Page 103 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Somehow he makes my ability sound admirable rather than horrifying. I suddenly remember the way he talked about the massacre in Ursula Engel’s house after we’d first escaped.

He said it was “fucking amazing.” Called me a superhero.

I was too scarred and incapable of trusting him then for the knowledge to sink in, but he really did mean it, didn’t he?

He doesn’t think my power is something wrong with me. He thinks I’m amazing, mistakes and all.

Why else would he be here right now, trying so hard to make me believe the same thing?

Jacob twines my fingers with his and raises his other hand to slide his fingertips across my shoulders.

“Even before,” he goes on, “I always thought Griffin’s nickname for you was silly. Moonbeam . Like you were something fleeting, fragile. You were a wildcat all the way through, fierce and unshakable.”

My smile tightens. “I don’t know about the unshakable part.”

Jacob circles his thumb against the crook of my neck in a soothing massage that makes me want to purr. “Look at all the shit everyone’s thrown at you, including me, and you’re still standing. I say that counts.”

I reply with a noncommittal sound, resisting the urge to press into his touch.

Jacob traces his fingers down my spine and up again, with just enough pressure to be soothing. There isn’t a trace of his usual rigidity in the caress.

His voice lowers again. “I did understand it better after a while, though. There was this one day at the facility—a few years before we tried to escape; we must have been around thirteen—when we were doing some training thing outside, and the sunlight caught on you just as you turned around and smiled at the rest of us. And I’d swear you fucking glowed. ”

“Like a moonbeam?” I joke, with a bit of a wobble.

“More than that. And not only your hair. All of you just shone.”

His hand pauses against the middle of my back, resting there.

“You’re a hell of a lot more than a moonbeam, Riva.

You’re our whole goddamned sun. Wherever you go, you bring that warmth with you.

You tether us so we don’t spiral out into the abyss.

How many times have you pulled each of us back from the edge just in the past few weeks? ”

The burn comes back to my eyes, hotter than before. “We all had each other’s backs.”

“But without you there during those four years, the rest of us got lost.”

“Without me and Griffin,” I feel the need to say.

Jacob starts rubbing my back with his slow, careful rhythm again. “I don’t know that it really would have been better if he’d still been there without you.”

He falls silent for a stretch, and I don’t know what to say.

The brush of his fingers is siphoning off my ability to speak. More heat kindles under my skin with every stroke, but the ache winding around my heart holds the sting of loss.

My losses. His. All of ours.

Jacob drags in a breath. “That moment in the field was when I realized how much I wanted you. But I also knew I wasn’t going to act on that feeling.

Griffin loved you too, so much—he might have been the one who could read people’s feelings, but he was my twin , so I sure as hell could read him—and I could see how you were with him…

I never would have thought there was even a chance you’d fall for more than one of us. ”

My throat constricts. “Jake?—”

He shakes his head. “It’s okay. That’s what I’m trying to say.

It was okay then, and it’s okay now. You don’t ever have to want me the way you want Dominic and Andreas.

I never expected to have it anyway. I just hope, so much, that we can get to the point that you believe I’ll be standing with you through whatever comes at us.

Having that would be enough. I’d be happy—hell, I’d be fucking ecstatic with that. ”

The emotion swelling in my chest bursts through the crack that’d opened, and I don’t know how to do anything but turn toward him and tug his mouth to mine.

Jacob’s chest hitches beneath my hand, and then he’s kissing me back. There’s so much tenderness and heat mingled in the press of his lips that I could melt with it.

Nothing about him is icy now. He cups one hand against my cheek and rests the other on my waist.

The shadowy essence inside me flares, clamoring for more.

My fingers slide into the smooth strands of his hair to grasp them and yank him closer. A groan reverberates from Jacob’s lungs.

We fall into each other farther, our kisses deepening, our tongues dancing. Every nerve in my body shivers with anticipation.

When my hand creeps up under the hem of Jacob’s shirt to trace the ridges of muscle across his abdomen, he groans again and slides his arm farther around my torso. Then he tips us over, pulling me with him so I’m bowed over his body, straddling him.

His voice comes out in murmurs between the collisions of our mouths. “I’m yours. Whatever you want with me, you can have it. This is your show, Wildcat.”

His palm grazes my breast, and a whimper tumbles out of me. I know this feeling, this rush of overwhelming hunger that can only be sated one way, and for a moment, I’m lost in it.

Then I turn my head to give Jacob access to my neck. As his lips sear against my skin, my gaze falls across his forearm raised toward me.

This close, I can’t miss the faint pock marks where his toxic spines can emerge.

Something flips over in my gut. The remembered sting and the rippling pain flash from the depths of my mind—and break loose a deluge of other memories.

The frigid blue of his eyes when he hurled his accusations at me. The cutting edge to his voice when he chose the best remarks to flay me open from the inside out.

All the thorns he jabbed in my side, over and over, hoping to tear me down.

I gasp for air, and a sob comes out instead. A different sort of crack splits me down the middle with a flood of tears.

Jacob jerks back from the kiss as I sag over him. His hands hitch against my body as if he doesn’t know what to do with them.

I can’t stop the tears from streaming out. They’re streaking down my cheeks and pattering across Jake’s shirt, and more seem to breach the walls I’ve held so firm inside me with every choked breath.

All the anguish and confusion I bottled up, all the pain I tried to bear unflinchingly—it never left. It’s been stewing inside me all these weeks, and now it’s boiling over.

“Riva,” Jacob says raggedly, framing my damp face with tentative hands. “Riva, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

I tip my head right against his shoulder, and his arms finally come around me, catching me against him in their solid embrace.

This is Jacob too. This is the Jake I knew, even if parts of him have hardened and turned embittered over the last four years.

He said the boy he used to be died, but he’s here. He fought his way up through the rage and misery that consumed him so he could be with me.

But maybe I’m still not capable of forgiving him for how much of that rage and misery he inflicted on me before he pulled free from it, not completely.

With a slight rock of his body, he pushes us so we’re sitting upright on the bed. “It will never happen again. I swear it. I’d rather cut off my own head than hurt you.”

Even through my sobs, I believe him.

I’m smearing tears and snot all over his shirt. “Sorry,” I mumble as I struggle to rein all that emotion in again.

Jacob only squeezes me tighter. “ You have nothing to apologize to me for. Not ever.” His lips brush my temple. “You’re so strong, Riva, but you don’t always have to be. I can be your armor when you need it. I know I can do that much.”

He feels like a suit of armor braced around me, shielding me from the world while I grapple with my tears. Maybe it doesn’t make sense that he could protect me when he’s the one who set me on this crying jag in the first place, but most of my uneasiness at the explosion of vulnerability fades away.

The embarrassment lingers. When I finally swipe the last tears from my eyes and inhale without a stutter, I keep my head tucked against his shoulder, not wanting to meet his gaze just yet.

“I love you,” Jacob says, his voice rough. “You are my sun, my fucking soul. I’m going to keep showing you how true that is for as long as it takes.”

I know I’m not ready to say those three words back to him, even if I could have four years ago.

I know I’m not ready to form the connection that would fuse his essence with mine, even if I teetered on the verge just now.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize that he’s been knitting my heart back together from the moment he stepped into my room.

Here with him, with his words and his embrace, I’ve found some kind of peace.

“Stay?” I whisper against his chest.

Jacob hugs me with a shuddery exhalation that sounds like relief. “As long as you’ll let me, Wildcat.”