Page 166 of Hurt

He leaned in and kissed him. Punishingly hard, their lips pressed together until their teeth knocked against each other. Noah’s body melted against Elijah’s, one hand on his neck and the other grabbing his clothes to yank him closer.

Elijah’s body reacted before his brain did. He grabbed for Noah and held him tight, opening his mouth to Noah’s attack and taking him in. Those rosy lips were as warm and soft as Elijah always pictured. They didn’t taste like anything but Noah. Noah made the softest little panting noises when Elijah kissed back, his hand running down to splay along his slender lower back to hold them close.

It was everything Elijah ever wanted and better than all those nights he screwed his eyes shut and pretended he wasn’t thinking about Noah coming apart on his mattress.

Noah broke the kiss but left his lips hovering just above Elijah’s. His cheeks were cherry red.

“Now it’s my turn,” Noah said breathlessly, looking at Elijah from under quivering lashes. “I’m going to ruin you.”

Their equally murderous fingers intertwined, and Elijah had a hard time believing that this was what being ruined felt like.

The ring looked wrong on his finger. It was too thick for his long fingers, and slightly too large. So much so that it rattled around his digit and was only stopped from falling off by his habit of closing his fingers to keep it in place. It wasn’t so much the fact that purple wasn’t his color, or that he wasn’t really a jewelry person, as that it wasn’t his.

This ring didn’t belong to him, and he hated it.

He hated that this ring was on his finger. He hated its weight and color. He hated the way it clinked against everything and that he woke up in the middle of the night to be sure it was still there.

And he really hated that he couldn’t take it off.

Twisting the thick thing around his thumb had become his new nervous habit. Something he couldn’t quite convince himself to stop doing—not that he had really tried. There was peace in hating this ring. If he focused on hating it, he couldn’t think about how the ring looked onhisfinger.

It belonged on him. Fitting snugly on his strong hands the ring accented his strength. As much a part of him as his habitual scowl or dyed hair. Grant would give anything to see this ring back on Kurt’s finger.

Rain tapped against the single pane window behind him. Falling in sheets down the glass it was impossible to see the lush greenery outside. Large bushes and topiaries just looked like giant green smudges against the onslaught of weather. The small office was filled with a gray watery light.

Grant had forsaken his small cottage on the edge of the Weaver Estate. He couldn’t go back to it after everything that happened. There were too many reminders. Everything from a pair of boots haphazardly thrown in the corner to long purple strands of hair still stuck to the pillow. It was too much. He locked the front door and didn’t look back.

Instead, he had taken up residence with Wallace in the Garden Manor. Originally it had been built as a gift to his mother. Why his father thought a woman born and raised in a city would appreciate this type of home was beyond him. He suspected that his father loved the idea of his mother—the woman he thought she could be or wanted her to be, rather than who she really was. He plucked her from her life and expected her to be grateful.

Tragic love must be a Weaver trait.

The manor itself was lovely and undeserving of the bitterness that its occupants brought to it. Large and airy, its architecture was reminiscent of an old German fairytale with arched windows and a dark and light color scheme. The real treasure was its spacious gardens that Wallace personally tended to. Rows and rows of shaped bushes and trees, colored flowers splashed against the greenery, and generic cement fountains filled the place with the sound of trickling water.

Inside was just as nice. Bigger than it looked with eight bedrooms and accompanying bathrooms, the place was cordoned off so every room felt isolated. A far cry from the open cottage that he had loved, but it felt right.

Wallace had forgiven his transgressions and they had gone back to their formal relationship. There were more lines around his grandfather’s eyes when he looked at his eldest grandson and a sadness tinged with disappointment in his eyes.

He would never comment on it. Because as much as he was disappointed, there was nothing to lecture. Grant was doing his job. Weaver Syndicate was being rebuilt, their ranks were swelling, and the Vega Cabals’ territories were being absorbed into their own. Like a train, the operation kept chugging along despite the bumps in the tracks.

Roland was doing the fieldwork. Grant wasn’t ready to leave yet. He couldn’t. He had to be here.

Kurt had once called himself a living ghost and Grant finally understood what he meant. He was the Garden Manor’s very own apparition. Listlessly haunting the halls and rooms like some figure disjointed from reality. He was eating and breathing—more out of habit than desire. He rose from a bed he didn’t sleep in and went about his day, only to return to do the same thing again. Days blurred together and sometimes he would look up to realize he didn’t know how he got to a place or even what time it was.

Worse than his sudden disassociation was that he didn’t care.

Why did it matter where he went? The anguish followed him regardless.

Most days it was like someone had filled his chest with wet cement. There was a dull pressure on his heart and lungs that he couldn’t breathe through. Periodically there would be a sharp physical pain in his heart, and it was as if someone was ripping off whatever scab had been trying to heal just to start all over again.

Grant didn’t cry anymore. He had done enough of that kneeling in the sand at the Catacombs. There were enough tears to float an armada, and nothing had changed.

He had fallen to his knees and held Kurt. There was still warmth in his body and the faintest trace of that crooked smile on his lips. The one he had given Grant just before he fell.

Grant had held that body and wept. He could feel the broken bones and disjointed limbs as he lifted him up. But still, he bent over him and begged. He made silent promises to whatever deity that would listen to bring him back. Grant knelt at the altar of the universe and promised to give them whatever they wanted just to bring Kurt back. He sacrificed his tears to pitiless gods who only turned away when he needed them most.

He thought they had had their fun. They had done the cruelest thing imaginable, what more could they do to him?

They heard that and laughed.