Page 11

Chapter 11

Wren

I thought about closing the door behind him and breaking the handle off—I’d felt him trembling in my arms, but it was different than before. It didn’t feel like it had when we were in the diner together. It didn’t feel like he was about to fly apart and attack someone.

It felt…

It felt like he was doing something to my head, infiltrating it with the unfamiliar scent of flower petals in the rain, torn apart in the wind and perfuming the air with their sweet destruction.

I should have left him there. I should have trapped him in the room and called Aiden to let him know what was happening so he could deal with the situation. I needed to kill him before he fucked with my head any more than he already had, because it was obviously doing something to my clarity and sense of self-preservation.

Instead of doing any of those things I should have done, I took a deep breath to erase the scent of him still fucking with my head and followed him.

He’d gone all the way into the adjoining room, but he’d left the door between us open. At my shoulders, I felt my wings give a nervous twitch just beneath my skin. That made no sense. I didn’t like them out when an Enmity was near. I’d kept them carefully tucked away since Theo had collapsed in my arms… and now…

Now I wanted to take to the sky. I wanted to run away from the way I could feel him in the room with me, and the way the scent of him hadn’t dissipated at all.

I wanted…

I shook my head and walked across the room, spinning so my back was against the wall. I didn’t have to look to see the thread in my chest reaching toward him to know he was leaning on the opposite wall, mirroring my posture.

Back to back, a wall between us. A red line stretching even though we’d tried and failed to make space, distance.

A thread keeping him alive.

A thread keeping me here.

Fuck .

“Are you… under control?” In truth, there was no reason for him not to be. The two people in the elevator hadn’t even had a connection running between them. They’d both been dusted with faint traces of pink—lust clinging to them in a gentle swirl of possibility—but it wasn’t anything that would have triggered him. I hadn’t felt the itch to pull out an arrow and connect them. Sometimes lust was just lust .

I was just being cautious. I was being… selfish. His lips pressed to my neck, that scent flooding my senses…

Fuck.

“I’m fine.” Theo’s voice came from directly behind me. I’d been right. We were inches apart, but it was somehow easier like this. If I didn’t look at him, I couldn’t see the red swirl in his eyes. If I didn’t look at him, I didn’t have to see the line trailing from my chest to his.

If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was having a normal conversation, and the scent of roses wasn’t still lingering at the back of my senses and threatening to get me drunk.

It was easier this way—easier to act like something hadn’t changed in me when the Ardor pierced my heart. Easier to ignore how all these emotions, all these feelings were trying to drown me.

Easier to pretend I couldn’t feel Theo just out of reach—the ocean spilling over me in waves and pouring into my lungs with the burn of salt and the promise of endlessness .

“We should be fine as long as we stay in the room during the day.” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to be helpful or give him a warning that he wasn’t allowed to leave. Whatever it was, I heard him scoff.

“Wouldn’t want me trying to kill the innocent people fucking in the rooms around us, would we?” His breath came in a gentle, shaking intake that was almost a sob… and I felt pinpricks along my scalp.

He was pulling his hair, leaning into the pain until my eyes burned and I was positive he was crying.

I managed to stay quiet for thirty seconds before his name spilled almost helplessly from my lips. “Theo?”

“I don’t want to hurt people, Wren. As much as you might think I do, I don’t… Fuck, I don’t want any of this. I never have.”

With the wall between us and my eyes closed, Theo was just the man who’d swayed in my arms in the alley, the one who’d looked up at me with soft confusion and wonder on his face… and I couldn’t help but envision the tears trailing down his cheeks, belying the monster I knew he was becoming.

It was easy to feel that sting when he pulled his hair again and clenched his nails into his palms until they cut. I could feel how broken he was. How much he needed , even if he wasn’t going to say a damn word about it.

“Does it help when I touch you?” I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but I had to hear it from him.

There was another moment of silence, and then I heard his fist slam against the wall behind me. It sent a lance of pain up my arm, but I stayed still and waited. Until finally…

“No.” Theo took a shaking breath almost instantly, like he could snatch the word back from the air. “Yes?” There was another thud against the wall, and the sound of a body dropping to the floor. Like I was drawn on strings, I followed. My shoulders pressed back until I could slide down to a sitting position. I turned, palms flattening against the cheap wallpaper, my forehead pressed against the coolness like it would allow me to see him, to know if he was telling the truth. “I don’t know… Fuck. I don’t like being touched.”

