Page 132 of Under Your Scars

I nip at her neck and then lightly lick the red spot. “But I loved you first.”

She whimpers and I kiss her until we can’t breathe. I kiss her until she pulls away, and then I kiss her more, holding her to my chest in an iron grip that will never loosen.

“Christian,” she breathes. “Christian, stop.”

With reluctance, I let her go and release her lips. She’s looking down in shame and crying. I cradle her cheeks in my hands. “Angel.”

She lightly bangs her fists against my chest. Not in anger directed at me, but frustration and emotional exhaustion.

“I just want to kiss you without seeing them!”

She buries her face in my neck and sobs. I wrap my arms around her and rub soothing circles on her back as she weeps. I can tell she’s putting everything she has into trying to make our relationship normal again. It’s never been normal for us, but the façade that I built before I told her the truth about the Silencer was her safe place, and she wants it back.

I shush her quietly, rocking her best I can in the seat as if she were a toddler that just woke up from a nightmare.

After a long while, she settles down and pulls back to look at me.Christ. Even with tears in her eyes and her nose and cheeks flushed red from emotion, she’s stillso fucking beautiful. She’s a pretty crier. Though I can’t stand it when she cries, she looks ethereal when she does. The sheen of tears in her eyes adds a glimmer to the brown of her irises that could only look stunning on her.

She really is the embodiment of simple elegance. She doesn’t turn heads because she’s beautiful, she turns heads because she’s regal and sophisticated. She’s the exact opposite of me. The real me, at least. I can put on a suit and fake the charm all day long. But take off the suit and strip away the smile, and what’s left?

A savage. A savage beast that fell in love with an elegant beauty that I will never be worthy of.

I could give her the entire world and everything in it and it still wouldn’t be enough.

Her voice hoarse and quiet, she asks, “If we hadn’t met the way that we did…if you didn’t think I was your guardian angel, do you think you still would have fallen in love with me?”

My first instinct is to say yes. Butyesisn’t enough to describe the way our souls are intertwined.

“When I told you that you made me believe in soulmates, I didn’t just mean in this lifetime, or even in this universe. My heart has always belonged to you, even if I didn’t know it at first. I would love you even if I had no heart to give you, because you are the sole reason for my existence. My soul would love you if we lived on different continents and spoke different languages. My soul would be tethered to you across oceans and mountains and harrowing canyons as black as my heart. My soul would be yours if I pulled the trigger the night we met, because not even death could keep us apart. God couldn’t keep me from you, because God isn’t real, butyouare, and that’s all the motivation I would have needed to find you.”

Elena trembles in my lap, weeping like I’ve just lifted a burden off her shoulders.

Do I think our relationship would be less intense if we met under different circumstances? Absolutely. But I would still love her just as much, and I am so confident in that statement that I’d bet my pathetic life on it.

Sniffling, she looks at me with a wistful smile on her face that makes my throat burn and my heart ache. “I love you.”

I let out a sad laugh and push her hair out of her face, rubbing away her tears with my thumbs. “Good.”

Two weeks pass.

They haven’t been good weeks.

In fact, they’ve been fucking awful weeks. Elena has been completely inconsolable for days and days on end. She hasn’t been sleeping because she’s been plagued with nightmares that wake her up in the middle of the night, screaming at the top of her lungs in a thick sheen of sweat. The lack of sleep has made her irritable and even more volatile.

I can’t get within ten feet of her without her body going into survival mode. Two days after we got back from Texas, I kissed the crown of her head, and she had the most intense panic attack ever witnessed in human history. She ran away from me, screaming like she was being murdered, and hid. For two days. Nobody could find her.

For two fucking days.

I nearly went into cardiac arrest, tearing apart every square inch of my house. I found her hiding in the back of my closet, inside a laundry hamper that she had hidden behind a rack of my suit jackets. She had a pocketknife clutched in her fist and blood coating her arm.

She slit her wrist.

She was dehydrated and unconscious from the lack of food and water and had to be admitted into the hospital where she underwent an extreme psychological evaluation. They recommended her for a seven-day outpatient program, which only made her panic again and she had to be put to sleep with a sedative. When she finally woke up twelve hours later, she was sent home with a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, anti-depressants, and I was given strict instructions to keep her under 24/7 supervision.

I haven’t let her out of my sight since.

It’s not until the middle of December as we get closer to Travis’ wedding that she begins to settle down.

I still keep a careful eye on her, leaving her alone for no more than five minutes at a time. All she does all day is study, only she has to write her notes with child’s markers because I don’t trust her to hold a pencil yet.