by Heather Linn
I had missed him and his emotional roller coaster ride. I didn’t know what to say, so I did what I do best. I completely ignored his emotional side. I was ill-equipped to deal with his feelings anyway, so I ignored them at all cost.
“What do you mean you were afraid I was going to wake up hungry? Let me go! And where is my friend?”
“You mean that sad little creature that talks to you like he owns you?” I almost wanted to smile at him but I didn’t think that would be prudent. He was jealous of Jace. Really? I couldn’t wait to tell Jace.
“Yes that is who I mean, and it is none of your concern at all how he talks to me.” Good. Mean, cold and conniving. I could do this.
“You really need to keep better company, I think I have told you that before, and do you mind telling me where this attitude is coming from? I have done nothing to you, and yet you have lied to me and worse than that, you let me think that you were dead. You let me kiss you and you let me fall in love with you, a goddamned human, and you dare to give me attitude?” My stomach soured and it felt as if a knife was tearing into my guts.
I am sure that my blood turned to ice. I never wanted to hear him call me a human and I never wanted to hear him say he was in love with me. My world started dissolving. I had nothing to say. I turned my head to the right like a guilty dog and I waited for the blow that would kill me. It had to be coming. The King of all monsters was not only pining and heart sick for me but he was pissed at himself for not seeing right through the line of lies I had been feeding him.
“Look at me Cat.” I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to see the blow that was going to kill me. “I said, look at me now!” I guess it was the least I could do, give him the common courtesy of looking into his eyes, while he struck me down. “What were you thinking? I could have killed you, I should kill you now; if I don’t, then what am I supposed to do?” His question encouraged me. This might not be as bad as I thought. Things could take a turn. If he was still deciding what to do, I might have a chance to get away. “You are a nothing but a useless human. What were you doing at the Ball, how did you get out of your cage?” The hardest thing that I had to do at that moment was keep my temper under wraps. I knew I had to, but let’s face it, who was I trying to kid? I had little control of my temper.
“Yes Akia, you’re right, I am a human and I belong in a cage. No one is questioning your superiority over me. Can we please just get on with this? Kill me now and burn my body. No one will ever know that you had any attachment to a dirty human that way,” I said and then I sat still and waited. I waited for him to end my life. I waited for him to scream at me. Hell, I waited so long that I was about to offer to scream at myself, just to break the silence. When he started to speak again I jumped. My nerves were on end.
“Do you really think it’s that easy for me? That I could just kill you after everything that’s happened between us? How can I kill you when you are the only thing that has ever made me feel an ounce of compassion? I was dead before I met you, Cat. I don’t know what you think I am. I used to kill just to cause hurt and pain Cat, because watching the suffering and hearing the screams delighted me. It was the only thing that made me feel alive. Then you walked into the palace, a place where you never should have been and you changed my life. Then all I could think about was getting to spend just one more minute with you. I needed to smell you and touch you. You turned me into a rambling mess of a man and still I wanted you. You were a challenge; a challenge that I was hell bent and determined to meet. I guess I figured, if I could just get you to talk to me, to pay attention to me, even get you to be in the same room with me without hating me, I would be able to make you see that I am not the spoiled, self-righteous monster that you think I am.”
I was screaming at myself to make him stop. I didn’t want to hear any more from him. I had convinced myself he was a monster and now he was giving me a glimpse of his soul and what I saw was completely capable of destroying the wall that I had built to keep him out. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t make him stop. I wanted to hear what he had to say. A part of me wanted to hear the hurt in his voice. I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one lost. I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one that had been fucked by fate, and the words flowing from his lips were so raw and filled with emotion that I knew I wasn’t. I tried as long as I could not to cry, neither of us needed that, but he just kept going and every single word brought the tears closer to running down my cheeks.
