Rip seems to catch the taste, biting down so hard that I hear his teeth grind. “You shouldn’t let him use your power anymore.”
The judgment in his tone makes me go tense. “You don’t understand,” I say, my mind immediately snagging onto Digby. “I have to.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he retorts. His aura pulses again, but this time, it’s erratic, irritated. Well, that makes two of us, because I know what I’m doing, and this playacting at obedience is necessary.
As he makes his way up the last staircase, I remember how this will look and what’s at stake. “We’re nearly there. You should put me down before the guards see.”
Flared, brutal eyes snap to mine. “I don’t give a flying fuck about Midas’s guards.”
His abrupt vitriol cuts my expression into a frown. “Rip.”
“We’ve been over this. You couldn’t even stand upright, Auren. I’m not putting you down,” he tells me, his voice the rough scrape of rocks, hard and unyielding. “I don’t care if Midas hears about me touching his favored. In fact, I hope he does.”
I sigh at the stubborn bastard. “It’s not just about Midas. I’ve made a mistake by making you think it’s okay to touch me,” I say quietly, unable to look at him. What if it hadn’t been dusk? One touch. That’s all it would take, and the implications of that terrify me. “It was selfish of me. But for your own good, you need to stop.”
He stops abruptly at the top of the stairs and then swings me around, suddenly settling my bottom down on the flat railing on the landing, facing my body toward his. I grip the railing beneath me, centering myself before I go pitching backwards, but I don’t need to, because his arms are already steadying me.
He boldly wraps his hand around the base of my head, fingers pressing against my nape with enough pressure to send tingles down my spine. Breath is locked in my chest as he angles my head toward his, lowering his face right in front of mine. He’s all I see, blocking out everything else until he’s all that exists.
“My own good?” The question is like a snarl, caught in the web of scales on his cheek. His voice is right there, felt against my lips like the sweep of a tongue, sinking past my ears and settling into my chest and making my entire body go on alert.
My ribbons are as frozen as the rest of me, snakes caught in the eyes of a charmer. “Y-yes.”
The intensity of his gaze lights a fire in my belly. “My own good was stuck on a pirate ship, with an aura like a beacon that flared across the Barrens,” he grits out, a thick spun voice meant to tie knots around me. “My own good was cowering before men who were nothing—fucking nothing—in comparison to her.”
All of my ability to breathe is gone as I stare at him in shock.
“My own good hated me, fought me, argued with me, but I didn’t care, because I watched her slowly come out of her shell, peeling back one layer at a time, and it was stunning.” He raises a finger in front of my face. “I got one touch. One taste, and if it was an act of selfishness, then you should know, it certainly wasn’t one-sided, Auren.”
I can’t blink.
I can’t think.
“What...what are you saying?” My chest heaves with the breathless question, like undulating waves in an uncertain sea.
I might drown in the depths of his bottomless eyes.
His teeth snap together, as if my uncertainty sets him on edge. “I’m saying that you are my own good. And for you, I gave you a choice, but you chose him.”
A storm rattles in my skull. A coiled collection of impregnated clouds billowing through my head, thundering through my pulse and threatening rain to fall at my cheeks.
But you chose him.
“Rip—”
“You will always choose him. That’s what you told me.”
I flinch at my own words that he tosses back in my face, a tumultuous deluge sluicing past the dam of my cracking walls.
“Is it still true?” he asks, like a desperate demand.
Water beads against my lids, a golden gaze hinged to pitch-black. The first drop trickles down my cheek, squeezing past my splintering resolve. But when I open my mouth to answer him, no words come.
Instead, Rip moves, and I move with him, wind and rain in harmonious tandem. My body turns, and he steps between my legs where I’m perched on the railing, one hand braced to my right, arm curled against my side to keep me from falling. That thumb against the nape of my neck holds firm, fingers dug into my loose hair.
When his mouth comes down, when it’s against my cheek to soak up the tear, I forget how to breathe. His firm lips take in my riot, like he wants to sip from my soul.
And I want to let him.