Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
“Do not dare say the rest of that statement,” she said.
Graves held up a hand. “I know that physical contact changes it.”
“Are you suggesting that I would be mad enough at you that I’d go fuck him?”
“You were at his house all night.”
“Does your surveillance not show you that he sobered me up because I couldn’t stop crying? I let him take care of me that night because I was broken over you, Graves. Don’t project your shit onto me.”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
She laughed sardonically, her hand to her chest in pain. “I would have blamed myself. I do not want Lorcan. I am not sure how I can make that any more clear to you. And if you haven’t realized that by now…” She glanced away. “How could you even suggest that I would sleep with him?”
“After what I did…”
“We had a fight,” she argued. “It was a fight. I was shattered and devastated, and nothing fixed it. You were still the dragon laying on his hoard. Alone and, for all I knew, happy about it. But I certainly wasn’t.”
“Then stay,” he pleaded, taking her hand.
“Graves…I don’t know…”
“Do you want me to beg?” he asked, clearing the distance.
She startled. “What?”
“I wouldn’t beg for any other single person in the world, Wren.” His hand hovered between them. “I would for you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I fucked up royally, and I don’t deserve for you to even want to talk to me after the way I treated you, but I want a chance to talk through it.”
Then Graves did an unthinkable thing. He got down to one knee. Her heart stopped beating as he got to another. He was on his knees before her, because he was begging her.
“Graves,” she whispered.
He took her hand in his. He was looking up at her with eyes the color of a bleak winter storm. “Please, let me make this right. I should never have spoken to you like that. I’m dying inside that you have a connection with him that we’ll never have. Dying,” he repeated. “I still never should have taken that out on you.”
“No,” she agreed slowly. “You shouldn’t have. But I should have told you…”
He shook his head. “I knew.”
“That’s what he said.”
He clenched his jaw and then relaxed. “I knew what the bond would do. I’d seen it happen. I’d watched other people fall in love with their person. A connection that is unmatched by any other, and it ate me up knowing it was happening to you. Knowing that the stone was out of reach and I could do nothing to stop it.”
“You shouldn’t have put that one on me, Graves. I was trying as hard as I could. I didn’t want that connection.”
“I know you didn’t. And there was something I could have done.”
The realization dawned on her all at once, and she jerked her hand back. “Are you suggesting taking the bond out of my mind?”
“I could have,” he said solemnly. “You had no magic. Your absorption was down. I had an all-access pass. And every time you touched me, I saw him in your mind, but I was also fighting my own desire to do it. To strip the bond out of your mind. Vale even suggested I do it.”
She looked down at him in horror. “He what?”
“He said I was strong enough to do it now compared to then. I told him I’d never do it. Not even if you asked me to. And I was furious about Lorcan and hurting and horrible to you, but part of it was that I didn’t trust myself to have you near me with your defenses down.”
Kierse stepped forward at those words. Her hands went to his beautiful face, lifting it to look at her. And seeing the disgust he felt for himself, the genuine fear that he couldn’t control himself, and the hatred that ran bone deep.
“You wouldn’t have done it.”
“I would have,” he argued.
“You literally sent me to your enemy before doing it, Graves.”
“He’s the only one who could have stopped me.”
“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “You stopped yourself.”
“And hated myself every moment you left for even entertaining the thought.” He leaned into her hands, a silent moment of supplication. “I thought I deserved to be alone again.”
She sighed. “Do you not see that this is the five of cups all over again?”
In the tarot reading, he’d been told that he would look away from the good in his life in disgrace of his failures, forever lingering in the travesty of his present and stuck in his endless past.
“I thought she was talking about the loss of your Druidic magic, but now I don’t know,” she said. “You act cursed to continue to replay your own torment. And I don’t want to be a part of it forever.”