by Cole McCade
“I don’t,” he hissed, before his shoulders fell. “I don’t…I don’t know anything anymore.”
“That’s okay.” Closer, her heart pounding, her blood a thrumming of high-pitched strings in wailing violin shrieks, until she pressed against his back, leaned into him, taking the weight off her ankle to give the entirety of her body into him and trusting him not to let her fall. She knotted her fingers in the back of his shirt, closed her eyes, pressed her cheek between his shoulder blades. “It’s okay not to know. We’ll figure it out. Just let him go.”
His shoulders heaved—and then he leaned back into her, until they propped each other up and without each other, they would fall. “What if I say no?” he whispered. “Are you willing to kill yourself to save him? To stop me? Is that what you expect, that I will punish you for defying me?”
“Your agenda hasn’t changed.” This close his heart beat deep enough to absorb into her skin, and she pretended it beat with something like human warmth, compassion. “Would it really make a difference, if you kill me instead of him?”
He turned. Faced her. Caught her before she could fall, his hands around her hips, his grip rough, possessive.
“It would have made every difference, firefly,” he whispered, and lifted her into his arms.
She stiffened. “Priest—”
“Don’t.” He carried her toward the bed, stepping over the writhing boy on the floor. “You’ve made your ankle worse; don’t injure yourself further.” He studied her with something like sorrow cut into the lines of his mouth, the knit of his brow. “Promise me that you are right, Willow. Promise me that what you wish of me is the right thing to do, when if I let this man go he may cause the deaths of dozens too desperate to turn anywhere else.”
“It’s right.” She curled her fingers in his shirt, tangling tight. “I know. I know your concept of right and wrong got broken. I know. But please believe me that it’s right. You can’t make decisions for the greater good like that. Not at the cost of making yourself a murderer. Not at the cost of so much blood, so much violence. You’re not a soldier anymore, Priest. It’s time to let it go.”
Priest looked at her strangely, so deep, so searching, as though he was trying to find a piece of himself in her eyes. “Perhaps you are not who you once were anymore, either,” he murmured, and she frowned.
“I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t.” He settled her gently against the bed, tucking her against the headboard. “But it is not a terrible thing to become aware of your own strength, firefly.”
He brushed his fingers through her hair, then drew back and strode toward the boy with steps that creaked with the pain and weariness of ancients. Priest hooked his hand in the ropes binding the boy’s wrists, then pulled him upright, guiding him to his feet; the boy stumbled, reeling and tripping and struggling, then managed to find his footing as Priest pushed him toward the exit.
Willow leaned forward, watching with wide eyes. “Where are you going?”
Priest looked back. Heavy, measuring, and the words came out like grinding cement as he said, “To drop him on the CCPD’s doorstep. Either he is innocent and will need their help, or he is guilty and can be their problem.” His jaw worked from side to side. His gaze dropped. “That is what you wanted, is it not?”
Hope leaped in Willow’s chest. Hope she didn’t dare grasp onto, when it was such a fragile thing that would shatter if she pressed too hard. “Promise,” she breathed, begging him with everything in her, needing to believe some core inside him had remained whole, the part that upheld the strict sense of honor that kept him from descending into true madness. “Promise you aren’t taking him somewhere else to kill him.”
He lifted his head; a shadow darkened his eyes, a haunting of pain. “Have I ever lied to you, firefly?” He swept her a bow, sardonic and deep. “You have my most solemn vow. I swear to you that I will not kill this man.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
But he wouldn’t look at her.
And she didn’t say a word to call him back, as he took hold of his frightened, whimpering cargo and left.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
THE MINUTES HAD NEVER BEEN longer than the ones Willow spent waiting for Priest. If she could have paced on her twisted ankle she would have, and she fretted at the hem of her shirt instead until the threads unraveled and the cloth started to fray.
Please. Please don’t let her be wrong. If she was, the suffering of innocents was on her shoulders.
And the worst part was…she would never know.
When she heard the doors grinding up, heard the Firebird’s engine, she jerked her head up, staring, watching, waiting, terrified she would see Priest drenched in blood after the urge had taken him without her there to intervene. But when he stepped inside, there was only a man who had aged decades in minutes, with haunted eyes that locked on her accusingly.
Before he shook his head and turned away from her, crossing the room to pick up the knife from the floor.
“Priest…?” she whispered, her voice like a penny dropped in the silence.
He said nothing until he’d put the blade back on the wall rack. He lingered, looking at it, then ran his fingers along the edge, tracing the sheen of its polish and glow. “He’s alive,” he grit out. “If that is what you are worried about. I left him bound outside the police station.”
She slumped back against the headboard; relief made her bones loose. “He’s not the one I’m worried about.”
Again that accusing look, before his gaze shuttered over and he bowed his head. “You do not need to spare your concern for me.”
“Priest…” She stretched out one hand, begging him. Something was wrong, something deeper than self-doubt over giving in to her pleas. “Come here. Talk to me.”
