Page 41 of Break Her Heart
I waited.
But whatever war was being waged inside him ended just as quickly. The emptiness returned to his gaze, and he adjusted his coat, jaw tight, eyes averted.
Like he had done every time.
He started to walk out the door again. Maybe I could stay calm and reason with him.
“August, I really don’t know if I can do this. The binding. It’s irreversible which means I could never bind myself to another.”
He stilled and turned back to me.
“You think this changes anything?” he asked, voice low and dangerous. “You were mine the moment you let me mark you. The moment you let me touch you. There will be no one else.”
My hands curled into fists, nails biting into my palms.Don’t show him anything. Not fear. Not anger. Not even hate.
And still, I met his gaze, steady and unyielding. “If you think that, then you don’t know me at all.”
August laughed—a soft, broken thing that sounded almost like pain.
“Oh, I know you,” he said. “Better than anyone everwantedto.”
For half a second, I let myself believe he meant to fix it. That he’d come to tell me none of this would happen—that we could still find a way out. That he still felt what I felt.
But then he opened his mouth, and I remembered who I was dealing with.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I didn’t like how he thought he had something over me.
I hesitated, searching for the cruelest truth I could wield. “I thought the mark meant something. That it meant something about us. But it was just a trick. I see that now.”
His expression didn’t move, so I pushed harder.
“I hate you for letting me believe it could’ve been real. And I hate myself for wanting it to be. You ruined my life!”
Then something inside him snapped. The veins around his eyes pulsed with anger, his face twisted with rage.
“Ask me how I felt about you.”
His voice didn’t sound like a command this time. It sounded like a man dangling off a ledge who needed me to let go. Like he needed to say it out loud so he could stop feeling it.
“What? Why?”
“Ask me.”
I swallowed hard. My fingers curled tightly around the fabric at my sides. “How did you feel about me?”
“At first, there was a part of me that woke up thinking about you,” he said. “And no matter how hard I tried to fight it, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I thought it was just bloodlust. That’s what I told myself. But then I’d think about your eyes, your hair, the way your nose scrunched when I aggravated you. Or how you would tap your thumb and fingers together when you were about to break. I don’t think you even know you do it. But you were doing it a moment ago. That’s how I knew to keep pushing.”
He let out a bitter, broken kind of laugh.
“But when I was trying to get to you before you saw your parents—I realized it wasn’t just that. The panic I felt… the way I thought I might shatter if you saw what they’d done. All I wanted to do was protect you. I l—”
“Don’t say it.”
He stared at me, a storm raging behind his eyes. “I loved you.”
He said it like it hurt. Like the words had to be torn out of him. For a man who had lived hundreds of years, I wondered if I was the first person he’d ever said that to. And now it would never be said again.
The words hit like a blade through my ribs. My breath hitched. I had tried not to think about my feelings toward August—how tangled and impossible they were. But I’d seen it in him before, in the way he started to look at me. And maybe, just maybe, I’d felt it too.
