Pushing to his hands and knees, he crawled toward me across the kitchen floor. His eyes etched with pain from his concussion, his body swaying a little from imbalance. He stalked me as if I was the one already dead, the one whose life hung in his hands for eternity.
He didn’t stop until he kneeled before me and took my jaw in his powerful hand.
I flinched as foreboding and despair made my hair stand on end.
His voice slipped from soft to steely. “I don’t know who you are or why you found me. I don’t know how you made me feel such things or why my thoughts aren’t nearly as black when I’m in your company. I don’t trust you. I don’t know how to figure this shit out. All I know is, I would rather you kill me than live another day without you, so...I’m happy with either option.”
As he ran his thumb over my bottom lip, his eyes caught mine and held. Blazing with truth, with vulnerability, with every dark broken piece of him, he breathed, “That’s how this will end, Gem. The only way. You either accept that it’s just us and learn to give me what I want—to learn to want me in the same way—or you will kill me to be free of me. There is no other path from here. Either way, I get what I need. I get you. For the rest of my godforsaken life.”
Letting me go, he pushed up and stumbled to his feet. Shaking his head from whatever sickness he still felt, he looked down at me.
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t believe what he’d just said.
He was the worst kind of contradiction. The most dangerous of all men.
He’d ensured I was his for evermore, accepting that if my desire for freedom was stronger than my desire to remain his, I would end up killing him.
It wouldn’t be a terrible master who beat and raped him that snuffed out his life.
It would be me.
The girl who’d spent the past week and a half by his bedside. The girl who believed she was falling for him. The girl who would never have been able to leave anyway.
In that savage flash of truth, I knew that despite my gumption, I would’ve hiked to the cliff face and placed one foot on its rocks, and I wouldn’t have been able to go any farther.
How could I?
I wasn’t cold-hearted enough. I couldn’t have been so callous to leave a concussed man alone in a forgotten valley.
I would’ve come back. I would’ve kissed him, helped him, taken my time to convince him to come with me. To turn his back on this place once and for all.
I would’ve come to him on my own accord.
And wasn’t that the saddest, cruelest thing?
He said he needed me.
Well, I’d needed him.
I’d wanted him.
I’d wanted to be more than just his friend. I wanted to be his savior.
But now?
Now he’d done this? Now he’d taken all choice from me and condemned my mother and brother to think I’d perished in some awful climbing accident?
Now, I hated him.
My heart closed to him. Any emotion I’d felt, any softness, understanding, and kindness all evaporated and hardened into stone.
We continued staring.
And he knew.
He saw the shutting down of my soul. He felt the ice creeping over my heart and nodded painfully as I braced my shoulders and reached for the bowl of pasta. Clinically, coldly, I stabbed a piece of ravioli and shoved it into my mouth.
I chewed as if I chewed his very essence.
I swallowed as if it was his very life I consumed.
And in a way, it was.
Because a sin like this couldn’t go unforgiven.
Need or no need.
Desire or no desire.
I was done being nice to this heathen.
Swooping to my feet, I clutched my pasta and swept past him.
With each step, the chain clinked behind me, making my blood boil with fury.
But he didn’t stop me.
He didn’t chase.
He merely let me go, knowing we were tethered forever.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WE SLEPT IN DIFFERENT rooms.
Well, she slept (at least, I assumed she slept). I didn’t.
Now that my brain wasn’t as fractured with a concussion, I found it impossible to sleep anywhere but the dormitory. I was done being unconscious in the library—bed of blankets or not. I craved the ability to close and lock a door. I grew more and more frustrated as midnight ticked over to three a.m. and dawn slowly brought light back into the world.
I didn’t know where she’d gone after leaving me in the kitchen. I hadn’t tried to find her. Partly because my head still hurt like a motherfucker, and mostly because I had a feeling if I pressed her tonight, she’d end up fulfilling the key task for her freedom.
She’d slaughter me with her pasta bowl or murder me with her fork.