The Killing Season (16 page)

Luke tensed, sensing the movement, but before he turned away from me, I brought his hand up to my neck. I shoved his dirty and bloodied fingers into my hair, and his thumb found the pulse below my jaw. His grip tightened. “Come on, baby. Let’s go.”

“No!” Thad yelled. “Luke, don’t touch her. You know what will happen!”

“She’s mine,” Luke said, his eyes never leaving me. He closed the distance between us as I gasped, his other arm reaching behind me and lifting me up onto his waist. As he bounded up the stairs to the second level, I wrapped my legs around him, securing myself to him as his hold on my hair tightened so that my neck had to crane back. He strode down the hall, blind, as he buried his nose into the column of my throat and inhaled deeply.

We made it to his room, but we weren’t far enough away to drown out Killian’s enraged curses. Vile and disgusting. All about me and what he would do to me. Luke kicked his door shut behind us, but didn’t bother turning on the lights. He slung me onto the bed and reached for a slim remote, flipping through the controls for a confusing moment until Five Finger Death Punch pulsed through the room, drowning out his father and everything around it. The music was so loud my spine twitched with every thrum of the bass, every smash of the drums. When the lead singer started screaming the first verse, I spread my legs as Luke loomed over me, his weight pressing me into the bed, one hand in my hair, the other down my pants.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, a shudder rippling down his body.

“It’s okay.” My voice hitched as he pushed his fingers inside me.

“I might break you.” Luke blinked down at me, eyes wide, and I knew he was barely hanging onto whatever control he had left.

I smiled up at him. “You can’t. I’m unbreakable.”

We became something barely human that night. I breathed him in until he consumed every inch of my insides. He pounded a new heartbeat into me with the music setting our tempo, relentless and unyielding. There was no end, no middle, and as I arched into him, clinging to his shoulders, begging him, I couldn’t remember not ever being in this moment—Luke above me, inside me, breaking my heart with every growl of my name, healing it with every reverberating stroke between my legs.

The blood on his body, the gore from the hunt, spread over me, mingling with our sweat, chilling me until I shivered, though a fever bloomed brightly inside of me. The saliva in his blood made him insatiable. He never grew tired, never got enough of me. He took me again and again, moving my body, adjusting me for every new way he needed me. I’m sure there was pain, but I only experienced the fire burning me to ash, recreating me every time Luke tore an orgasm from me. He fed on them, eating the screams from my mouth, claiming my ecstasy for his own. The power of him, the sheer velocity of how he worked my body, rocked me deeply. He built a new foundation for me to stand on that night, redefined my entire world in just a few hours.

Something happened to us as the hours passed, as the night wore into the deepest, darkest hours. Something between the lines of fear and love, pain and pleasure, possession and being possessed. We came together, and, though I knew we would eventually stop when the morning came and the music ended and the screaming I occasionally heard beneath the pulsing beat quietened, I sensed that we would never be separate ever again.

It would ruin us. Destroy us. Wreck us.

But it would be our only saving grace.

* * *

When I woke, the room was mostly dark. I smelled of lavender and my usual hibiscus shampoo. Someone had bathed me and replaced the sheets beneath me. My naked skin prickled in the chilly air that smelled strongly of caramel and cottonwood.

I searched for a part of me that didn’t move stiffly, but found nothing. Every muscle twitched with fatigue. I knew from the flush of heat in my body that I was hurting. My muscles were sore and torn. I probably had bruises and bite marks, cuts and claw marks, in addition to likely re-injuring my old wounds from Fields. I’d been through a war last night, my body the battlefield, but I was floating high with the clouds.

A shadow stirred beside me, barely illuminated from the single sconce lit in the room. “That’s my fault.”

Hearing him only made my mood soar. I rolled over and looked toward him, though I really had no clue where he began and the darkness ended. I thought I made out the chiseled edge of his jaw, but he moved deeper into the shadows.

“What is?” I asked.

“Your pain.”

“I’m not in pain.”

