Page 34 of Unholy Vows

Layla

I paced the small space of my living room, my bare feet slapping against the floorboards. The sound was deafening in the silence, and I fought the urge to grind my teeth together, just so I could focus on something else.

My chest still hurt from where that lunatic had sliced into me, and my cheek throbbed from the backhand he’d delivered to my face.

The real pain, however, emanated from my shoulder. Not from the bruises the Phantom left behind. But from the knowledge that something had been inside me the entire time.

Tracking me and reporting my every movement back to Malachai without my knowledge or consent.

Sure, the tracker saved my life tonight. But the violation I felt to my core overshadowed the rational part of me.

“How long?” I snapped, spinning to face him.

Malachai leaned against the window; his arms crossed over his chest like he wasn’t the reason I was ready to explode.

His expression didn’t shift.

He was calm. Controlled. Calculating.

“Layla —” he began, but I cut him off.

“No, Malachai! Don’t you dare, Layla, me. How long has there been a fucking tracker in my shoulder?”

Malachai sighed as if he considered the conversation tiresome.

“Since you found out about my extracurricular activities and froze me out.”

“Since I what?”

“The night you followed me to the cemetery,” he said, shrugging. “You froze me out after you saw me burying that body. I wanted to give you space to come to me on your own… and you did.”

The smirk that ghosted his lips made me damn-near homicidal.

“But I needed assurances you wouldn’t disappear on me. So, I broke into your apartment, drugged you, and inserted the tracker.”

By the time Malachai had finished speaking, my jaw was on the ground.

“You… drugged me?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want you waking up halfway through and hurting yourself trying to escape.”

“You didn’t want me to hurt myself?” I repeated slowly. “That was your concern. Not the fact that you had drugged me and tagged me like a piece of fucking livestock.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged again. “Honestly, Layla, I don’t know what the big deal is.”

“You don’t know what the big deal is,” I muttered to myself.

Before I could stop it, a laugh worked its way up my throat and broke free. The sound was unhinged, and it made Malachai clench his jaw.

“I saved your life tonight. If I hadn’t implanted that tracker, who knows what could have happened to you.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me!”

Crossing the room, I jabbed a finger into Malachai’s chest.

“You don’t get to exert control over my body just because you’re afraid I might slip past you.”

Malachai’s eyes burned into mine, but I didn’t back down. Not this time.

“You don’t get to take my choice away just to make yourself feel better.”

Malachai speared me with his gaze, and I had to fight the urge to shift. Then he lifted his hands, his palms cupping my cheeks tenderly. I tried to pull back from him, but Malachai held me in place.

“Layla,” he murmured. “I’m not wired like other people. To me, placing a tracker on you makes sense. It ensures I can always reach you in an emergency.”

He brushed his thumbs over my cheekbones, and I melted into his touch despite my best efforts to resist.

“Things such as boundaries and consent are not something I consider. To be honest, I’m not sure I even understand what they mean. Not the way you do. I don’t feel guilt, or empathy, or fear. I don’t feel much of anything.”

His eyes searched mine. Not for forgiveness. He didn’t need it. He wanted me to understand him .

“What I do know is risk, and losing you is not something I will entertain. So, I took action. It was simple math to me. Logical. Efficient. Necessary.”

Malachai’s hands cradled my jaw. In the suffocating silence, I became acutely aware of our breaths mingling — his cold and measured, mine shaky and panicked.

His confession floored me. It wasn’t like I didn’t already know this, but his words shook me all the same.

I tried to press every fiber of my being into hating him. It should have been easy. Knowing what I did. Yet, my body betrayed me with a pathetic tremor.

It was the first time I’d truly let myself consider what it meant to love someone who moved through the world studying it rather than living it.

It wasn’t the tracker that shattered me, or even the fact that he’d do it again if he felt compelled.

It was the utter alienness of him.

The way he could watch me, touch me, sleep beside me, and still say with chilling honesty that he didn’t feel… anything.

What did love mean to someone like him?

Was I just a variable in his endless internal calculus? The most efficient solution to a problem only he understood?

Worst of all, was I incapable of being anything else?

I searched his face for something, anything, to grab onto. But Malachai’s eyes were two wells with no bottom, dark and depthless.

I thought back to our first night together. I had been scared, furious, breathless, and he had watched me with the same calculating edge. As if my fear was both an inconvenience and something to savor.

It hit me then, how skilled he was at appropriating gestures. A gentle touch here, a soft kiss there. Each act, the perfect imitation of warmth.

Was that all it was? An act. Did it even matter?

I’d given my heart to someone who would never see me as anything more than an object to possess.

I could feel his fingertips at the edge of my hairline, smoothing away the flyaway strands, as if organizing me into neat little categories only he could comprehend. A shudder ran through me. Not from fear, but from the enormity of my confusion, the desperate hope beneath my anger.

If I hated him for what he’d done and who he was, why did I want him to hold me tighter? Why did the pressure of his hands on my jaw make my lips part in a breathless, involuntary gasp?

The answer sickened me, but I let myself fall into the sensation anyway.

At least for a moment.

He said nothing, just studied me with the clinical fascination of a surgeon.

But I recognized the silence.

He was letting me process, letting me spiral, because he knew exactly when to speak and when to hold back.

I wondered if this was his version of care. Anticipating my emotional moves before I even made them. Not because he felt what I felt, but because he’d mapped me better than I’d ever mapped myself.

It was a tear, single and hot, that finally betrayed me. It slipped from the corner of my eye, tracing its way down my cheek, and Malachai caught it with his thumb before I’d even registered it was there. I hadn’t realized I was crying until his skin was wet with my salt.

I recoiled out of shame or habit, but he held me steady, his face close enough that I could see the faint pulse in his temple.

In the space between us, something shifted. The air thickened, stretched, vibrated with a current I couldn’t name.

Malachai’s voice was low and stripped of all pretense. It broke the silence that hung around us like a shroud.

“Baby,” he murmured, “I’m not finished. My whole life, I’ve never felt much of anything… until you.”

I sucked in a shaky breath, not wanting to get ahead of myself.

“What do you mean?”

A pensive expression crossed Malachai’s face as if he were trying to find the right words to describe his feelings.

“I don’t know if I’m saying this right, but meeting you… It’s as if my heart is beating for the first time. Before you, I felt… numb. Dead inside. And I know you’re worried it’s just an obsessive need to possess you that’s driving me.”

He gave me a pointed look, and I opened my mouth to refute his claim, but I couldn’t.

How the hell did he figure that out? I had that realization myself only mere seconds ago.

“But I promise you, it’s not. It’s something… more. I don’t know what that something is, but I want to find out. And I want to do that with you by my side.”

Tears welled in my eyes anew, and I threw my arms around him as I buried my face in the side of his neck.

“Does this mean you’re over my boundary breach or whatever you called it?” Malachai asked, gripping my hips.

“No,” I chuckled, peering up at him. “This means I am going to train you.”

“Like a dog?”

Malachai raised a brow. He wasn’t offended. If anything, he seemed amused.

“Exactly like a dog.”

“Do I get to hump your leg?”

Surprised laughter erupted from me, and I snorted.

“What about a reward when I’m a good boy?” he whispered as he nipped at my earlobe.

I bit my bottom lip to distract myself from the images his sultry tone conjured in my imagination.

“Stop,” I warned, not letting him divert me from the issue at hand.

I turned around, giving him my back.

“First, take it out,” I said, pointing to my shoulder.

“I’d rather not.”

“Malachai,” I growled. “Do. Not. Push. Me.”

“Fine, but for the record, this is a bad idea.”

“Yeah, well, it’s my bad idea.”