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“I do.” I can’t believe the words slipping from my lips. I shouldn’t be saying this. I should set him free, but demons are selfish creatures, after all, and I need him.
“Then I’m yours.” His lips meet mine in a gentle kiss. One we never shared before. “Everything else we will figure out. Slowly. But I won’t leave.”
“You won’t?”
“No. Never, Kira.”
Chapter forty-one
Vassar
My heart is breaking for the girl who was cut open with those sharp, cruel knives and by the hands of those who were supposed to love her.
My heart breaks for the woman who patched up the deep scars but never allowed anyone close enough to reopen the painful wound.
Everything the world knows about Kira Clark is a façade she has put up to protect herself. She’s cold because warmth has burned her before. She is unfeeling because emotions nearly killed her. She hides her heart and soul because those were ripped out of her with claws one too many times.
But she opened up to me. She allowed me into her past, into her pain. She exposed herself and tried to run away, thinking her shadows could hurt me and my daughter, without realizing she was the one shining light into our lives.
“I love you, my little witch. I love you with all I’ve got.”
“You love me,” Kira repeats my words like they will somehow make better sense to her that way. And my heart breaks again.
What do I do, to whom do I pawn off my soul to go back in time and rip apart every single monster who caused her pain? Who killed off that brightness and life? Who murdered her unborn babies in cold blood?
She has to repeat the word love to believe it because she’s never felt it before. At least not in such capacity. Not in the way I love her, and every fiber in my body knows she loves me, but I am not looking for her to say it. I don’t need her to when I feel it in the tips of her fingers, she runs through my back, tracing the art on my skin. I see it in her green eyes that are looking at me like I’m the one who holds the key to her world. I taste it on her lips when she leans into me and presses them to mine tenderly.
“I love you,” I say it again and again and again. I will keep saying it until she no longer has to repeat it to believe it. Until it is tattooed on her bones and heart.
“You love me…” she repeats again, her eyes searching mine for the truth.
“I do, Kira.”
“But I’m so damaged. How could you possibly want someone like me around your little mermaid?”
“That.” I kiss her gently.
“What?” She looks at me, puzzled, her fingers halting the tracing she was doing.
“That, right there, is how I would be lucky to have someone like you around my daughter.”
“I don’t understand.” She shakes her head.
I slip off her and onto my back but turn my head toward Kira. “Victoria was obsessed with mermaids from the moment she could crawl. That was the only cartoon she would watch as a baby, the only toy she liked, and her first word was ‘memaid’ missing the R because she couldn’t say it.” A soft smile ghosts my face at the memory, and I see the same one mirrored on Kira’s face. “Yet you are the first female in her life who heardher and immediately called herlittle mermaid.” Kira blinks at me. “I heard you that first morning in your kitchen and saw my daughter’s eyes light up. That is how I knew back then that I wanted you around her.”
Kira swallows hard. “It’s just a nickname.” She shakes her head. “You can’t base this kind of thing on just a nickname.”
I take her chin into my hands. “You know what my mom told me when I saw her and told her about Vee asking you to be her mom from that first look?”
“What?” she whispers, her eyes trained on mine.
“Den dialéyis tin ikoyéniá su. Íne dóra Theú ya séna, ópos ke esí yi' aftá.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”
“What does it say about mine then? Or maybe the day I was born, God took a break, and the devil took over?”