“I died again too Cat, when you died I felt it. I knew that you were gone, I heard you tell me goodbye. I died when you did and I didn’t care about anything. I destroyed everything in my path. I killed so many rodents just because I thought maybe the next life I ended would help me cope with a life without you. But I never got there. When killing the rodents failed to satisfy me, I moved on to my guards. After all, they were the ones responsible. They were the ones that had let you in to begin with. I had no idea back then what you were, not even a hint. I didn’t know what happened that day but I knew that someone should have stopped you at the gate and turned you away. There is so much that I don’t know about you Cat, there is so much that you have to tell me. We have to tie up the loose ends and figure out how to fix this. I have you back now. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but I won’t lose you again,” he said, and his voice trailed off into misery and the room grew still.
My tears were falling in a steady stream. It felt so good to finally let them fall. I wanted him to see me cry, I wanted him to watch the tears slide down my face. I wanted him to see that I was just as hurt as he was. I knew there was never going to be an Us, and he had to face that too. He was the King of the world. There was no way that I could ever be anything to him but a painful memory.
“Stop crying! Now Cat!” It was more of an order than a comforting plea, but he was doing the best that he could. He looked so confused. This was all more new to him than it was to me.
I had loved Darien, and I knew how it felt to have half your heart torn out of your body, and I knew what it was like to know that that another person had the power to crush you completely with just one word. Akia, for lack of a better phrase, was afraid. How do you comfort a man that at some point might wind up having your blood on his hands?
“If you are scared of me Cat, you have nothing to fear. I have decided I can’t hurt you¸ but believe me I have thought about it. I thought you were dead once and I lived through it, and I’ve thought about how much simpler would it be for me if I just ended your pathetic life. You are after all, just a human. I would be doing you a favor.” Before I realized it he was standing over the top of me, both of his hands raised high. This was it I thought. He had convinced himself to snap my neck. That couldn’t possibly hurt too badly, right? Just one wrenching snap and my life would be over.
I thought of my family and Darien and Jace, either of them would have been the perfect boy to bring home to the parents back in the old world. Either would have made me happy. I could feel Akia standing so close to me now. I could feel the warmth of his skin, which told me that he had recently fed. For some reason the thought of his lips drinking from someone else no longer disgusted me. Instead, a flash of jealousy coursed through me. It physically hurt. I was glad that soon this would all be over and I would never have to face any of the three men that held pieces of my heart. None of them would ever understand. They would all come to hate me for not being able to choose between them. Death was better than disappointing any one of them. If that made me a coward then so be it. A lifetime seemed to play out in my mind in these final seconds, seconds that passed like forever. I waited for my neck to snap wanting it more so, because I could smell him, and I wanted to reach out for him. I had never been happier in my life that my hands were tied down. Not because I was afraid I would be a coward and fail to fight him off, but because I knew my untied hands would have reached out to hold him. He smelled like adventure, he smelled like the promise of everything I needed to make me feel a whol
e person and I wanted nothing more than to claim what he held out. I deserved it. I deserved to know how it felt to be complete for once in my life. I was so lost in my world of self-pity that I didn’t even feel his hand close around the ring on my finger.
“I can’t make you listen to my words but I can make you feel them.” With one swift motion the ring was off my finger and lying on the pillow beside me.
“Akia! No! Please put that back on, you have no idea what you are doing. I need that ring.” He was just looking down at me, his eyes still fresh with pain.
“What’s the matter Cat? What else could you possibly be hiding from me, that you need this ring to keep me out?” He knew way too much about the ring, how it worked and what it did. I guess me and Jace were going to have to have a long talk about keeping secret tokens secret.
“I am asking you to please put my ring back on and to untie me so I can get out of here. I can’t be the person you want me to be and you are way too smart to think that there are more than two options here as far as we are concerned.” I was really hoping he wouldn’t ask what those two options were because I knew how bad it was going to hurt to admit them and I didn’t know if I was ready for that just yet.
