Page 27 of Love's Ace

When Wren thought about his best memories, what did they smell like?

Chapter 11

Wren

Ithought about closingthe door behind him and breaking the handle off—I’d felt him trembling in my arms, but it wasdifferentthan before. It didn’t feel like it had when we were in the diner together. It didn’t feel like he was about to fly apart and attack someone.

It felt…

It felt like he was doing something to my head, infiltrating it with the unfamiliar scent of flower petals in the rain, torn apart in the wind and perfuming the air with their sweet destruction.

I should have left him there. Ishouldhave trapped him in the room and called Aiden to let him know what was happening so he could dealwith the situation. Ineededto kill him before he fucked with my head any more than he already had, because it was obviously doing something to my clarity and sense of self-preservation.

Instead of doing any of those things Ishouldhave done, I took a deep breath to erase the scent of him still fucking with my head and followed him.

He’d gone all the way into the adjoining room, but he’d left the door between us open. At my shoulders, I felt my wings give a nervous twitch just beneath my skin. That madenosense. I didn’t like them out when an Enmity was near. I’d kept them carefully tucked away since Theo had collapsed in my arms… and now…

Now I wanted to take to the sky. I wanted to run away from the way I couldfeelhimin the room with me, and the way the scent of him hadn’t dissipated at all.

I wanted…

I shook my head and walked across the room, spinning so my back was against the wall. I didn’t have to look to see the thread in my chest reaching toward him to know he was leaning on the opposite wall, mirroring my posture.

Back to back, a wall between us. A red line stretching even though we’d tried and failed to make space, distance.

A thread keeping him alive.

A thread keeping mehere.

Fuck.

“Are you… under control?” In truth, there was no reason for him not to be. The two people in the elevator hadn’t evenhada connection running between them. They’d both been dusted with faint traces of pink—lust clinging to them in a gentle swirl of possibility—but it wasn’t anything that would have triggered him. I hadn’t felt the itch to pull out an arrow and connect them. Sometimes lust was just lust.

I was just being cautious. I was being…selfish.His lips pressed to my neck, that scent flooding my senses…

Fuck.

“I’m fine.” Theo’s voice came from directly behind me. I’d been right. We were inches apart, but it was somehow easier like this. If I didn’t look at him, I couldn’t see the red swirl in his eyes. If Ididn’t look at him, I didn’t have to see the line trailing from my chest to his.

If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was having a normal conversation, and the scent of roses wasn’t still lingering at the back of my senses and threatening to get me drunk.

It was easier this way—easier to act like something hadn’tchangedin me when the Ardor pierced my heart. Easier to ignore how all these emotions, all thesefeelingswere trying to drown me.

Easier to pretend I couldn’tfeelTheo just out of reach—the ocean spilling over me in waves and pouring into my lungs with the burn of salt and the promise of endlessness.

“We should be fine as long as we stay in the room during the day.” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to be helpful or give him a warning that he wasn’t allowed to leave. Whatever it was, I heard him scoff.

“Wouldn’t want me trying to kill the innocent people fucking in the rooms around us, would we?” His breath came in a gentle, shaking intake that was almost a sob… and I felt pinpricks along my scalp.

He was pulling his hair, leaning into the pain until my eyes burned and I was positive he was crying.

I managed to stay quiet for thirty seconds before his name spilled almost helplessly from my lips. “Theo?”

“I don’twantto hurt people, Wren. As much as you might think I do, I don’t… Fuck, I don’t want any of this. I never have.”

With the wall between us and my eyes closed, Theo was just the man who’d swayed in my arms in the alley, the one who’d looked up at me with soft confusion and wonder on his face… and I couldn’t help but envision the tears trailing down his cheeks, belying the monster I knew he was becoming.

It was easy to feel that sting when he pulled his hair again and clenched his nails into his palms until they cut. I could feel howbrokenhe was. How much heneeded, even if he wasn’t going to say a damn word about it.

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