Page 71 of Her Soul for Revenge

He was...glad I was…

Oh.

I wasn’t great with words, but that silenced me completely. My throat closed up, and my heart began to pound. My hands were sweaty. He’d positioned himself close to me, and that had a ridiculous way of making me flustered. I needed a drink. Several very large drinks, because my mind wasn’t right.

What he’d just said shouldn’t have made me feelthatway.

“I...I mean...I guess it doesn’t really matter if I die though, right?” I was staring hard at the door handle, my one escape from these words that were rushing wildly out of me. “You’ve got my soul, so...no loss to you...if I…”

He grabbed my neck, long fingers curling into my hair to cradle my head — and kissed me.

My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see. His lips were soft but his grip was hard. His touch was hot and his other hand grabbed my waist, pulling me closer, and I closed my eyes as I wrapped my arms around him.

I didn’t know what the hell this was. It was too frightening to contemplate, too complicated to try to understand. Why did he get to break down my walls again and again, dismantling the cold, unattached safety I’d surrounded myself with? Those walls were all I had, they were my protection. They kept me safe from pain, from heartbreak, from betrayal.

I didn’t want to think about what these feelings meant.

But I could think about that kiss. I could lose myself in the sensation of his hard chest against mine, and the muscles in his back as my hands wrapped around his neck and my nails dragged along his skin. His forked tongue caressed around mine, and he kissed me like he was starving.

These were soft, tender feelings that remained in the rubble of my walls. They were bruised and beaten, trembling in the light that touched them, striving to crawl back into the dark. They’d been ignored and unnurtured for so long, they curled away from freedom.

Zane kept dragging them toward it.

It shouldn’t have felt like this with him. I shouldn’t have wanted him to tear me apart and hold me tenderly. I shouldn’t have wanted him to hold me at all. I was setting myself up for disaster. He was a monster, and I’d seen enough of them to know they could only cause pain.

When he broke the kiss, pulling back mere inches from my mouth, I was pressed back against the car. He kept holding me, caressing me, keeping me close. How was I supposed to put the wall back up? I was vulnerable as hell. I was shaking.

“Why are you scared?” he said softly. I shook my head, but he grasped my face again and made me look up at him. “What are you scared of, love?”

Love. He’d called me that before. I’d brushed it off. It felt different now, it felt heavy. I was breathing hard, and I wasn’t even sure why. It was like panic without the pain. He lifted my hand, watched my fingers trembling — and he kissed the back of it, kissed my palm, kissed my wrist and let his lips linger there.

“What are you scared of?”

“This,” I whispered, and he smiled against my skin. “I’m scared of this...whatever...whatever this is.”

He looked up at me, with his head still lowered as he held my hand. It was strange that a monster could look gentle, especially when he smiled at me with teeth sharp enough to rip me apart.

“And what do you think this is?”

This was usually the point at which I’d end the conversation. I’d met my fair share of people that had grown close to me over the years; men and women who’d somehow decided they wanted more from me — and those questions were always the ones that made me run.

But Zane and I were bound together. Eternally. There was no getting out of it. A damning bargain was all it was supposed to be.

“A bargain,” I said softly. “It’s...just a bargain.”

He took both my hands, and kissed the other one just the same as he had the first, before he laid my palms against his chest. “Juniper Kynes, a storm manifested in human form, is afraid of a bargain?” He leaned close and kissed my neck, pausing with his lips barely brushing beneath my ear. “No, you’re not. You’re afraid of something far bigger than that. And I’ll tell you something, Juniper — this is a hell of a lot more than a bargain. I’m not fucking around. I don’t fuck around when I find something I want.”

“But you already have me.” My voice sounded desperate. As if I was pleading with him to be callous, to tell me he was just joking.

“Body and soul. But I decided I want something else too.” He laid his hand around my neck, and pressed his thumb against my pulse. Every beat was emphasized as it throbbed against his finger, hard and fast. “That right there. I want that next.” He lowered his voice, a shiver-inducing whisper in my ear. “And I’ll have it. Just wait.”

He left it at that. He let me go, left me standing there shaking as he got into the driver’s seat. And when I got in after him, he started the engine and turned up the music, bobbing his head to the beat like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Except he did care. He cared far too much, and I did too.

32

As we arrived back at the house that night, I was overcome with the strangest feeling of coming home.