Page 21 of Walking in Darkness

But how could Valeen forbid this? This connection they’d been given?

She and Pax were so much more than temporary.

Another wail rose up from Margarethe, a mournful cry that echoed through their sanctuary.

Aria’s spirit throbbed and thrashed, and she held tight to Pax’s hand.

Praying that what they were was unbreakable.

Chapter Six

Aria

When my lids fluttered open, I found Pax staring at me from where his head rested on his pillow.

We faced each other, tangled in the middle of the bed.

Bare light flooded the room, but it was enough to cast him in a spotlight. Rays spearing through the drab atmosphere and glinting over the sharp edges of his face.

Cheeks cut like razors, his brow proud, and his jaw a blade.

But I was the one who felt lit up in the spotlight right then. The way he gazed at me through the space, those icy eyes the softest I’d ever seen them.

It was as if I had become a beacon. The only thing he could see.

He reached out tattooed fingers and brushed back the matted locks of hair from my face. A sorrowful smile touched his lips.

“Morning.” The word was rough as gravel.

“Good morning,” I murmured, eyes flitting back and forth as I took him in. Absorbing everything I could.

The sorrow from last night chasing me here. Knowing what Margarethe was waking up to.

A hole that I knew ached so horribly inside her.

Pax must have felt it, because he set his palm on my cheek, so big that it nearly covered the entire side of my face. “Nothing better in the world than waking up next to you. Getting to have you in my arms. Knowing you’re right here. This sweet body tucked right up against me.”

“It can’t be wrong,” I whispered.

“It can’t,” he agreed.

Wistfulness pulled through me, and Pax’s gaze tracked the motion as it pulsed through my expression. “You’re hurting for her.”

My hair swished around me as I nodded against my pillow. “I can’t imagine.”

“I know,” he murmured. “Weird that I never gave much thought to giving thanks in my life—but lying here, right in this moment, that’s what I am, Aria. I’m thankful. Thankful that I have you. Thankful that you’re mine.”

A warm buzz hummed in my chest, and redness rushed to my cheeks. I let my fingertips scratch through his stubble. “I told you that you were going to like claiming me.”

It was a thread of playfulness woven with a ribbon of sincerity.

A rough chuckle scraped his throat. “Oh, you did, did you?”

“I just had this hunch,” I teased with a lift of my bare shoulder, a lightness pushing through the gloom we’d been met with in Tearsith last night.

“Let it be known that there was never any question if I was gonna like it or not.” His tone shifted, too, riding on the whisper of levity that curled through the air. A flirty taunt from his tongue that had me snuggling closer to him.

“Well, I don’t know. I would have thought I’d have been irresistible the second you saw me.”