“Well Cat, I think that you owe me at least the chance to choose between the two. So why don’t you go ahead and fill me in.” His voice was taunting me now. “I don’t know what it is but when I am this close to you, angry or not, I just have to touch you.” He was right. I craved the feel of his hand trailing along my cheek and he was making it so hard for me to stay upset. If I wasn’t angry with him, I would never be able to hurt him. Damn it!
“Please stop touching me your Majesty. You aren’t making this easier on either of us. You know you have to either kill me or you have to let me go. I promise if you choose to let me go, I will disappear and you can forget that all of this happened.” As the words spilled from my mouth in a lying rush, I couldn’t stop the tears from slipping out and running down my face. Stupid girl, he was never going to believe that you didn’t care about him if you couldn’t even talk about leaving him without turning into a crying mess.
“You really think I am going to risk putting myself through losing you again? I get it now. I am a big bad monster and you hate me Cat, but you can’t argue with me about how amazing this feels.”
I should have clamped my mouth shut. I couldn’t move away from him because he was holding my face between his strong hands. When his mouth touched mine it was all I could do not to cry out for him. I needed this man like I needed oxygen. Why couldn’t I believe that he needed me as much? I was nothing compared to him. Nothing at all, and in a world where humans are living on borrowed time and monsters live forever, he didn’t need me at all. This had to be just a way for him to delay the inevitable.
“Is that what you really believe Kitten?”
His mouth was on mine, his tongue was setting my body on fire so I knew that he was talking to me through my mind and not through ordinary speech.
“Akia if you care about me at all please don’t do this.” It was amazing how my body went on moving on its own while my mind grew wrapped up in his.
“I have no intention of stopping. You are going to experience once and for all how I feel about you. How hurt I was and just what you mean to me now.”
With my face in his hands, there was nothing that I could do but give in and let him show me the truth. I saw it all. I saw how I looked to him the first time he saw me. I felt the pangs of jealousy that he felt when I danced with the other men at the Ball that night. He was watching me and I looked like an exotic beautiful creature in his mind. I saw the next morning all over again, how he woke up and saw me laying lifelessly in his bed, and how he had suffered. He made me live through my own death in his mind again and again until it hurt so much I could stand the images no longer. He was angry and he used both the scenes in his head and his kisses to let me how deep his pain and anger went.
I was a panting piece of flesh, out of control, a quivering combination of tears running down my face and a moving tongue working hard to keep up with his. I couldn’t break his hold on me and the images kept getting stronger and worse. I saw all the nameless people that he had torn apart and drained. He even allowed me to see that he had mourned each one when he was finished with them. I was lost to him and nothing could fix that; no amount of spilled blood could replace the loss of me. He carried me forward in his head, all the way up to the Hunt. I saw myself kissing Jace through his eyes. To Akia, I was just a random human. He had been happy to rip me away from Jace. I felt him get excited. I knew that it made him happy to destroy the bonds between humans. For a second the thought crossed his mind to kill me and let Jace go, just so he could make someone else feel as lonely and abandoned as he did.
When his teeth sank deeply into my neck back in that cave, he had felt a spark. I had felt it too, electricity building, and he drank on and on because he had sensed that he had regained some semblance of the feeling of me that he craved. Akia was so lost in blood lust at that moment that he had stopped paying attention to Jace. He was consuming me and he didn’t care what the man in the corner was doing.
When Jace finally got the ring off my finger I felt the sharp stabbing pain go through Akia’s head. It made me gasp between my needy moans. I felt his confusion. He hadn’t known what was happening. All that filled him was one thought, she was here. It wasn’t until I let myself call out to him in my head that he registered what was going on and stopped. I felt his heart leap. He was ecstatic. She was back! Through some twist of fate, he had received another chance to have me. His mood vanished quickly when he looked down at my ravaged neck. I could see Jace through his eyes. Jace frantically waving his arms, and then ordering Akia to drop me, it was all there for me to see.
