Page 116 of The Lands Defying
“No, brother, of course not.” I pick up a knife and start carefully carving into the wood. “But you need rest.”
“I’ll rest when this organ in my chest stops beating all together,” I tell Leo then turn, facing him.
His blue eyes tired, his blonde hair all over the place as he scrubs a hand down his face. “Darius, I know how you feel.”
“You have no idea how I fucking feel!” I growl at him, my temper short. Patience short. “Do you feel like half of your heart is gone? Like it’s missing a beat and cannot work properly without its other half?” His eyes look between mine as he shakes his head slowly as I walk toward him, aggression spilling from my pores. “Does it feel like the air is tainted in poison with every breath you take? Like you are constantly running out of air? Does it feel like every step you take, your legs are about to break, like you can’t move without a fracture, like your bones rebel at every simple step?”
Another shake of his head as his shoulder slump, pain in his eyes for me. “Brother…”
“Does it feel like your soul is torn in two, like it has split, ruptured, and ripped in half and it’s searching in an endless circle for it to be whole again?”
“No,” he whispers, his shoulders slumping.
“Then you have no fucking idea how I feel,” I tell him, moving around him and out the front door before I unleash everything that is inside me and flatten Eridian.
I can’t do that.
Rhea would hate that.
And then hate me.
And we are far past hate. Far past anger, disgust and despise for each other. We would never feel that way toward each other again.
No, I am so far from hate that she ended up being my everything.
She may be my weakness, my pain, my anger.
But more than that, she’s my softness, my comfort. My home.
And I will not rest until she is back in my arms.
I walk into the cave, running my hand over the glowing ore here as I follow it to the space that Rhea claimed as hers. Where I claimed her for the first time.
She didn’t know it then, but I knew what I was doing when I followed her here.
No, followed isn’t the right word.Hunted.
When I smelled her coming into her heat, that’s when I began my hunt.
I stalked her from a distance, never too far from her unless I was pulled away to speak to my men. I watched her with her pack, and then watched her handle her business and get her hands dirty with chores that needed doing around Eridian. Sometimes she would laugh and smile, other times she was quiet.
That’s when she would go off on her own, walking amongst the trees, deep within her own thoughts. I would have given just about anything to know what she was thinking in those moments.
Then she was in their gardens and her heat had begun. She raised her pretty, ice-blue eyes to me, half-lidded, her chest rising and falling with her heavy breaths. I don’t think she knew how she reacted to me then. Her back slightly arched, her thighs rubbing together and her eyes silently begging me to take her.
And I did.
I hunted after her through the forest and to her cave.
I waited outside for a time, a small part of me knowing if I went in, it would be a mistake. But I couldn’t resist because thethought that someone else may come and claim her drove my first steps into her space to make her mine.
I’ll never forget the first time I was inside of her, the way her body wrapped around me like it was always meant to be. And it was.
In the end, it wasn’t a mistake, I didn’t regret it.
But I regret what I said to her afterwards.
Sighing, I run my hand through the cascading water when I reach the center. It’s cold—as cold as my body feels as I look toward the middle of the pool, remembering her standing there, body wet, curves on display, hair dripping.
