Page 17 of Vows & Violence
I let out a shaky breath. “You’re not supposed to say things like that to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll believe you. And then I’ll burn it too.”
A small smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Not all the way. “Good. Let’s burn it together, then.”
The space between us vanishes.
I don’t even know who moves first, me or him, but suddenly his lips are on mine, and it’s not frantic this time. It’s not desperate or rushed or tangled in adrenaline. It’s slow. Deep. Honest. His hand cradles the side of my face like I’m something breakable, which I hate. But I don’t stop him. For once, I want to be held like this. We break apart just enough to breathe, our foreheads touching.
“You’re mine,” Ghost says, barely a whisper. “And I’m yours. I don’t care if they mark us, name us, hunt us. I don’t care what doors they think they can open.”
I nod, throat tight. “They want to cut the tether?”
He lifts my hand to his chest and presses it over his heartbeat. “Then let’s make it a chain instead.”
Chapter Eight
Phoenix
Back inside, the walls feel closer. The safehouse hums low with generator noise and half-buried fear. Outside, thunder rolls, but inside it's all sharp eyes and quieter threats. The kind you can’t shoot your way out of.
Ghost stands near the window with his fists clenched like he’s gripping some invisible lifeline. His jaw ticks with words he won’t say.
I match his silence with my own. Mine’s sharper. Colder. Laced with control and stitched with violence. Blood on the floor is easier than feelings in the air. Always has been.
But the space between us? It’s not space at all. It’s tension and love. A livewire. One wrong move and we’re fire and ruin again.
The more I try to move away, the more I feel it. That magnetic pull like we’re both pieces cut from the same cursed metal. Same war. Same wound. Whatever hell built us, it used the same damn blueprint.
Ghost’s voice cuts through the quiet, low and rough. “Have you ever thought this isn’t a coincidence?”
I meet his eyes. Haunted blue like drowning in memory. I nod once. “I think it’s fate,” I say, slipping a knife into my boot. “And fate’s a bitch with a bone to pick.”
He doesn’t smile. Just watches as I gear up like I’m suiting for war, and I am. We both are. The war just keeps shifting faces, literally.
The burn on my side is worse. Hot and wrong, like something is alive beneath the skin. I peel the bandage back, and there it is. A spiral etched in red, not from the outside in... but from somewhere deep.
It pulses. Branding me. Not marked by Vale. Not by the MC. Something older and hungrier.
I don’t tell Ghost. But he sees it anyway. “You’re hurt.”
I shrug and pull my shirt back down. “Pain reminds me I’m still here.”
Ghost steps forward, his voice lower now. “You’re not just hurt. You’re changing.”
I don’t answer. Not because I don’t want to, but because I don’tknowthe answer.
MV’s voice breaks the silence. Crackling through the earpiece, softer than usual. Less machine. Almost... human. “You’re not the door, Nix. But you might be the lock… or the key.”
The words dig deeper than they should. I close my eyes, just for a second. And in that second, I see things I shouldn’t.
Flashes.
Blood. Screams. Ash is falling like snow. A woman’s face I don’t recognize but somehowdo. She whispers our names,mine and Ghost’s, like she’s been waiting centuries to say them.
I snap my eyes open. Ghost is watching me like he saw it too. The dream keeps changing, but the spiral is always there. And so is she.
