Page 85 of Lovely Violent Things

As I near Kallum, his lawyer turns to address me, and Kallum nearly growls, “Leave.”

Crosby glares at his client, but dutifully takes out his phone and walks away, leaving us standing before each other, only a few feet setting us apart.

“Kiss me,” I order him.

Kallum tilts his head, gaze narrowed in question. Yet he eats the distance between us and grabs me by the nape, crushing his mouth to mine.

I melt into him, savoring the taste of his demand, before I break away. The sharp slap of my palm meeting his face rings out to draw attention.

Head canted to the side, Kallum’s mouth curls into a wicked smile. Using his thumb, he wipes the bead of blood from his lip as he turns back my way.

“Now,” I say, releasing a shaky breath, “when asked where you got that bruise, advise your lawyer to say it’s from when I struck you yesterday for trying the same shit.”

Then I push up onto my toes and wrap my arms around his neck, forcefully pulling him down to me. I kiss him hard, full of yearning, tasting the hint of blood as liquid fire pours into my veins. There’s only a moment of hesitancy before he matches the urgency of my kiss.

Kallum lifts his head to stare down at me, looking deep into my eyes. “And when asked about this right now?” he says, a taunt layered beneath his guttural tone.

I lick my lips. “Now… Now I’ve changed my mind.”

A heated ember ignites behind his dark gaze, and he strokes his thumb across my jaw. “There you are, sweetness,” he says, his rough voice abrasively striking over my skin like flint to spark a flame.

“I remember,” I say. “I remember everything.”

Taking my face between his slashed palms, Kallum angles my head back farther, sealing his mouth over mine in a devastating kiss. I taste blood and carnage and passion; I taste him, the man who kept my secret. Who was incarcerated for me, and who continues to keep my secret, to protect me.

As he pulls away a fraction, his captivating gaze sweeps over my features, my skin crackling beneath his electrifying touch. “Mine,” he whispers across my lips.

A shiver encases my body as I blink up at him, my vision crystal clear, the dull heartache always present in the center of my chest alleviated by his desire. “That’s your masterpiece,” I say, referring to the flayed agent displayed in the scene behind us.

He kisses my lips tenderly before he smiles down at me. “What can I say. You inspire me, my dark muse.”

“I am yours, Kallum. Truly,” I say, knowing that when the time comes, I’ll have to again break the rules to protect us. But it’s what I owe him.

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

Voltaire’s verse comes to me as truth. Arms linked around Kallum’s neck, I trace a finger over my forearm, feeling the wound, the scar, the ink, the stitches. The layers of a life of tragedy and pain.

The night I first met Kallum Locke, he was witness to a violence born within me, one it’s taken until now to finally reconcile, to accept.

When you fight monsters, you risk becoming one yourself.

But it takes a monster to hunt monsters.

That night, I took a life. I snuffed out that life with a vengeance that had infected me from the darkest moment of my existence. And when my mind fractured, and I couldn’t cope with my reality, a professor of philosophy and a practitioner of the dark arts promised he could help me forget.

Kallum lowers my arms and threads his fingers through mine. “There’s a conspiracy floating around that the priestess and the Harbinger are working together.”

His use of the wordconspiracystrikes a chord inside me, and I know what comes next. “We have to find Devyn.”

A striking smile slants his mouth at my inclusivewe. “I’m always at your command, sweet Halen.”

The personification of my profound grief came to me in the form of a beautiful devil with clashing blue-and-green eyes and a smoldering, disarming smile.

I summoned this daemon. I asked him to cast out my grief and pain, to shelter my darkness, to siphon away my shame. To make me abstract. So abstract I no longer recognized myself.

And he’s patiently waited for the fracture to mend.

We are the high and low notes, a madness and genius that fosters harmony. Alchemy and magick, or logic and psychology. The answer to the question is less important than the fusion which creates something darkly beautiful that belongs only to us.

---