For a moment he looked as if he might protest. Lash out. Yet even now he had control; trembling control, but still control, and she realized as much as he unnerved her she trusted that control in ways so deep it was frightening. But still she held her hand outstretched, waiting, and finally he came to her—slow, laborious, crossing the room as if it was a journey of a thousand miles and sinking down to sit on the edge of the bed.
She pushed herself over to him and pressed against his back, with her cheek resting to his shoulder blade and her fingers curled against his shoulders. “Tell me what’s wrong,” she whispered. “You did the right thing.”
“But would I have if you hadn’t made me?” The edges of his voice were crumbling, harsh. “I thought I was changing you…not that you were changing me. Yet even as you stood before me and defied me, a part of me already doubted. Already questioned. I…I am not sure if I could have done it. I am not sure if I could have killed him.”
“That’s not bad. It isn’t. It’s a step in the right direction.”
“Is it?” With a hoarse sound, he dragged a hand through his hair. “I…I don’t know if I can do this anymore. How am I any different from them?”
“Who?”
“The ones who killed…” Against her, his back went stiff as stone. “Everyone. Killing for a cause. You say I don’t know what it is to feel vulnerable, but you were not there.” Underneath the dead emptiness in his lyrically accented voice was a quiet loathing, an old loathing, steeped in years and deeper than a grudge. “I hated them. And yet I made myself in their image because they cut my image of myself out of me. Do you know what they did to me over there, in Sangin?”
“No.” She shifted back, leaning against the headboard again, tugging him, coaxing him. “Come here, Vin.”
He followed her with halting movements, laying down to rest his head in her lap, his hair spilling across them both and his weight heavy against her. His eyes were red-rimmed and strange, gleaming, seeing other places, other worlds. “You did not see what they did to us. ‘Vulnerable’ is a kind word. They flayed our souls from our bodies. We were captured. My entire unit. Gabriel, Serafina, all of us. Even now, I still do not know if
it was hours, days…weeks. There was no time. None. There was just…” He closed his eyes, and curled one broad hand over her knee. “Pain. Pain, and questions I couldn’t answer. Wouldn’t answer. They liked to whip me. Like my tormenter was Pontius Pilate, and I was Jesus whipped and mocked in a crown of thorns. And even now…I don’t even know what it was for. What they really thought they would gain from it. From killing the people I loved before my eyes.” Wetness glimmered on his lashes, each tiny droplet struggling free as if they were the last vestiges of emotion left in him, clinging to this hollow vessel. “They were family. And none are left save me and Gabriel. Or the pieces of me and Gabriel. I don’t…I don’t know if what came out of there could be called whole men. Or men at all.”
Her heart was a breaking thing, splitting apart and spilling too many painful, aching things from its cage. “Priest…”
“Don’t. Don’t.” He shifted onto his back to look up at her. “I’ve been thinking this forever, don’t you understand?” His chest rose and fell erratically, deeply. “You. When I had to ask myself what to do with you…for the first time, it made me feel like I could stop.”
“So stop.” She brushed his hair back gently, leaning over him. “Priest, stop. Let it go. I can’t pretend to understand, but whatever this thing is riding you…” She leaned down, resting her brow to his. “It’s going to kill you.”
“I’ve always known that,” he whispered. “I simply thought I knew how to feel about it.”
Willow cupped her palm to his cheek and traced her thumb below his trembling lower lashes, gathering those beads of wetness that said his coldness, his sickness, his cruelty were all a mask, and his strange code of honor was a desperate attempt to preserve the remnants of the broken, tired man underneath. “What would you do, if you didn’t do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, and reached up to curl his fingers in her hair. “But I know what I want in this moment.”
He drew her into him, and kissed her with trembling lips; she shivered as he plied her mouth with a softness, a searching warmth as if he sought the last vestiges of himself in her depths. When his hands fell to frame her hips, heat flooded through her, turning her soft and liquid, and she didn’t resist as he guided her atop him, never once letting go of her lips and only kissing her deeper, slower, melting her mouth with soft tastes and touches as he settled her straddling his hips.
She braced her hands against his stomach and leaned over him, bringing their bodies together in a meeting and mating of tangled limbs, letting herself go without thinking, without struggling, when she understood what this was. What he needed from her in every gripping, kneading, possessive stroke of those rough hands against her back, bunching the shirt against her skin. What he asked for in every teasing, taunting nibble and every twining of tongue to tongue in wet, slick strokes.
And what he commanded not with force, but with quiet entreaty as he lifted her over him, freed himself from his jeans, stroked his hands down her thighs and looked up at her with those red-rimmed, aching eyes.
He was asking for comfort in the only way he knew how, and the only way she knew how to give.
Her breaths hitched as his heat pressed against her naked flesh, parted her, opened her for him. She pulled back to look down at him, watching that beautiful, arrogant face, watching the torment in his eyes, in the tightness of his jaw, watching the part of his lips as he tried to make himself ask when the clear pride in every line of him refused to let him.
And watching as every hint of torment, of pain, of struggle vanished from his features as they went slack with pleasure, the moment she took him into herself.
