“You can give it to me,” she whispers. “And I’ll give my pain to you. We’ll hold it for each other. And we won’t ever have to bear it alone again.”
My pain. Cayde’s rage. Dean’s chaos. She takes the things we hold so deeply inside of ourselves, the thingsno one else can bear, and somehow makes it into something beautiful. And in that moment, her gray eyes fixed on mine, her hands circling my wrists and her fingers touching my scars, I know why.
Because she has all those things inside of her too.
Pain. Rage. Chaos. She’s all of us in one, and we’re all of her.
I reach for her, pulling her into my lap the way I did the first night I brought her here. Her hands are still around my wrists, and I wrap mine around hers, looking into her eyes.
“If there’s an order to the universe,” I whisper, reaching up to touch her face. “Then you were always meant to find us, Athena Saint. And we were waiting for you all along.”
Athena swallows hard, and she raises one hand to mine, covering it. “If there is,” she says softly, “then that would mean every bad thing that’s happened to us, to everyone in this town, to everyone that Blackmoor has ever touched, had to happen. It would mean it’s all fate, that it couldn’t have ever been changed.” She bites her lower lip, looking into my eyes. “Does that make it better or worse, Jaxon? If it’s fate, and not just horrible fucking luck?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur. “But we’re going to make sure that it wasn’t for nothing. Your parents, Natalie, you, us, everyone—we’re going to make sure that all that pain isn’t for nothing. I fucking promise you that.”
Athena sucks in a breath, and both of her hands go to my face, holding me so that I can’t look away. “Don’t make me promises you can’t keep, Jaxon King.” She pauses, her fingers pressed against my cheekbones, and I know she’s deciding whether to ask the next thing she wants to say.
“Just say it, Athena. Ask it. Anything.”
“Why did you bring me here that night?”
I know the answer isn’t as profound as she might like. Or maybe it is. I still don’t fully understand it myself. But it’s all I have.
So I answer her honestly.
“You needed somewhere safe, just for a little while. And it was the only place I could think of to go.”
Athena nods, slowly, and I can see that her eyes are shimmering again.
“This was our place,” I whisper. “The only place we were ever safe. And then—it wasn’t. She died here. It wasn’t safe after all and maybe—maybe I just wanted to make it that way again. Maybe I wanted to believe that there was still something here that mattered. Or maybe—maybe I knew long before I ever really did.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was going to love you. That you were meant to be mine. And that you’d turn everything that hurt me back into something beautiful again.”
When she kisses me, it takes my breath away. And I know that’s exactly it.
I spill her back onto the grass, my body over hers, her hair spread out like a raven’s wing. “You’re my past and my future all in one,” I murmur. “And I’m never going to lose you. I swear, we’re going to get out of that ritual alive. I’m going to keep you safe, Athena, if it’s the last fucking thing I do.”
Athena looks up at me, shaking her head. “I don’t need you to save me, Jaxon,” she says softly. “I can do it myself. This is my battle to fight, too. I don’t need you to stand in front of me.”
“Beside you, then.” I run my knuckles over her cheekbone. “And we’ll walk out together.”
“Yes,” Athena breathes. “That’s more like it.”
She pauses then, her fingers stroking my cheek. “When we went to the beach,” she says softly, “you told me to leave all my happy memories there. And you’ve done that here—the happy and sad both.” She looks down at me, stretched over her, and I can see in her eyes that she knows as well as I do where this is going next.
“Do you want to do this here?” she asks quietly. “This was your place—yours and hers. I know you brought me here once before, and we—” she hesitates. “It doesn’t mean we have to do it again. If you want to keep it for yourself, the way it was before—”
Something in the way she says it makes my chest clench so tightly that it hurts. The temptation is there to say yes, to get up and take Athena away from here, back to the manor house, to leave this meadow as a shrine to Natalie and I and everything we had together.
But no matter how I feel about it, all of that is gone.She’sgone. And I have to move forward.
“No,” I whisper. “It doesn’t do any good to live in the past.”
“You’re right,” Athena agrees, her voice barely audible. “It doesn’t.”
When I reach for the button of her jeans and she reaches for me, it’s not lust.Every time we do this, it feels like something different,I think as I slide them over her hips, tossing them aside in the grass. The first time was nothing but unhinged lust, frustrated desire, tearing at each other. And since then, every time I’ve been with Athena, it’s felt different. There’s been hurt and there’s been anger and there’s been forgiveness and comfort, and there’s been desire too. But this is something else altogether.