When a memory got too much for him to relive he would shut it off and move on to the next moment that had been seared inside him. He was there watching me sleep. Hour upon hour, he sat talking to me, begging me to open my eyes, willing me to just give him one chance to make everything all right. I was crying again. He was letting me see his soul and what I saw scared me. Akia was without doubt, a hundred percent in love with me and he was done with hiding it.
I was so hoping that this was the end. He had shown me what he needed me to see, and I hoped he was finished. I knew I wasn’t that lucky, I knew that he wasn’t going to let me alone the moment I felt him probing deeper and deeper into my mind. I had to make sure that he didn’t see Kira, not yet. I knew that I could block off bits and pieces of my consciousness if I shut down the right parts of myself. I also knew that I could block only one thing at a time. I was going to be almost totally wide open to him and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Akia I am asking you one more time not to do this.” I sounded so weak and lost. I knew that he could hear the desperation in my voice, even though words never escaped my lips.
“What’s the matter Kitten? Didn’t you miss me the way I missed you? Of course you didn’t. You had the other two fools to take care of you.” He was turning to anger again. I had just seen things that he wasn’t sure he wanted me to see and now he was going to take memories from me and there was nothing that I could do to stop him.
I had exactly two seconds to decide what I was going to block from his sight. I had to decide between what would hurt him, and what might damage the rest of us even more. There had to be a happy medium, right? I knew that there wasn’t but I could pretend. If he saw me with Darien or Jace that would hurt him badly, and hurting him was the last thing that I wanted to do right now. I couldn’t save him from himself. I had begged him not to push but he was too stubborn. If I let him see Walker, there was a chance he would decide that he had to piece everything together and turn us all in. If I let him see Kira, he would definitely go search for her and all would be lost.
A split second impulse led me to block Kira from my head and for the moment, she ceased to exist to me completely.
I blocked wh
at I could and I let him see everything that remained. He saw that I hurt for him. He saw that I ached for him and that was good. I needed him to see that. I needed him to see the nights I cried myself to sleep, wishing that I could have just one more kiss, or at least the chance to say good bye. The difference between what he was seeing and what I had seen was closure. I desperately wanted to see him again for closure and he had wanted to see me to make me love him. But no, I couldn’t let it look the way it did. I didn’t want it to seem like I was the heartless monster except that is exactly what it was. I knew the deeper he got into me, the more and more crushed he was going to be. The moments that I spent with Darien, the vast battles that I had with myself, the memories of times when I was sure that I could spend the rest of my life without Akia, they were all there; every single one of those moments were there. My inner most self was exposed.
His kiss deepened. He needed to make sure he got every last drop of me before he left me an invaded shell. Next, he saw Drake. I felt shock and hurt and betrayal hurl through Akia’s body as he watched his best friend kidnap me, abuse me and rape me. I felt the pang of confusion when he saw me with Jace for the first time, laying there tied to the bed, much like I was now. None of this was making sense to him. I thought for a brief second he would stop and just let everything connect in his mind but he didn’t. He pushed forward, sorting through my memories, inspecting them and then leaving them scattered like pieces of trash that could never be swept. Drake’s words were etched permanently into his mind, as if written with acid. I could feel the burn and the scars settle in place and then what he saw next made me fear for my life again, because I knew it might be all it would take to put him over the edge and end me.
He saw me giving myself to Jace. It wasn’t the sex that hurt him; it was the fact that he watched me willingly giving all my trust to a stranger. I was certain that in that second, I betrayed him more than even Drake. He was right. I was stupid, unworthy, and I had trusted another man enough to tell him everything about me. Akia would never look at me the same again. Love me or not, I was no longer innocent in his eyes. Lucky for me, he didn’t stop and examine things more closely, his morbid curiosity kept him moving rapidly on to my next memory, greedy to see more. He was in a frenzy of self-destruction, trapped in a nauseous search for things that could only hurt him more.