Page 56 of Bitten & Burned
But he’d taken that choice from me, springing this on me like he always did—expecting me to rise to his moment, not mine.
I placed my hand on the door. Finally met his eyes. Up close, the crimson rims around his irises were stark against the shadows under them.
They were dark. Shadowed. He looked like he hadn’t slept.
I sighed. Good. Let him wear some of the exhaustion he’d thrust at me.
I slowly pushed the door closed.The wood met the frame with a soft thud, his words dying behind it.
The latch clicked. The click echoed in the quiet, a small sound with the weight of a slammed gate.
And I walked away, the echo of that click still in my ears.
Back to where I’d been before.
I’d meant to leave the door open for Dmitri. But now… now that Vael had come, I supposed I needed to keep it shut. The air felt heavier with it closed, the last of the daylight thinning along the floorboards.
VAEL
The door clicked louder than anything she’d done or said. Louder than anything I had said. The sound seemed to live in my ears, a sharp, metallic punctuation to everything I hadn’t managed to say.
If she’d yelled at me, it would’ve been better. If she’d looked me in the eye and said, “Vael, I never want to see you again”—that would’ve been better. At least I could have taken the blow steadfast, knowing where I stood, instead of drowning in this quiet, shapeless rejection.
I sighed.
The breath left me in a slow, fraying exhale, as if I could bleed out the ache one lungful at a time.
No, I couldn’t.
Lying to myself had never been my style. Especially about her.
I just… wanted a chance to explain myself. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since what happened. Since I dropped her. And I couldn’t fix it. It was a wound I couldn’t close, no matter how I pressed my hands to it. That’s what hurt most.
First Dmitri, now her. One of my oldest allies, my newest bond. Both were looking at me like I’d betrayed something sacred.
I sighed again. It wasn’t Dmitri’s fault. It wasn’t Rowena’s either. I was just… out of ideas.
What do you do when you’ve fucked everything up so badly that nothing looks the way it used to?
How do you live like that? With the edges of every day cutting you open in the same place?
Quil did it all the time. He carried his damage like a second spine, all sharp angles and hidden marrow.
How did he live with himself?
I stopped walking, my pulse kicking up in my throat.
Quil.
Of course. If anyone knew what to do now, it’d be him. He wouldn’t want to see me—he never wanted to see me—but so what? That wouldn’t make today any different than usual.
I turned down the corridor that led to his rooms. The air in this part of the manor was cooler, quieter, the light thinning into long shadows that seemed to reach for me as I passed.
We all had our wings, but Quil only used one of the rooms in his. The others were boarded up, like he’d sealed whole pieces of himself behind those doors, places no one was welcome to trespass. Kept locked and empty. I never understood that. Why have space you didn’t want to live in?
But I suppose that was the difference between Quil and me. He preferred to contain himself. I preferred to spill into every space I could claim. Just one of many differences.
His door was ajar—just like Rowena’s had been. A thin spill of lamplight cut across the hall.
