Page 104 of Beg the Night

Without hesitation, I scooped her up and hugged her tight.

She was so tiny, yet she looped her arms around my torso and held me equally as tight.

Fuck, I could have died at the relief.

Like that, she cried. Her entire body shook. The tears came and came until they soaked my shirt. She buried her face in my chest, muffling her cries. Still, I held her. I would have held her forever.

“I hate who I am,” she whispered. “Katherine hates me, but it doesn’t even matter. Nobody hates me more than I hate myself.”

I didn’t think I had a heart, but I felt it breaking in that moment. Shattering. Icing over.

“Don’t worry.” I kissed the top of her head as if it would help. As if I could break through the numbness that had enveloped her. “I hate me, too.”

Her sister was wrong. We were alike. There was nothing Athena could do that would make me turn on her. She was part of me now. Her soul was part of my soul.

People like Katherine would never understand us. She would never know the feeling of standing in the darkness alone at night, wishing for pain, wishing for an ending.

Because even pain was better than living in this void. The apathy that spread like a disease, that called me home. That summoned me forward.

I couldn’t slip back into that trap. Not now. For years, I’d lived in the darkness, in the abyss. But then I met Athena.

And when she clung to me, when she sobbed against me, her body shaking, I realized I had escaped it. That was strange,wasn’t it? That we never knew we were out of that hole until we threatened to slip right back into it?

Part of that realization was terrifying. But the other part was comforting.

Like coming home.

I held Athena until her tears dried. Until her sobs were silenced. She didn’t try to explain. She didn’t have to. I wouldn’t ask. This was her battle, and she had been fighting it alone for so, so long.

She would never have to fight alone again.

“What are you doing awake?” she said, finally peeling herself from my grasp.

“I need your help with something.”

Before she could ask questions, I slipped quietly back into our room, tugging her along with me. The moonlight trickling in from the window was bright enough to illuminate all the lists and plans Benedict had written out. I took a seat on the floor beside them, and Athena followed my lead.

“What are you doing with these? You’re not changing the plan now, are you?”

I inhaled deeply, eyes closed, then blew the breath out and zeroed in on her. “No, I’m not changing the plan.”

She eyed me carefully, her eyes puffy and red. “Okay, then what?”

I picked up what I believed was the list Mags and Benedict had compiled of all the other known gifts in the army and handed it to Athena. “Read this to me.”

Lip caught between her teeth, she eased the paper from my grasp. “You want me to read you this list?”

“Yes.”

A beat passed. “Why?”

“Because I’d like to know what’s on it.” I nodded at it. “Now, please read.”

She looked down at the list, then back at me, then down at the list again. When her gaze returned to mine, her brows were drawn together, her eyes more focused than they had been all night. “You can’t read it?”

“If I could read it, I wouldn’t be asking you to do it for me, now would I?” The words were harsher than I had meant for them to be, but Athena didn’t flinch away. She didn’t laugh at me, either, which was a relief.

Not like I cared, dammit.

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