“Yes. You are,” Luke corrected firmly, his rumbling voice snapping through the darkness like a live wire zapping me. “You just can’t feel it.”

“Same thing.”

He sighed. “It’s really not, Ollie.”

“Hmm,” I murmured, closing my eyes and smiling. “I’m not doing this tortured monster shit today. Today I just want to be a girl who had awesome sex last night. Got it?”

I wanted to imagine he smiled, but it might have been just that: my imagination. “How do you feel? Are you hungry?”

Using an elbow to prop myself up, I switched on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with a warm light.

The chair where I thought Luke had been sitting was empty.

I reared up in bed, jerking the sheet with me to cover my bare chest, and looked around. He stood by the dresser on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall like he hadn’t moved in minutes. I shivered.

“How do you feel?” I asked when I could speak.

“Like I’ve had an entire night of awesome sex.”

He’d bandaged his bite wounds, but his skin was pale. For the first time, I noticed the sharpness of his cheekbones and the way his collarbones poked against his thin skin; the hunts were wearing on him. “Tell me the truth.”

The silence stretched out. “Like I hurt the girl I love.”

Ah, yes. There was my heart. I knew its presence because it currently ripped apart, shredded by my beautiful, dark man full of shadows and rage. And apparently love. “So it’s not just me alone in the love department then.”

“Not by a long shot.” He crossed the room, his loose linen pants sagging below his hip bones, showing off the swath of dark hair beneath his navel and the structured V-shape of his muscles. He slipped into bed with me, pulling me flush against his chest, his hands roaming over my body. He quickly laid claim to me again, touching my breasts—thumbs flickering over my nipples as he kissed me—before his hand slipped between my legs, reminding me. As if I needed reminding.

I grabbed him and squeezed until he hissed.

“You look like a demon when you smile like that,” he said, voice low and gravely. He took my hands and pinned them above my head, making the sheet slip down my chest. His eyes roamed over me, followed by his mouth. His nose lingered in the hollow of my throat until his breathing evened out.

“We shouldn’t let ourselves be this happy. You know what happens to happy people in the movies. They always die.”

“Happy?” Luke snorted against my neck. “Ollie, you fucking torture me. You piss me off nearly every time you speak. You do insanely stupid things that paralyze me with fear. And when I finally have a moment away from you, you haunt my dreams. Happiness isn’t a word I would use to describe what I feel.”

I’d never smiled this big in my life. “But you would use a word like love?”

“Love is exactly the word I would use.” He rose up from my chest to stare me in the eyes, his forearms flexing to hold up his weight. “It’s the only thing that comes close enough to describing this hell with you.”

I blinked, refusing to cry. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“You’re so screwed up.”

“You’re not flying the sanity kite very high either, Luke Aultstriver. So let’s be crazy together.”

He stayed silent for so long my smile faltered. The happiness—I wasn’t scared to admit I was stupidly happy—faltered in my heart. This was the closest I’d ever been to someone before. The furthest I’d ever let anyone in. He could crush me with a breath. Ruin me with a word. Cripple me with a sentence. My very existence had become dominated by so much fear. Never-ending fear. I realized now the blind fearlessness I’d felt before coming to Fear University was only because I’d never had anything to lose.

“You love me?” he finally asked.

I breathed out the breath I’d been tightly holding in. “Yes.”

“Why? How can you?”

I cupped his face in my hands, my thumbs running over the sharp angles of his cheekbones. His green eyes swam with fear and doubts. I hoped mine conveyed the certainty I felt. Maybe Luke had only ever felt a broken kind of love from his father, his mother, from the people at Fear University who relied on him to keep the ’swangs at bay. Hatter loved him, but they were boys raised with too much hate, too much war. And Luke was right: I was screwed up, only loved by a warped kind of love too. But what I felt for him, it was the best thing about me. The only whole thing inside me. I could guide us to the better side, to the light, to the place where we could be happy together.

“How, Ollie?” he pressed.

