I’d already taken whatever this was entirely too far. Farther than I’d have ever thought imaginable. It was growing painfully clear that no matter what I did, I wasn’t escaping anything. All of it was too thoroughly entwined around me, squeezing no matter what move I made. As if I’d been wrapped in razor wire and my fate was simply to bleed.

But I wasn’t alone.

Perhaps, I didn’t have to be. Maybe, this was how Rorn had felt—torn to too many shreds to remember what was right and wrong.

Attempting to allow empathy for him, attempting to understand why he’d hurt me so irreparably at all, caused my eyes to well with tears. I gripped Scythe tighter, and his hold on me tightened, too. He rubbed my back while I tried to focus on drawing even breaths.

He said nothing. He just held me.

Me. A strange female who’d crept into his city and into his life. Yet swallowed in his embrace, somehow, none of the insanity felt insane at all.

FOUR

Aster

It was wrong to snoop through Scythe’s belongings, so I decided to call it exploring.

Down the short hall at the back of the cottage was a bathing room that wasn’t much bigger than the one in his apartment and a single bedchamber.

At first glimpse, I’d thought the room was incredibly small. That was until I absorbed the sheer magnitude of the bed, which was larger than the giant one in his apartment. Large enough for four males, it swallowed nearly all the space in the room.

Large enough for a faerie wolf.

Nightstands sat on either side of it, a tall arched window behind the bed, and a chest of drawers squashed into the corner opposite the door.

The cottage door opened. “Wildflower.”

I quickly placed the emerald stone back where I’d found it. Or rather, where I’d felt it inside the top drawer of his dresser while I’d been wiping it free of dust. “Yes?”

“Was beginning to think you might have come to your senses and ran,” Scythe said, and though it was in jest, we were well aware that none of this made sense. We knew rations of one another, yet it felt as if we could survive on those for an eternity.

We both knew we couldn’t.

“I lost all sense a few nights ago,” I reminded him with a coy smile.

He grinned, eye moving to the drawers behind me. Looking back at me, he offered his hand. “Come. Time to feed you.”

I placed my hand in his and laughed when he pulled me against his chest. “You do like doing that.”

“Nothing has made me happier”—he tipped up my chin—“than filling your cunt with me and your stomach with food.”

I shivered. No matter how lewd and antiquated his declaration, I loved it all the same.