Page 136 of Bound By Fury

He wraps his arm around my waist, his fingers fisting the rain-dampened dress at my lower back as he pulls me flush against him, his other hand tilting my head, his nose grazing up my throat.

I dig my nails into the backs of his arms, and he hisses, his next words grinding out like gravel. “Because trust me, I’ve imagined it.”

His touch trails up my spine, and his fingers sink into the depths of my hair, the pressure forcing my eyes to meet his. “If that’s what you really want, you can tell me,” he says it softly. Tenderly. And his twisted words sing to something shamefully dark buried deep inside my core.

Something I want to dig out and crush beneath my foot.

For the first time in a long time, his lips pull back into a wide smile, but it’s all wrong.

“I don’t want to die,” I whisper as I struggle to steady myself despite the raging power coursing through me. Begging me to release it. To give in to the fury. To make a mess of us right here, right now.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” he laughs, his eyes crazed and hungry. Ravenous as he stares down at me. He looks at me like he’ll eat me alive if I let him. I am so tired of feeling hunted. Haunted. Chased by the past—both mine and my ancestors’. I’m tired of feeling confused. Of wanting to make everything better again. Of wanting to fix us.

There is no fixing us.

After everything, I finally snap.

“You know me better than that,” I say, finally pushing him away. “I have never been a damsel in distress. I am not weak. I am not in need of saving. And I am not afraid of you!” I pant, my mind swirling as I speak, layers of whispers disorienting me, trying to tell me something I can’t quite hear over the violent beat of my heart, the screaming rain slamming against me, the howling wind freezing me everywhere our bodies don’t touch.

“You say you wish you never met me? Well, I’ve let you blame me for too long. I blamed myself for too long. But I didn’t turn you into this. This isn’t on me. You ruined us,” I yell, throwing up my hands and pacing away when he doesn’t respond to me. “So you know what? I’m done!” I turn around, dizzy. Frustrated at the look on his face, his silent mouth bent into a frown, his bottom lip crushed between his teeth. “Well? Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Don’t you want—”

His fingers wrap around my arm and tug, a snarl ripping from his chest.

Thunder crashes in the distance.

“You talk too fucking much,” he growls.

And then his mouth is on mine.

FORTY-FOUR

IT IS NOT SWEET OR gentle.

It is a lifetime of want pierced between hungry teeth. It is gasping breaths and his chest heaving under my fingers digging into the flesh beneath.

It is electricity popping in painful bursts against our skin.

It is his hands in my hair, it is my palms trailing under his shirt, his stomach clenching on contact.

It is falling backward, backward, backward until we’re pressed against the brick wall and the world is illuminated around us in flashes of white lightning like jagged scars slicing through the night sky.

It is dread and the burning of flames licking at the gold around my throat.

And then, it is knowing.

A deep, ancestral shiver that sinks into my bones and seizes my heart.

Malachi’s mouth moves against my own, his moan a vibrating caress of my lips, and our bodies crush together, fusing us from two angry souls into one passionate bomb on the precipice of detonation.

Underneath the sparks—the technicolor explosion in the depths of my mind—is a certain and inevitable knowledge that sits at the core of my power.

I know what I must do.

I savor the feel of him, the tension in his muscles, the tentative exploration of his tongue, his pained hiss as my magic nearly burns my handprints into his back. I kiss him even though my blood is aflame and the world is spinning, tumbling, plunging from beneath my feet.

I kiss him even though the truth is suddenly crystal fucking clear.

Malachi Matsoukas is a witch hunter.