Page 217 of Boy of Ruin
Maybe because Elijah’s wife is back, although she doesn’t even seem to know who took her. A girl, she said. A girl, but she covered her face with a skeleton mask.
Seems fitting.
It’s something to worry about later, but she dropped her back off at Sanctum’s doorstep. Well, the gate. Edith said a man hauled her out, that’s what Maverick told me. A man, because she felt his size as she scratched at him. Heard his voice telling her to calm the fuck down as he set her down by the gate. But he bound her arms and she had a blindfold over her face.
She heard the engine of the car. Then it pulled away, and she had to wait until Elijah came to Sanctum to meet up with the Unsaints again.
But she’s okay, and now there’s more questions than answers.
In this moment though, I don’t care about any of that.
All I care about is my heart breaking.
All I fucking care about is where he’s going to go.
“Don’t leave me,” I say again. “You can’t…you can’t do that.”
He’s still staring at my belly, and I know he’s thinking about the baby. Seeming reluctant to do it, he tears his eyes from there, meeting my gaze, and I see a tear clinging to his lower lash line.
He squeezes my hands tighter, our fingers threaded together.
“I don’t want to.” He runs his tongue over his teeth, staring at me. “You know that, don’t you, baby? I don’t fucking want to.”
My heart is beating too fast in my chest. So fucking fast, it’s scaring me. But I’m not hooked up to a pulse monitor, and I’m glad, because I can’t deal. With doctors, nurses. I couldn’t fucking deal.
“Then don’t,” I plead with him. “J, please—”
He leans in close to me, stealing my words as he angles his head. His gaze dips down to my mouth and I inhale his clean scent, sucking in a breath.
Then his mouth is on mine, and my lips part for him without hesitation. His hands come to my face, then one threads through my hair. I grip his arms, feel his hard muscles flex as I cling to him, tears falling down my cheeks, salty on our lips.
He’s crying too, and as we collide, I try to memorize this. His taste, fresh and minty and fucking perfect, because he’s tried to keep everything that way. For so long, he was in darkness. Filth and decay.
I embed the way his fingers feel against my face, tangled in my hair, into my mind. The way he groans against my mouth like he just can’t fucking get enough of me. The way he takes and gives and how my heart flutters when his tongue twirls around mine.
The hand on my face trails down to my throat, over my breasts, and he moans against me, but that’s not where he stops.
Instead, he slips his hand up the gown, over my thigh, past my hips, right above his initial carved into my skin.
Goosebumps break out over my body as he runs his thumb over the healing cut.
Finally, when I feel like I really can’t breathe, he pulls back, fingers still threaded in my hair.
“I love you, baby.”
I bite my lip, a swell of emotion making it hard to think, let alone talk, but I know if I don’t say it, I’ll regret this for the rest of my life. I have this strange, crushing feeling that where he’s going, I won’t be able to follow. “I love you too, J. So much. I love you so fucking much.”
“I know,” he says simply, his full, beautiful lips turning up into a smile. “I know you do. And that’s the best thing anyone could have ever given me, you know that?”
I can’t let him leave.
I fucking can’t.
“Where are you going?” I whisper instead, because I’ve already begged him. Already told him not to go. And I know when Jeremiah makes up his mind about something, he doesn’t stop. He won’t let anyone change it.
I haven’t accepted it yet.
I don’t quite believe it. Don’t think that soon, he won’t be following me. Won’t be stalking me.