He filled her so slickly, so smoothly, that heat that glided home until it fit right where he belonged, nestled into her until they fit one to one and there was no part of herself where they did not touch. She came aglow, light burning under her skin, turning pleasure into something radiant and soft that flowed through her as she moved. Arching over him, sliding her hands against the taut planes of his body, she rolled and twisted her hips until he groaned. She bit back her cries of pleasure as fierce heat stroked and licked her from within. She rode him as if she rode flame and would tame the beast between her thighs, and he clutched at her and whispered her name and filled her with an ecstasy so intense it could only be deepest, most perfect pain.
“Willow,” he whispered, tight and rough with emotion, with need. “Willow.”
“Shh,” she answered, as she bent to kiss him, bent to take him deeper, bent to make them one. “I’m here.” She threaded her fingers into his hair, cradled his face in her palms, kissed him until she could taste nothing else but the softness of his lips and the bitter salt taste trickling over his skin. “I’m here…and I’m not going anywhere.”
* * *
TANGLED IN THE SHEETS AND each other, they watched the sun rise in narrow bands of color through the slits of the windows. They’d said not a word, since they’d come together and burst to pieces and something inside Willow had shifted, some empty place where he fit inside her, leaving her hollow at the thought of what would happen now. One way or another, they would part. Soon.
Even if he didn’t kill her…he had to let her go.
“I want to find home,” Priest murmured against her hair, and she stirred drowsily from her pensive thoughts.
“Mm?”
“You asked what I would do. What I want to do is find home.” His fingers splayed against her stomach, stroking idly, teasing at her sensitivity in little brushes of rippling tension. “After the war they shipped us back, but it did not feel like coming home. Not to Crow City, and not to Venice. Home didn’t exist anymore.” He exhaled heavily, a melting cloud against her nape. “I felt like a stray dog cast on the side of the road, waiting to be found. Waiting for someone to tell me where I belonged.”
“Failure to launch.” The words stung with an ache born of familiarity. “Only you launched and crashed.”
“And I have been trying to pick up the wreckage ever since.”
She turned to face him, settling in his arms with the sheets wrapped around their legs and the cooling sweat of his body slick under her palms. “Start over,” she said. “Forget Priest. Forget anything you’ve been since you came back. Start over. Learn how to be Vin again.”
“It is not that simple, firefly.”
“Choosing to can be.”
He chuckled. “And now you lecture me about choice?”
“We’re two peas in a pod.” She smiled slightly. “You still can’t even make up your mind about killing me.”
He tensed, expression transfixed in something dark and aching, before he looked away. “You speak so glibly of that.”
“I gave up fighting fate the moment you tied me to the bed and I didn’t say no. If the chance came to run, I would take it. If it didn’t…I couldn’t control what you did.”
“And yet you were the one who swayed me.” He caught a lock of her hair, toying with it, brows knitting. “You gave up on yourself, but not on a stranger?”
“I wouldn’t call it giving up.” And she wondered that she could smile, now, with such calm and quiet acceptance. “I’d call it knowing when to make the right choice.”
“That is something I am still learning.” He trailed that lock of hair against her throat, marking a path down to lay it against her collarbone, tangled in the firefly pendant. “And yet the choice here appears obvious. I seem to have difficulty with killing the people I love.”
That word, love, struck her in the center of the chest with more force than a blow, cracking her calm to pieces. She stared up at him, searching for any hint of mockery, any lie, any question that he might simply be taunting her—but he only looked down at her with that grave solemnity that was so very Priest, his honesty part of what made him so strange and alien and at once simple and impossible to understand.
She curled her hand against her mouth, pressing her fingers against her lips, eyes wide. “You…you can’t know if you love
someone after three days. Not even three days.”
“Yet you can look at a profound piece of art, or a life-changing vista, and know in that moment exactly what you feel, and never doubt it as real and true even though you have felt it for but seconds in a lifetime.” He caught her hand, drew it gently from her mouth, unfolded it to clasp her palm over his heart—over that flesh that burned furnace-hot, and the wild animal engine that drove it, beating and racing and tumbling so fast. “You are the one who said I am too intense. Too much. Perhaps I am too much in this, as well. All or nothing.”
“I…you—but you said love is an illusion…”
“Perhaps it is.” He watched her with lidded, steady eyes, amber dark with quiet calm. “The thing about illusions is how real they often feel.”
“You’re crazy,” she breathed.
“That too.”
He meant it, she realized. He meant it that he thought he could love her, or feel something like love for her—in this sick situation, in the space of scant hours. Her heart was a thing of lightness and fire and confusion and dread, and she didn’t know what to do. What to say. How to feel. When he was inside her so deep, branding her from within and leaving an indelible, permanent mark on her…
But to accept those words, to want them, went beyond madness and into suicidal.
She swallowed back the clotted knot her emotions made in her throat. “If you honestly think you love me, then let me go.”
“The problem, firefly, is that you do not love me.” And yet he said it with such simple acceptance, without an ounce of accusation. “Not enough to keep my secrets. You desire me. You are fascinated by me. I represent the risks you wish you had taken with your life…but I represent every terror of the unknown, as well. I am not wholly certain you even see me as a man, rather than the seductive allure of an idea.”