Page 55 of Flirting with Darkness

“I don’t know when you were planning on leaving, but make it now. Right now.”

“Lilith.”

He didn’t say, “Look at me,” but I heard him ask for that in his tone of voice. And despite my better judgment, I turned.

Vale looked… sad.

I expected frustration. The same expression I was used to seeing on the faces of the people unfortunate enough to love me. But Vale… he just looked resigned, like he knew why I was doing this and that he couldn’t stop me.

“I need you to know—”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Listen.” His hand fell to my arm—holding me gently. Did he know that it was the same place he held me down last night? “I know you, Lilith. I know that no one can make this decision but you. But let me give you all the information to make it with.”

I should have stopped him, but I didn’t.

“You could leave with me,” he said.

I knew he was going to say it, but it still ached to hear.

“If we run now,” he went on, “you will be gone by the time Vitarus shows his face. We could draw him away.”

I swallowed thickly. “To Obitraes?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. It doesn’t matter. None of the gods of the White Pantheon can touch Obitraes. But if you wanted to go somewhere else, we could do that, too.”

There was nowhere one could hide from a god.

And it was foolish and naive to think that Vitarus wouldn’t destroy my home, a town that had already earned his ire, out of nothing more than petty boredom, whether I was there or not.

Vale knew this just as well as I did.

“You aren’t a stupid man, Vale,” I said quietly, and he winced.

“No,” he said. “Just a desperate one.”

He stepped closer, his body now flush to mine. His hand released my arm and moved to my chin—touched it more gently than he had last night, but the grip seemed just as inescapable as he looked into my face, our noses brushing.

“You do not have to do any of this alone,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me. But it was the first time I really wanted—needed—to hear it.

“I don’t want you there,” I said. “It would be dangerous. You’re one of Nyaxia’s children. Any god of the White Pantheon would hate you for it, including Vitarus. The best thing you can do for me is get far away from here and never come back.”

My words were sharp and clipped and cold. The same voice I would use when I told Mina I could not stay with her or sent away Farrow when he asked too many searching questions. Hard as iron.

That tone would usually send them away with a scoff and a shake of the head.

But Vale didn’t let go of me.

“It must be hard,” he murmured. “To bear the weight of so much affection in a life so short.”

My eyes burned ferociously. I had to squeeze them shut, had to clamp down on my sudden shuddering inhale.

No one had ever seen that before. The love in my cold absence. And it was always so easy to just let them believe I didn’t feel it.

All this time I thought I had been studying Vale, but he had been studying me.

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