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“It’s too risky.” I drive a hand through my hair. “All risk poses a threat of ruin.”
Her anger flashes hot. “What the hell am I supposed to glean out of that?”
“I won’t risk you. I won’t lose you to your own ruin, no matter how damn hard you try, Halen St. James.”
I stopped exactly that from happening once, and I’m prepared to do what’s necessary to prevent it again. Even if I have to charge sigils, spill blood, banish her thoughts—risk her forgetting us all over again. Fuck it, thatisthe risk I’m willing to take.
“For once, Kallum, please… Just tell me what you’re trying to say.”
I eat the distance between us, forcing her head to tip back as I tower over her. “You went willingly with Devyn. While I was locked up, unable to protect you. You went with her and put your life at risk.”
“I get it. You’re upset?—”
“No, I’m not upset. I’m goddamn furious.” There’s a pit in my stomach trying to gnaw me from the inside out at my admission. “You already tried to save her once, and you nearly died. Now here you are, with your answers and no hope, and you’re still trying, like you have a fucking death wish.”
The truth burns through us like a destructive wildfire. Unable to douse the roaring flames once the tinder has caught fire.
She won’t deny it, because she can’t.
The ache in the center of my chest flares until I’m strangled by the force of it, constricting my throat with fear’s razor-sharp talons.
“You asked me what I fear,” I say, my gaze holding hers. As she reads my expression, I lower my defenses, allowing her to see the brutal truth of what her death would do to me. “If you want to destroy me, don’t take your next breath.”
A hard swallow drags along her slender throat. “Kallum, I came back,” she says, her eyes searching mine, a promise held there. “I came back for you.”
A deep groan barrels free of my chest. “Fuck them. I’m handing in my fucking notice anyway.”
She came back for me.
Instead of running, she came here to be with me—to fight, and fuck, and hurt—to get what my dark little muse needs that she can’t get from anyone else.
My whole body ignites as I drop the gear and grab the nape of Halen’s neck. I pull her to me, my mouth descending on hers as I crush her body against mine.
Her hand roams my chest, her fingers finding the crescent sigil through my shirt, delivering that sweet hint of pain that screamsmine.
Alchemy’s stones and elixirs, the endless quest for eternal life. But what is eternity if spent without the fire of your twin flame?
Fear of loss is such a brutal bitch. But hope… Hope is a cruel and sadistic monster, one of our own desperate design. Yet even the most monstrous of us cling to the frail wisp of it.
9
ICEBERG
HALEN
In one of my psychology classes, we were presented a structural model which displayed the two-dimensional rendering of an iceberg in comparison to the psyche. This was Freud’s iceberg theory, and it essentially broke the mind down into three layers.
The tip of the iceberg is where our conscious exists. The layer right beneath the frigid water is the preconscious. And the rest of the berg below is the unconscious. It is in this vast region below the water where the psychological forces of the psyche reside, there in the dark, endless void.
The deeper the unconscious, the darker the abyss.
I would stare at that iceberg, unnerved, the image evoking a sense of dread and hollowness that left me shaken and suffering some form of Thalassophobia. Possibly the reason why I’ve never used Freud’s model as a reference. That, and his approaches have since been widely rejected.
And I’m only thinking of it now, as I hit Send and fire off the finalized profile to Agent Rana, because of the connections I can no longer deny, the ones stirred by Devyn’s shrine.
Everything connects.
Kallum said this in the killing fields our first day on the case.
