This was the end of my old life.
I couldn’t come back here after I broke the bond with the guys. I wouldn’t be the same. Hell, I wasn’t the same even now. I was still learning, but every minute that passed, every second that flew by, I became more solid in this world. More determined to protect myself and find out what kind of fuckery was happening in Hellfire.
God, Hellfire. I had accepted it all without even realizing it. Real or not real, I drank blood from Lanier. Real or not real, I changed the weather. Real or not real, I had wings.
I accepted it.
I owned it.
I was going to figure it out.
I lifted Anna’s two tiny duffle bags into the back of the Escalade, pissed off that she had virtually nothing to her name.
We left her furniture, telling her she could sleep wherever she wanted in the penthouse, and took only what was necessary. Which turned out to be everything she owned. Almost nothing she owned was for pleasure.
Vodka to drink, the posters on her wall, weed to smoke, and that was it.
The posters were rolled up by Cabe and placed into a garbage bag so that we could find a place for her to keep them until she eventually left the penthouse. She wasn’t willing to throw them out, and we didn’t have time to argue about it.
“So that wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be,” Quint said from the back seat, fumbling with this phone. He was always watching YouTube videos about random shit.
“I feel like a fucking asshole,” Annalise admitted in the passenger seat.
“Don’t,” Cabe said from the back, leaning forward between my seat and hers. “He’s in love with you, but he knew deep down that you were never going to be his. You never led him to believe differently.”
“What makes you think he’s in love with me?” she asked, turning around to face him with a confused expression. Adorable.
“You’re you, Annalise. There’s no way he could spend as much time with you as he has and not fall for you. But I was once in love with your ghost and I can tell you that its worth all the pain.”
With that, he leaned back, pulled his phone from his pocket, and started to scroll absently while Annalise watched him with an unreadable expression on her pretty face.
When she turned around, I looked over at her. “You good?”
She nodded and turned toward the window.
I should have been annoyed hearing Cabe admit that he was in love with her, but I had gone into this knowing how he felt about her. He was always upfront with his feelings; we just didn’t know that he would be so open with her. Annalise didn’t handle the emotional shit very well, all of us knew that, but he was being so transparent.
He must have been aiming to push her past her limit, force her to see that love was right in front of her, whenever she wanted to grab it. But Annalise was like me, she was stubborn and not willing to compromise her heart, her independence, her defense mechanisms.
She was smart as fuck.
The less we felt for each other, the easier it would be when it came time to complete the ceremony and go our separate ways.
I drove us home, the car silent and thick with tension. The feeling of someone watching us hadn’t gone away but instead had instead grown stronger. I was nervous as fuck, and that right there wasn’t something I was used to feeling. I didn’t like not knowing what we were protecting her from.
I cared about my brothers, I would give my life for them, but I never had a reason to before this. I looked out for trouble, made sure to stay away from the shady corners of our world, but then we were asked to protect someone more powerful than ourselves. Annalise was beyond strong before her Transition, but after, as a Nephilim, she was unstoppable. Add to that both vampirism and elemental power, and she was lethal.
This threat against her, the reason we’re protecting her, was invisible to our eyes—much like everything else in our lives.
Invisible bonds, invisible threats, invisible feelings.
Just because none of us could see them didn’t mean that they were any less real, and it scared the fuck out of me.
When I pulled into the parking garage and parked the SUV in our space, Annalise all but jumped out the car, heading for the door that led us into the building and toward the elevator.
“Do not push her,” I pointed at Cabe.
“I know what I’m doing, Lanier.” He rolled his eyes. “You may want to break this bond and run like hell, but I never agreed to that. I agreed to break it, but I intend to stay when all is said and done.” He looked to the door that Annalise disappeared through. “I’ll keep her because she deserves to be kept. She deserves to be loved and cherished and protected, Lanier. You can throw her away over something that was out of your control, but I’ll just pick her up off the ground and take her with me. This is your choice, but it isn’t mine.”
He got out and slammed the door, heading toward her, leaving me and Quint in the car together.
“I don’t want to let her go, either,” Quint admitted. I closed my eyes and shook my head. My memories, my demons, the fucking guilt threatening to choke me. I planned to turn down the bond because I knew that I would feel something for my mate, I would want to stay with her, and leaving would be my punishment. If I Fell and still got to keep her, what lesson would be learned? What kind of punishment would that be? None of us owed society anything, we didn’t ask to be Nephilim. Falling wasn’t the issue, she was the issue. She would be the reason I lost my brothers.
Annalise was right yesterday when she said she was cool as fuck. She was. She ate when she was hungry, she wasn’t ashamed of her body, she made jokes, smoked weed, fucked like a goddess. She twisted up my insides and pulled until I was a shredded mess at her feet.
There was no way that I would walk away from this without a gaping hole in my soul. She was my match, and I wouldn’t even know what I was missing out on. With this arrangement, I would only get a small taste of what it was like to be loved by her, and then I’d spend the rest of my life knowing what her love tasted like. It was the perfect punishment, the sweetest kind of torture.
I did nothing while four Nephilim murdered my father, kicked his face in, ripped his organs out. Back then, I had no idea that a Neph could be capable of that kind of evil, and hadn’t seen it again in the eighteen years that passed since that day, but it didn’t matter.
I did nothing while he suffered.
Now I would suffer, and this was the perfect punishment.
I took my time walking into the building. Annalise was standing by the elevator alone, staring straight ahead, lost in her thoughts. When I came to a stop beside her, she blurted out, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t,” I replied casually, shrugging my shoulders as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
It was.
She was quiet the whole ride to the top floor. We passed floor after floor, each level bringing a sinking feeling. Something was wrong. The air changed, becoming thick with dark power. Magic?
“Cabe, what’s going on?” Anna asked, her eyes narrowed.
I sniffed the air, my beast coming forward, attempting to catch a scent.
There was nothing tracible there.
“I don’t know,” I replied just as the elevator opened to the short hallway on our floor. I stepped out and looked around, nothing was amiss. “Stay next to me and watch the right. I’ll watch the left.”