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After a few strained breaths, where I swear her glare might actually ribbon the flesh from my bones, she concedes with a single nod.
Freeing my grip on her throat, I covetously run my thumb over her cheek to clear away the specs of dry mud from her bruised skin. Her lips swollen from my kiss, she turns her head to force my hand away.
“I’m not offering any excuses, delusional or otherwise,” I tell her. “And I’m only saying this once. I didn’t lie. I didn’t know it was Devyn. At the visitation table, when you mentioned a crime-scene analyst quoting Chaucer, I never asked who that tech was. Whether or not they were connected, I didn’t want to know.” I expel a lengthy sigh. “I wanted, selfishly, as much time with you as I could get on this case.”
I wait for her to argue, to interrupt. Selfishly, again, so I can slather her body with mud.
“But you had that same information,” I continue. “You refused to see Devyn through the blinders you have for her. I may have orchestrated the first scene and set the game board, but you’re the one who decided how the game was played.”
She blinks up at me, her lips pressed together. Breathing heavily through her nose, she drops her gaze—and I see it in the slightest flicker of her eyes, the doubt of her own convictions.
“Your turn to tell me the truth. Would locking them up have been enough?” I ask her, my tone a degree more gentle than my touch.
Her soft eyebrows crease as she meets my eyes with uncertainty.
“If you could’ve found that person, would watching them get sentenced in court have been enough?” I demand to know. “They might’ve gotten ten years…possibly more. Hell, even if they’d gotten a life sentence, would imprisoning the person who killed your parents have satisfied your need for retribution?”
Her breathing quickens, her gaze slit as her raging fury ignites. “I don’t know. I never got that chance.”
My jaw tightens in dissatisfaction and I smack my hand in the mud. “Lies earn another mud bath.”
She shakes her head against the ground. “Fuck you for even saying this?—”
I cup her breast with my mud-caked hand, effectively cutting her off. She bucks beneath me as I coat the grainy sludge over her nipples, the coarse texture making her just as ravenous as she clamps her thighs against my hips.
I lower my body, feral at the feel of her muddy breasts slipping against my bare chest as I whisper my demand in her ear. “I want the truth, Halen.”
As I rise up, angry tears brim her eyes, and she furiously blinks them back. “No,” she says, the word delivered on a shaky breath. “It wouldn’t have been enough.”
I wet my lips, tasting her, a glutton for more. “If that person was here right now, what would be enough? Could you smash their face in? Could you paint the reeds red with their blood? Would that be enough?”
Her body trembles seductively beneath mine. “No… But it would be a start.”
My gaze roams slowly over her features, captivated by the raw pain I find there. I make a low sound of agreement, my heart grazing my rib cage as the muscle races to match the staccato beat of hers.
“And after…” I dig my fingers into her hair at the base of her neck and tip her face up. “Would you have asked for forgiveness?”
She fastens her eyes closed to deny me the fierce emotion banked there. “Never.”
A tendril of hope unfurls. She has a darkness inside her that she taps into to see beneath the veil—but it’s only ever a peek, enough to work the cases that call to her as she masks herself in the killer’s persona. Her fear always shuts it down.
Bound beneath me now, she’s Nyx to my Erebus, night to my darkness. A goddess who spawned the very brutal entities that still torment her soul. Death, Strife, Pain.
Her parents’ killer was never caught, and that first tipped domino set off our sequence of events that, when she finally tears through the veil, will part the sands of time like a tidal wave.
But I have to make my own concession that she might not ever uncover this fragment of memory. This is the reality of us that tortures me, forced to accept that this—right now—is as far as we come.
If this is to be our story, then I want her to see the monster. I need her to look into the eyes of the fiendish villain and glimpse every atrocity attached to my soul.
Then I need her to accept me.
“I won’t ask for forgiveness,” I say, flaying my soul wide between us. “Not ever, Halen. There’s no ecstasy in the celestial planes that can ever tempt me to atone. You’re the only heaven I want to be in. Don’t damn me, sweetness.”
The shrouded sun casts the marshy shore in muted grays, an echo of the tormented demon clawing at my mind as the sky is torn apart to unleash the rain.
No amount of rain can rinse me clean. Onlyher, that fire raging in her depths.
“Then we’re both devils,” she says, her voice so soft she’s nearly drowned out by the fall of rain pelting the water. “We’re monsters who’ve done monstrous things, and we should both burn.”
