“You will if I tell you to. That was the bargain, remember? You can’t stand in my way anymore.”
“Then I’ll stand on the sidelines.”
The heat of him, the scent of him, it filled my senses until I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. I looked up at him, my gaze drawn to his lips. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to close the distance between us, to lose myself in the taste and feel of him. To let myself be selfish before I walked away. To take and take from him as he’d taken from me.
Do it.Let him think he’s finally broken through your defenses.
I hesitated, torn between the desire to give in, to lose myself in the intoxicating pull of his presence, and the knowledge that this was a dangerous game, one I couldn’t afford to lose. But as he looked at me, as he loomed over me filling every inch of the room with that beautiful body, the decision was made. I could take what I wanted. Give him one taste of what could be, before I ripped it all away. The thought was cruel, calculated, and entirely too tempting. I let that temptation consume me, transforming me from the woman who wanted to run into a vengeful siren who could bring a man to his knees with a single smile.
“I can’t deny there’s a part of me that doesn’t want you on the sidelines,” I said, glancing between his lips and those fucking eyes. “But I think you know that. I think you’ve always known that.”
He lifted my chin with his hand, before sliding his fingers down to rest gently on my throat. “Of course I have. We share a soul.”
I moved to my toes, sliding my hands up until they locked behind his neck. “I already know I’m going to regret this,” I said truthfully.
He smiled, leaning down until his lips were less than an inch from mine. “Welcome to my entire existence.”
And then I kissed him, deeply, fiercely, with all the pent up passion and fury of a thousand lifetimes. He froze for an instant, before melting into me with a groan that sounded like surrender.
I poured everything into that kiss, every ounce of the desire and desperation that had haunted me. I nipped at his bottom lip, soothed the sting with my tongue, and reveled in the way his fingers tightened on my throat, pulling me impossibly closer. It was electric, magnetic—a clash of wills and a meeting of souls that left me breathless and aching. But beneath the heat and the hunger, I could feel the colder, more calculating part of myself waiting, biding its time. This push and pull between us was over.
I broke the kiss, inching back only enough to look into his eyes, to see the hope and the love and the unguarded vulnerability shining there. And I smiled, a slow, wicked thing that held the promise of pleasure and the threat of pain in equal measure.
“Paesha,” he breathed, my name a prayer and a plea on his tongue.
But I was already stepping back, slipping out of his grasp like smoke. The voices in my head hummed their approval, urging me onward. I turned away, a small, secret smile playing at the corners of my mouth. Thorne would follow me to the ends of the world, into the heart of the Forgotten. And when the time came, when I had what I needed, I would leave him here to suffer the same fate he’d condemned so many others to.
It was a betrayal, cold and calculated and cruel. But it was necessary. To save us both, to break the cycle of love and loss and endless suffering, I had to become the monster. And as I steppedout into the waiting dark, I felt a piece of my humanity crumble away, replaced by something harder, sharper, forged in the fires of the Forgotten.
“We should go,” I said, stopping at the opening of our shelter. “I don’t want to be in this place any longer than we need to be.”
32
Thorne
There was a part of me that wanted to confess I’d seen that siren’s shift as easily as I’d watched the sun rise and fall over Stirling yesterday. But fuck if I wasn’t desperate for her. And those godsdamn lips. So, if all she offered was ruin, I’d take it gladly. If she meant to watch me burn, I’d set the fire myself, just to feel her warmth before the flames took me.
As I followed her out of the shelter, the sound of rushing water echoed through the twisted landscape, its source hidden by the darkness. Paesha tilted her head, listening before changing direction without a word. I followed, as I always had. As I always would, even when my instincts screamed that we were walking deeper into danger.
“There’s something familiar about that sound,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. Her Remnants swirled at her feet, leading the way like eager hounds on a scent. “Like a waterfall, but… wrong. Hollow.”
The roar grew louder as we picked our way through the ruins. Fragments of forgotten architecture rose around us, columns that defied gravity, archways that led nowhere, stairs that spiraled up. The patches of heavy darkness were thinning out,and finally we could see what was hiding within the shadows of the Forgotten.
When we reached the source of the sound, Paesha’s breath caught, and on instinct alone, I whipped to attention, worried she’d seen something I missed. But it was only a massive ravine that split the landscape like an open wound, stretching endlessly in either direction. Far below, something that might have been water once, but was now thick and dark, churned and crashed against jagged rocks.
Through the rolling fog that spilled over the edges of the chasm, I could barely make out the shapes of buildings on the far side, a forgotten city slowly being reclaimed by strange, twisted vegetation. At our feet, spanning the vast emptiness between, was a bridge that looked barely stable enough to hold a whisper.
“There’s movement over there,” Paesha said, her head tilting at that odd angle again. “Can’t you see them? Walking between the buildings?”
I adjusted my glasses, squinting beyond the fog.
She laughed. Truly laughed. “Wait, do you actually need those glasses?”
I lifted a brow. “I haven’t always needed them, as I’m sure you’ve noticed from the glimpses of our history. But there’s something wrong with our power, and currently it’s affecting my vision. I was created to see the past, Paesha darling. Not the present, as it turns out.”
“Well, that’s not true, is it? Beginnings and endings and all that? Endings sounds like the future.”
“You’d be surprised. I have no visions of what’s coming, only the task of committing it to memory as it all happens. There are specific things that lend to that title, but none so final as Death.”