The way he said it was so simple, but there were worlds beneath the tone. There was a story that he obviously wasn’t ready to tell me, and I wasn’t willing to ask for. I wasn’t sure if I could stand to hear it—not on top of these emotions. Not when I couldn’t understand what I was feeling.

I was born to be what I was. Most Enmity were made through circumstance and shit the world threw at them. It wasn’t a choice, or something they’d done. It wasn’t their fault… not really.

What had the world thrown at Theo to make him feel so broken inside?

“I…” I trailed my fingers along the wallpaper like it would somehow give me the answers, and I heard him shifting on the other side like he was following the line I traced. “If it helps, I don’t like touching people either.” My lips quirked into a rueful smile. “Up until I met you, I avoided it altogether. My kind can sense emotions when we touch others and…” Why was I telling him anything about me? I was sworn to kill him—we didn’t divulge our secrets to our enemies. And yet… “I can’t feel those emotions. It made me angry, I think… because it was there, on the edge of my senses, but I couldn’t understand it.”

“Why not?”

“Cupids can’t feel strong emotions like love and lust. When we’re made, they take that from us.”

“Until now.”

His voice was so soft it was nearly a whisper, and I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or if it was pity. Either way, it was a truth I couldn’t ignore.

“Until now,” I echoed. When I dropped my forehead against the wall again, I heard another rustle from him, a thump on the other side that sent vibrations along my skin. He was mirroring me—touching without really touching. “So… if it helps keep your rage under control, can you tell me how to do it without… upsetting you?”

I was shocked how much a small part of me wanted to ask why . I wanted to understand who’d hurt him, how they’d hurt him. It was easy enough to blame it on professional curiosity. We’d seen Enmity in the making. We’d killed them. We’d taken half-changed humans and questioned them before putting them out of their misery… but this was…

Different.

I’d never been this close to someone who was so on the edge of change and been able to have a conversation. I could completely blame this on wanting to understand the makings of the monsters I’d killed more times than I could count—the things I’d had my life stolen away for.

It definitely wasn’t because I gave a shit about what had happened to Theo.

“I… don’t… trust people to touch me. Any time they have before, it’s not been… kind.” His voice cracked, and I could hear the way his breath was a little more ragged than it had been. Each word was punctuated with a punched-out little sound, breathy and pain-filled, so raw it ached behind my ribs. “I don’t know how to let you touch me without wondering what part of me you want to break. I’m the only person I can trust to take care of me, and even that’s debatable sometimes.”

That wasn’t true. I had no idea what he’d been through before, or who’d hurt him. He’d told me he’d killed people, and I believed him… but he was still broken along every line in his chest, and it wasn’t fucking true .

Things were different now. I could feel when he was hurting, and I didn’t want to feel that at all.

I wouldn’t let it happen again.

And I didn’t know what I was doing now, here… but I knew that I had to do something.

I shifted slightly until I could reach around the doorframe. I couldn’t see him, but I laid my hand on the floor, palm up, with my forehead still pressed to the wall.

“Then touch me instead. If it helps. I won’t move. I won’t hurt you, Theo.” It took more effort than I thought to get the words from my chest—how long had I spent avoiding exactly this? Not just with an enemy, but with anyone? How long had I made sure I never had to touch anyone, to feel the edges of those emotions that would never be mine? And now I was throwing it all away because Theo was crying and I could almost taste the salt of his tears on my tongue.

For a breath, I thought he wasn’t going to take me up on the offer. I stared at my upturned palm on the floor, stretched out in the space between us like it was a damn traitor. What was I doing?

Then I felt it. The barest hint of his fingertips trailing along my skin, tracing the lines like he was searching for a roadmap that would give us both answers to whatever this was, to whatever was happening between us.

I felt him settle into the sensation. All I could see were his long, elegant digits… but I knew his forehead was pressed to the wall opposite me. When he let out a trembling breath and slid his fingers into mine, my body twitched… and before I could stop them, my wings sprang from my back in a rustle of feathers that left me breathless. My instant reaction was to jerk away, to move, so I wasn’t close to danger while in such a vulnerable position, kneeling on the ground and being held by an Enmity.

Like he could sense it, Theo’s fingers held tighter to mine.

It didn’t make sense, but I stopped trying to pull back. I wasn’t sure that I could have, honestly. We were tethered together, heart to heart, palm to palm. Pain to pain.

At my back, my wings rustled and then settled against my skin, leaving one dark feather to fall between us and land on the back of Theo’s hand.

He didn’t move it away.