Page 137 of Drown Like Heaven
But Aamon was back now.
And, knowing him, he would still be at least partially focused on killing me.
Which was the reason for Mason being at my house right now, standing in my living room and perusing all my personal belongings, inspecting them like foreign specimens. To him, they were. He didn’t know this version of me.
Approaching the fireplace, his eyes latched onto the the photo frames there.
He picked up a photo of me in my doctoral regalia then turned it face-down, slamming the glass into the corner of the mantle so the picture frame shattered. I just watched him, holding entirely still. Not getting the reaction he wanted out of me, he began perusing the bookshelf again. His fingers wrapped around a glass plaque—a teaching award I’d won.
“Mason,” I warned.
He looked at me.
“Don’t—”
He flung it hard on the ground, the glass shattering into dozens of tiny pieces, making me flinch. The picture frame was replaceable; the award was not. Mason didn’t discriminate. Anger heated in my blood, but I was determined not to let my expression slip.
“Are you done?” I asked flatly. “Are you just going to go around breaking everything in my house? You think that’ll make me give a fuck about you again?”
“No. I don’t think that. I just like breaking your things.”
In his eyes, I could see the look that I liked least when we were together.Nothingness. He didn’t give a single fuck about what he was doing, and he genuinely didn’t care how any of it would affect me. When he got like this, he was unreachable. He’dlearned how to do it so he could lie to me. If he was able to make himself completely unaffected by the lie he was telling, he could hide it from me.
I focused all my energy on reaching into his mind, even knowing I wouldn’t be able to affect him how I wanted to now. It was like an impenetrable wall, his emotions completely intangible, almost nonexistent. There wasn’t even anger. Just…nothing. Nothing to grab onto.
His eyes snapped to mine.
“Get the fuck out of my head.”
I pressed my lips together.
“You know you can’t control me like this.”
Right.But when I do this…
His eyes went wide and blank, rage instantly flooding into his mind as I took his sight.
I’d never done this to him outside of sex, because it felt like a gross overuse of power, an abuse of my abilities. Sigeian ability was in theabsenceof things. The ability to take someone’s senses, to steal their emotions, manipulate and hold them in my fist, to make tangible things into invisible ghosts. They weren’t able to be counterbalanced. If I had someone, Ihad them. Because of that, I often refrained from ever using my aspect on Mason when I was angry with him.
But that was back when I cared about him.
Dark desire clawed at me, gnawed on me, begging me to takeeverythingand make him entirely lost. His sight, his hearing, his ability to feel, to speak. I could take all of it from him right now. Most Sigeians could only take one or two things, but I’d been lucky enough to be born with the ability to take all six.
All five senses, and the voice.
But I refrained, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold all of it very long—not against a Thrausian—and then it would becomenear impossible to control his mind afterward, which was what I most wanted to do.
I let his sight seep back into him.
He was furious now, and I could sense those tendrils wrapping around his thoughts, replacing the nothingness with a fiery blaze, giving me something to pull on. Without moving a muscle, I unraveled one thread of his rage, testing more limits. Three more erupted in its place, Mason’s expression twisting into something murderous.
He stalked across the room towards me, not slowing as he shoved me backwards, my spine slamming into the wall. I didn’t fight him. The angrier he got, the easier it would be for me to manipulate him, the more ground I could cover in his mind.
The deeper and stronger an emotion, the deeper I could reach.
And if he started tofracture, I could hold him in the palm of my hand, both of knowing I had the power to push him into oblivion right there. It was so fucking tempting. I’d never let myself eventhinkabout doing anything like this to him before. But now the idea was a living thing in my skull, the possibility of controlling him like that taunting me viciously.
His forearm slammed into my throat and I tipped my head back, skull pressed to the plaster.
