Page 168 of The Truths We Burn

“That’s the thing, baby.” I tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. “When we ended, you reminded me how empty I am. How so goddamn empty I have always been. The only thing that fills me is you, and it shows.”

It’s true.

Every bit of it.

“How did that go?” she asks, wrapping her arms around my waist.

“I’m not bleeding, so it’s a start,” I laugh. “I’m not worried about me though. Are you ready for this?”

With soft fingers, she reaches up to fiddle with my hair. “I’m pissed he is going to be buried beside my sister, but I think I’m ready for anything with you by my side.”

A grin spreads across her cheeks as she leans closer to me, her lips brushing my own.

“My fire god.”

“Fire god, huh?”

“Yup,” she hums, smiling at me behind her long lashes. “Always ready to burn. So bright. If anything happens, I know you’ll be there to hand me the match.”

The gold necklace she wears glitters in the sun.

“I’ll always be there. Always. No matter what happens, you will always have me.”

“Because you decided to keep me?” she whispers.

There are mountains ahead of us, things that are out of our control, and even though we’d taken care of everything on our end, there are people out there who know about us. Who know that we are after them.

It won’t be long before they send more obstacles to stop us. To try and rip us apart. We are no longer the hunters; we would soon become the hunted. But we’re all ready for whatever is coming.

Even if they didn’t come for us, we would make sure those missing girls’ families got answers. That no matter how nasty, we would make sure the right people found out about what was happening here and they could stop it. Even if that meant ending ourselves in the process.

It was a small victory. Ending the life of the person who’d thrown Rose into this mess, but it wasn’t the end. Not with everything we knew now. There were too many lives on the line and even though I’d never considered myself a hero, I was a decent human being, despite my reputation.

Whatever hell they brought, we would always bring more. There is no one who could out-chaos us. Not when we had been born from it, not when we lived in it.

I would do anything to protect my family. No matter how fucked and dysfunctional, they are mine. And there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them.

And fuck do I know that Sage and I came together in a hurricane of rash decisions and lustful disarray, but what we have found beneath all that pain, all the lies, all the truths, was something real.

It’s a love that would be painted in a gruesome light, and the whispers would speak of how sinful it was, the narrative spelled out simply as the wicked child of Satan corrupting Ponderosa Springs’ most cherished angel. They would say I crept into her room at night and stole her away to my kingdom of eternal damnation, keeping her here forever.

Our story would be a villainous one for as long as we live here.

But they don’t know what we did.

They don’t know that she is more than just a flimsy angel.

She is a force with the power to destroy anything in her way. A phoenix from the ashes.

The Lilith to my Lucifer.

The one I would burn the entire goddamn planet down for.

In the opaque darkness, we found a love that could never be contained.

So to some, our love would be seen as unholy, an act against God himself, but to us?

It’s more.

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