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“Telling you will only put undue stress on you.”
Which was undoubtedly why he’d kept it from me. A thought that failed to make me feel any better. “Tell me, Jericho. I want to know. It’s someone you know. Someone who wants to hurt you.”
His lips screwed up to a snarl as he stared down into his drink. “There is only one who has ever endeavored to destroy every piece of my life.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
A dizzying shock swept over me. I could’ve thought of a number of shady individuals, including Barchiel--or Bishop Venable, as he was once known. But my God, his father? That had to be the most screwed up family drama I’d ever heard. “And is he the one?”
“Yes.”
My heart shriveled with his response, and I clutched the edge of the desk to keep from swaying with the waves of nausea pulsing through me. “And your father would try to–”
“He absolutely would. He would tear that child out of you with his bare hands, knowing it would kill me.”
“And there’s no way you can stop this.”
“He is untouchable. The council fears him and the consequences of pissing him off.” His hand resting beside me on the desk balled into a tight fist. “I still intend to barter for your freedom, and Iwillclaim you. Publicly, so that every ancient lord on the council knows you are mine.”
I felt stripped bare already. As if all my choices, everything I wanted, had been torn from my grasp. Caught between father and son. It was hard for me to swallow, considering the only crime I’d committed was bringing someone I loved back. Even if, in my heart, I knew I’d do it again, I began to wonder if coming to Nightshade, falling in love with Jericho, had been a mistake. If things would have been better had he never gained back his memories of me. It broke my heart to even imagine such a thing, but the way things were playing out felt like impending doom. “The claiming. What’s stopping you from doing it now?”
“Only the baby. The ritual would deplete your energy and nutrients and potentially kill the child.”
“And is that all? The only reason?” Perhaps it was ridiculous of me to expect it, but I only wanted him to ask. Ask me if I wanted to be claimed. Even if the choices were slim and not in my favor, I wanted to know that he was willing to offer me that much dignity, at least.
“Yes.”
I snorted a mirthless laugh. “And I thought I was naive when it came to love.”
“That is because you’re accustomed to words that have grown meaningless for your language. What I feel for you is a word that does not exist in human vocabulary. Stronger thanlove.”
“Are you implying that what I feel for you isn’t real?”
“What you feel is nothing more than a fleeting human emotion. When I claim you, you will understand.”
I pushed his hand away and stood up from his lap, straightening my dress, and as I rounded the corner of his desk, holding back tears was futile. For the first time since I’d met him, I felt adrift. Alone. Instead of taking a seat in the chair, as before, I walked past it toward the door.
The sound of chasing footfalls told me he was not about to let me walk out of this office.
The truth was, I didn’t know how to process the emotions bouncing wildly inside of me. My heart was a fragile vessel of entropy, an unsteady beat of chaos.
Jericho was my first love, and I kind of felt as if I’d just been slapped with invalidation. I needed to chew on it. To untangle the confusion in my head and decide whether, or not, I was just overthinking. I needed to dissect his words a bit without the pressure of having to look him in the eye and respond.
Just as I reached the door, an arm shot out from behind me and slammed it shut. He pressed his body to my back, trapping me between himself and the door.
“Jericho, let me go.” My voice wobbled with the tears in my eyes. I was on the verge of cracking.
A possessive grip of my hip yanked me back to him, and I felt him bury his face in the back of my neck, inhaling deeply. “There is not a single thought in my day that doesn’t involve you. I want you in a thousand different ways, and at the moment, I’m losing my mind. I wish I could say it was the demon inside of me who longs to take you this way. To claim you, with or without your blessing. I will not come to my senses, though. Even before Ex Nihilo, before I lost my wings, I longed to make you mine. Officially.”
“I am yours. Officially. I do not need a bunch of old men watching me prove that I love you.”
“And as much as I appreciate and agree with those sentiments, I am determined to keep you protected from the one conniving bastard who would take from you without an ounce of mercy or remorse.” His hand slid around my neck, and he cupped my jaw, pressed his lips to the other side of my face. The hand he’d thrown against the wall to slam the door shut slid down the hem of my skirt to my thigh. “I will give you pleasure and everything you desire, but I will never give you up. To anyone. In the end, you will bemineeternally. Not his.”
I wanted to tell him that I loved him. That after months without him, I understood his burgeoning obsession, his need to protect me, which seemed to shadow everything else. Something had settled over me, though. This place, the one to which I’d longed to return, had become foreign all over again. It didn’t feel like home to me anymore.
“Let me go,” I whispered. Tears slipped down my cheeks, and he pushed off me, allowing me to open the door. Without a glance back toward him, I scurried out of the office and back to my room.
