His green eyes turn dark, the color of moss in a forest. “I’m a shit caregiver. I know that.”
“It’s exactly the opposite. You’re perfect. Too damned perfect. I want you to rail at me. Yell, scream, tell me you’re sick and tired of feeding me chicken broth, because I’m damn sure tired of eating it.” I’m too loud, the rising voice too much for my overtaxed body, but I don’t care. I don’t care. I can’t care any longer.
Elijah’s lip quirks. “You want Chinese takeout?”
“Yes. But I can’t have it. We’d be found out.” I know this like I know he’ll come in here at the first sign I’ve tried to move. I know this like I know the edge of guilt in his eyes that never leaves. It’s there when I wake up, and there when I fall asleep, just like the relentless pain.
“I can maybe sneak a dumpling or two.” It’s a joke. A gentle joke for the woman who’s slowly going insane in the basement of a church. Elijah runs a soothing hand over my arm, a gentle pressure reminding me—yet again—that I need to rest.
He lets the silence settle over us like a blanket. I could kill him for being so perfect. I could kill him and kiss him and fight him if he’d just let me.
All my anger seeps into the ceiling and taunts me from up there, as useless as I am. I’m reduced to a hand on my arm. It’s not the kind of touch I crave from Elijah. It’s so neutral and bloodless that I don’t recognize it at all, never mind that it’s the way he’s been touching me for days.
I don’t know this man. This perfect, steady man who never shows me anything but competent concern. He’s been like some kind of caring robot, never flinching at my pain or at the blood, never losing his patience.
What happened to the beast who bared his teeth behind bars?
I’ve been trapped in this cell with the prince instead. A stranger.
6
Elijah
She’s pushing me.
Holly doesn’t lay back down. She tips her head back and glares at the ceiling.
That’s good.
Because I can’t let her see. I can’t let her see how close they are to the surface—my guilt, my shame. The violence that sits at my core. It wouldn’t take much to bring them out into the open. It never has taken much, and they’re like monsters now. They chew at the marrow of my bones and threaten to burst out of my flesh.
Her breathing is uneven now, hitched and angry. How could I not react to her? It’s been abject misery, tending to her without having her. The misery is almost powerful enough to override the aching lust at the core of me. Goddamn it, I want her. I want so much from her that I can’t have. Too much from her. I’ve taken too much already.
I let my hands ball into fists and release them.
I don’t want to hurt Holly.
I can’t hurt her.
She’s already injured. She was shot trying to save me from an inevitable fate. Does she realize how much this eats at me? By the end of all this, I’ll be nothing but a flayed heart. I’d rather take a hundred bullets than mar her smooth skin.
Memory intrudes, shouldering its way past weakened defenses. In that apartment I wasn’t a man anymore. I wasn’t a soldier.
I was a child, three years old, watching my mother die in front of my eyes. I couldn’t save her then. I can’t save Holly now. The bullet wound might be healing but the threat that looms outside these walls can’t be stopped. It can’t ever be stopped.
Holly shifts closer to the edge of the cot, and my hands come up. Force of habit. I stop myself from touching her at the last moment as she eases herself onto the floor. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” Her legs tremble with the effort of standing, and there’s high color in her cheeks, pain she tries to hide, but it’s so clear. It’s sketched all over her brown eyes like lightning across a dark sky. “Don’t move? Don’t talk? Don’t be a person?”
“Don’t hurt yourself.” It’s not often that I feel even an echo of desperation. I learned not to feel that a long time ago. But I feel it now, like a distant wave.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispers, and my heart clenches. Stops. Starts again.
I don’t know how to tell her that we won’t survive.
The right combination of words will never come. We’re sinking, drowning, and I’m going to smile and nod and reassure her all the way to the goddamn ocean floor. I’m not going to tell her that we’ll probably die. “I never said I knew how to love.”
Her eyes flash, surprise in the lift of her eyebrows. “You love me?”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m pushing you away?” This hurts more than the guilt and the shame. It’s an awful, tearing truth and it feels like sandpaper leaving my lips. It feels like fire in the lungs and steel through my gut.
“I thought it might be the other thing.” Both corners of her mouth turn down, vulnerability flickering through her expression and disappearing.
“Hate?” Every muscle reaches for her. Longs for her. My palms ache. “Yes, I think I hate you too. For making me want you. For making me weak. And most of all, I hate you for putting yourself in danger.”
Holly takes a quick step forward, too fast, and the hate detonates into fear. I grab for her without thinking and pull her between my legs. She gasps.
“That hurt.” She steadies herself with her small hands on my shoulders, and I’ll be damned, I’ll be fucked. She sounds wondering. Relieved. Not like I’ve just done the unthinkable and kicked her when she was down. “Finally.”
“Finally? Finally?” I’m so pissed at her, so righteously enraged, that I do the only thing I can think to do and wrestle her into a kiss. Damn her for being so reckless. Damn me for putting her in a scrap of cloth that’s barely a bra so I can see her peaked nipples pushing up the fabric. Damn us both to another circle of hell.
Holly kisses me back hard, groaning into my mouth. I have to be killing her.
I stand her up again, trying to push her away, but she digs her nails into the backs of my hands. “No,” she says. “No.” Then she reaches for me again.
“I’m hurting you.”
“Yes.” She follows this with a bite and I bite her back, then soothe the bite with my tongue. It’s been torture, not kissing her. Not taking her mouth. Not taking her. I’ve taught her plenty of lessons about the way she should behave, the way she should not fucking push me, and she hasn’t learned a single one.
With the taste of her on my lips my restraint shatters. It’s been weak for days. Weak since I brought her down to this crypt knowing that we were never coming out alive. I have felt every second pass us by. All of them. Ticking down to the moment when death takes us and wishing I could do this to pass the time.
I sink my teeth into the flesh of her shoulder and this time the noise she makes is so dirty, so filthy, that I do it again just to hear it. “The fuck is wrong with you?” I murmur into her skin.
“You’re what’s wrong with me.” She rakes her nails under the collar of my shirt. Four bright lines against my skin. I hope she scars me. I hope I never stop feeling her touch, not until I draw my last breath. “Hate me even more, sweetheart. Make me feel it.”