Page 63 of Dance with Death

Even when everything in the world is wrong, it’s all made right when she’s in my arms.

She cries, her face falling to my chest as her skinny arms sneak around my waist. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t live like this. I just want it all to end.”

I’m stalled on the tracks and her words are a freight train barreling into me. I don’t know what to say to her to make it better, so I just tell her the truth.

“My life means nothing without you in it, Anya. If your life ends, my life ends.”

She stills.

She raises her head slowly and I can see the blue of her eyes in the dim light. The shade is dull in this lighting, but it’s my blue-eyed girl all the same. Everything that makes her Anya is still right there behind the cloak of color. Seeing her again, after all this time, reminds me how hard I fell for her.

I told her once that my heart beats for her, but I didn’t understand the absolute truth in that until this moment. I feel like I’ve just been resurrected in her arms.

Her fragile, malnourished, too thin for her arms.

“I’m yours,” I tell her, picking up her tiny arm to inspect the bloody cut she made on her wrist—it’s small and seems to have stopped bleeding. I let go and lift both of my hands to hold her cheeks, to brush the tears from them with my thumbs. “Always yours.”

Her eyes flicker as they search mine, the familiar flicker they’ve always had whenever she’s looked at me seeking honesty, rawness, and truth. Truth is exactly what I’ll give her.

“If you die, I die,” I tell her.

Her head tilts, falling heavy into my palm and her expression softens.

“Ezra, I…I wanted to hate you,” she says, and I wait for her to continue, though her silence stretches through several beats. “I wanted to hate you for making me fall for you, for disrupting the predictability of my captivity with Nikolai, for making me fall so hard and so deep that I risked everything to be with you, just for that one night in my bed. But I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. My life without you is meaningless pain. And that’s all it’s been since he sold me.” Her voice cracks as fresh tears spill.

I press my forehead to hers. “But…wasn’t that one night with me worth everything? I’m really good in bed.”

The sound she makes is magic. It’s a sob, but there’s a laugh behind it that forces her to smile and fuck, I can’t help but grin at her. I lick my lips before tilting my chin forward, pressing my lips softly against hers.

I don’t know why it surprises me that she kisses me back, that she parts her lips and invites me to kiss her deeper, but it does. It surprises and calms me, and it excites me and scares me.

Anya makes me feel everything more intensely than anyone else ever could.

She tried to kill herself.

My breaths quicken with the deepening kiss, the intimacy with the woman I love who has been gone from my life for months.

She tried to kill herself.

My heartbeat races with the passion I feel for her and the passion beats out a pulse of wanting, but even more so, of anger.

I’m angry.

I’m angry withher.

She tried to kill herself.

I pull my head back, though my grip remains firm on her cheeks.

“Why the fuck did you do this, Anya? Did you really try to kill yourself? Why? Why would you do that to me?”

I press my lips to hers again, unable to dampen this fiery mixture of love and rage that’s starting to boil in my blood.

“I’m sorry,” she says between heated kisses. “I just need it to end, I need it to be over.”

“Over? No. No, it’s not over. Not like that. I promised you, didn’t I?” I kiss the corner of her lips. “I promised you that if there was a way for us to escape this nightmare, I’d find it.”

Her eyes narrow and she yanks backward, dragging herself free of my grip. “There’s nothing for you to find. There never was. The only escape is death.”

---