“I can love you because I know where all your cracks are. Because I know when you need to be cussed out and when you need to be held. I know how to destroy you and I know how to repair you. I know you’re not a good man, but I know you’re the best kind of man in the world: ruthless and wicked and loyal and brave. I’ll help you fix the cracks and keep out the shadows but only when you need me to. And when you want to kill your father, I’ll hand you the knife. When we go to kill Max, I know you’ll watch as I dig his grave, and afterward, when he’s dead, I know you’ll kiss my bloody lips and still love me just the same. That’s why I can love you, Luke. Because we’re the only ones who can love each other the right way.”

Luke shuddered against me, burrowing his head into my hair that fanned out on the pillow beneath me. I held him tight and waited, running my fingers along his bare back, tracing his scars from memory. “This isn’t normal, Ollie. The things I do to you break my heart because I know you crave them and I can’t stop doing them to you. We’re toxic people.”

I pushed on his shoulders until he leaned back enough to look at me. I tucked a piece of damp hair behind his ear, taking in all his bruises, the way his eyes were hooded with pain both from his hurt body and heart. He was my everything. Never before had such an anchor tethered me to one spot, one person. “But I love you and you love me. We probably won’t live long enough anyway to feel guilty about it, so let’s just be happy for now.”

He stared at me for a long time, my words hanging in the air between us. I relaxed into his hold and wrapped my legs around his hips to wait. I could live like this forever, in this exact spot, feeling his presence above me.

“You’re terrifying,” he finally whispered, “but I’ll never let myself stop being afraid of you. I’ll never condition that fear or that pain. You can be my monster in the dark and I’ll be the shadows to shield you.”

My heart thumped.
Tell him now
, it commanded.
Tell him now.

“Luke I have to tell you—”

Someone pounded on the door. “Ollie! Luke!”

I reared up in bed. “What is it, Sunny?” I shouted. Luke was already up, tossing my clothes over his shoulder.

“It’s Hatter.” Her voice broke over a sob. “Please, hurry.”

E L E V E N

Sunny

I
beat Ollie and Luke back to Hatter’s room.

He was exactly as I’d left him: muttering to himself and furiously scribbling the same words over and over on page after page of paper.

Hundreds of pages marked with his tiny, tortured handwriting littered the room like snow. I stepped on them as I entered again, careful not to disturb him. When I’d tried to get his attention earlier, he’d pushed me away, sending me stumbling into the wall. He’d blinked at me, like he hadn’t even recognized me, then went back to his writing.

I picked up a piece of paper, my eyes trailing across the words scrawled there.

A man does not scream. A man does not cry. A man does not hide from the dark. A man is brave and strong and fearless.

Hatter twitched and tossed a full page over his shoulder, reaching for the next, while his other hand raked down his forearm, leaving bloody ribbons in the wake of his fingernails.

Tears ran down my cheeks. I had no clue what to do, how to fix it, how to calm him down. I’d never felt so useless in all my life.

Luke and Ollie slipped in behind me. I didn’t need to say anything to explain the situation. Luke knew. He took in the scene before him like he’d seen it countless times before. I reached for Ollie and she pulled me against her side. I wrapped my arms around her and tried to stifle my sob.

“He gets like this sometimes,” Luke said quietly, still watching Hatter. “You know the saliva makes him manic, but medicines don’t help. We haven’t figured out a way to medicate any of the saliva reactions, much less his.”

“His parents did this to him?” I asked, choking on the words. Ollie had told me once that Hatter’s parents were like Luke’s father: abusive and obsessed with the war.

“I met Hatter here, in Barrow,” he said, toeing a crumpled page by his boot. “We grew up together. Had the same tutor. The same workout regimes. And when we were punished in similar ways, we went to each other. I was the one who held him when the saliva made him sick. When the mania terrified him and he didn’t know what he was doing. I was the one who helped him figure out how to cope. He came to me with his hands cramping and swollen from writing those words over and over.” Luke jerked his chin toward where Hatter continued to write. “We were practically brothers, and when Hatter’s parents were killed in a raid the summer before we went to Fear University, Hatter lived with us. Here.”