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“You don’t get to decide that.”
He heaved a breath, and she could see the flicker of pain that ran along the line of his jaw.
“I’m not deciding anything. I’m merely stating fact.” His voice that had been solid cracked, raw and beaten. “You are the light, and I am the dark. We will never be anything more. There is not a world for us.”
She chuckled at his statement. “Dramatic words that don’t mean a thing, Rafe. I heard you with my father. You have been fighting for us—even through pain and torture, you have been fighting to get back to me. And now you suddenly decided to take the noble route? No.” She shook her head. “We are worth that battle. We are the same even though we are opposites. You don’t think there’s loneliness and pain in the light? There is. So much. But when I have you…”
Her voice choked off, her head dipping for a long moment and then she lifted her eyes to him. “You say you are the dark, but you’re my light, no matter what you are to the world, to yourself. Your darkness is the light I need.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Vic.”
“I don’t think it’s supposed to. But it is what it is.”
His mouth closed, the right side of his lips not quite managing to line up properly. Something settled in his mind and his head tilted to the side as he stared at her. “I don’t know that I can be what you need. I am on the wrong side of everything.”
He was fighting it, but his voice almost sounded like acquiescence had crept in. Defeat.
“You think to decide for me what I need?” She stepped closer, setting her hand upon the side of his face, her fingers smearing into the blood on his skin without pause.
She didn’t care if he was bloody. Damaged. Wrong.
Because she saw something different in him, beneath all of it. “Choose me. Choose us, because with me you get all of us, my aunts and my cousins and my impossible uncles and father. You get a family that will go to the ends of the earth for you, because loyalty, love—those are our guiding stars. Choose me, and the rest? The rest will fall into place. You will find the right side.”
“How…how can there be room for me?”
“Room for you?” She scoffed, bringing her other hand up to capture his bruised face. “You think if my love and loyalty is with them, there isn’t room for you?”
It took forever, seconds ticking by before he nodded, his jaw sliding along her palms.
“Fool man.” One hard laugh escaped her. “I don’t have a finite amount of love, Rafe. Hearts don’t work like that. They’re more complicated, carving themselves into pieces that swell and beat on their own. I love my family. Would die—almostdiddie for them.”
His head hung, but she wouldn’t let him hide from her. She tilted his face up, her forehead pressing into his bloody one, so close he had to look at her. “And I would do the same for you. You just need to let me. You just need to want me like I want you. Love me like I love you.”
His eyes closed again, hidden from her for a long moment and then he swallowed hard. When his eyelids parted, the cold, the callous was gone. Only a rawness she’d never seen in him before simmering in his brown eyes. “I already do, Vic. I have from the moment I first saw you in that silver dress. An angel. A curse. From the first moment. You were mine before I knew what to do with you.”
At that, actual breath flowed into her lungs. Real breath that didn’t weigh her down. Air that flooded away all of the shadows and doubts.
Her lips curled in the slightest smile. “Then here is how this ends. My father, my uncle, they aren’t going to kill you. They love me too much. They know how much I love you. But you went after them, you went after what was most precious to them, and that cannot go unpunished. No matter how you changed sides. No matter how you saved us. You. Went. After. Them.”
His eyes closed at her words.
“And I don’t know what I can do to stop them from doing what they need to do to you. You lived vengeance, you know what that is. They are built exactly the same.”
She let that hang in the air between them, wanting so badly to tear the iron cuffs off his wrists and drag him from the wall, holding him as she cleaned each and every one of his wounds.
But she didn’t have the power to get him out of there on her own, not when her family was determined for him to suffer.
So she did the only thing she could. Offer him hope.
Her breath hitched. “This.” She reached out and shook the chain holding his left arm out to the side. “This—all of this—this is how you become family. This is how you become someone I would die for. Someone that each and every person in my family would die for. You survive this—what my father and uncles have in store for you? I will be waiting. Waiting for a lifetime with you.” She went to her toes, leaned in, her words a whisper in his ear. “So survive it.”
Her heart splitting in two in her chest, she turned and walked out of the dungeon.
{ Chapter 33 }
Staring down at her bloodied hands, Victoria bent to step under the low entrance of the room and then straightened as she moved past the heavy stone archway.
She jumped.
