Page 98 of The Reveal
His silver gaze is brighter than before. I can feel it everywhere. “If you’re asking if I fucked an ancient death goddess, I did. She wanted a pet vampire and picked me for the role, thinking she could control me because I was new. Only a few hundred years old. She was wrong.”
My imagination is too vivid for this. I can conjure up entirely too many scenarios to fit in and around what few words he actually said. I can come up with timelines and storylines and entire bedroom scenes between a vampire and that long-beaked horror—
This is not healthy. I know this is nothing close to healthy.
More importantly, I have other things to do.
“I have to go,” I tell him.
And I do. I can feel it like an itch, deep in these bones of mine that she tried so hard to snap. I have to find some kind of touchstone, something as close to normal as I can in all of this, or I’m not going to make it.
But he still hasn’t told me what he did to me this time.
Maybe that’s written all over my face, because one of his brows lifts, as if he needs to lookmorearrogant. “I gave you some armor, that’s all. You’re not undead. You are not precisely mortal any longer, not in the way most humans are. You can be killed, but it will take effort. Even for her.”
“I don’t know if I should thank you for that or not.”
He moves so fast I don’t even see it. I only really know that he does it after the fact, when my brain tries to reconstruct the split second it took for him to go from lying down on his back to crouching over me, holding my face between his hands.
While my body tries to convince me that what I should do is melt against him,Itry to convince myself I should be mad at him.
“If I hadn’t done it, you would have died.” He growls this at me, his eyes dark the way they were on Mount McLoughlin. “For the second or third time now. I can’t have that. I told you, Winter. I need you alive.”
“Everyone needs me alive. For their own purposes. I get it.”
“I don’t think that you do,” Ariel says, his voice little more than a dark thread.
And his kiss lights me on fire all over again, but this time, I’m the one who pulls away.
I think of immensities and galaxies. I think of Augie.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I grit out at him. “I didn’t ask for any of this. Not you, not a sorceress and a werewolf playing games on my land, not the entire fucking Reveal in the first place—none of this. But I’m handling it. What I need from you—”
“Do you truly believe that I don’t know what you need by now?”
“I’m not talking about sex.”
I move away from him and see the glint of gold on the simple nightstand beside his bed. Augie’s medallion. I don’t want to touch it. I feel actively repelled by it, actually—
But I tell myself that’s just shame. That I’m embarrassed—as I should be—because I certainly understand my twin’s vampire blood thing now, don’t I? I took a deep dive into it and didn’t exactly come away with the desire to be a teetotaler.
I feel like a fraud.
I make myself scoop up the necklace and drop the chain over my neck, and it feels like a harder blow than it should when the medallion thuds against my chest.
Ariel scowls at the sight of it. “As if anything that’s happened between us is as simple as sex. That’s not the kind of need I mean.”
The tide that rises in me at that statement, not to mention the look on his face, terrifies me in a completely different way than death goddesses and monsters do. I lean into the temper that hurries along after it instead. I lean in hard.
“If you had the slightest idea what I need,” I bite out at him, “my twin brother would not be languishing in a cold, dampdungeon, forced to feed from a vampire bitch with a chain around his ankle.” That feels both good and terrible to say. It feels risky. But I keep going. “You’ve been holding him over my head since you demanded I come see you in the first place. I thought he was dead, Ariel. Actually, permanently dead, not whatever dead means to you. That’s what families of addicts do. We assume they’re dead and pray they’re clean while you justuse it—”
I cut myself off. The medallion is in my fist, and that’s where Ariel is staring.
I didn’t mean to say any of that. It doesn’t feel like I’m telling him anything he needs to know. It feels like guilt—mine, for wasting time with him that isn’t actually rescuing Augie, not that I could do that without him anyway.
It feels like I’m baring my neck and my soft belly and daring him to sink his fangs in deep.
And not in a fun way.
