I should have already.”
“But I haven’t gotten you that long. It’s not fair.”
He pulled me closer until I crawled into his lap and stared into his dark eyes. “I had hoped I’d find you and feel young again, that I’d feel restored. It was foolish to think you would fix everything.”
“You’re an idiot. It isn’t about me fixing it all—it’s the fact that we’ve been dealing with crisis after crisis! If anyone found some sense of peace in the last few months, they’re psychotic. You can’t be in a warzone and expect some magical calmness.”
“I want peace.”
“So stick around long enough to make it, because I can assure you, you’re not going to find it if you just let yourself fade away.” I leaned in and brushed my lips to his slowly enough that he could stop me, willing him to understand. “I was sent to therapy when I was a teenager one time, after yet another family said I was weird and deranged. It was this man who told me something that’s always stuck with me. He said that he couldn’t promise life would get better, but he could guarantee it wouldn’t get better if I didn’t stick around. If you want that peaceful life, you won’t get it if you let this stupid addiction win.”
He returned my kiss. “What would peace even be? If we all lived through this, what would a future look like?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “What would it look like for you?”
His voice was soft, quiet. “I don’t want to have to fight, to have to keep up my guard. I would step away from the coven—I only participated to pass the time. I would want a safe home, a place I would not have to keep up pretenses, where I did not have to watch my back.”
“And how would I fit into that?”
His lips curled into a smile. “You would be in my bed, of course.”
I didn’t want to break the moment, but I had to. “And Grant?”
“He would set wards and cause no end of trouble, I am sure.”
“Hunter?”
“Lurking about, probably conspiring with Grant to cause mayhem.”
The next one was the hardest. “And Troy?”
He exhaled, but instead of the copper-tinted breath I was used to, it was almost sickly sweet. Yet another sign that something was seriously wrong with him.
“He could sleep outside, like a good guard dog.”
I chuckled at the half-hearted statement. “That’s better than I thought you’d say. I was expecting you to say the pound.”
“If I thought I could get away with that, perhaps. Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that you need him, and despite my personal feelings about him, he’s good for you.”
“So does that mean he can curl up at the foot of the bed?”
He smiled, and despite the way his cheeks were sunken in, it charmed me. “Okay.”
That made me pause. “Okay? He can sleep in the bed?”
