Her mouth moves against the scars. A press here, a press there, mapping the damage with her lips the way someone would map a face they were trying to memorize.
Why the fuck would shewantto?
How is she not… horrified by this?
Byme?
And I can’t fucking pull away. I’m in some state of shock or stupor, frozen in place, unable to do anything but stand there and take it.
I can’t evenbreathe.
The self-hatred is so loud it's a roar in my ears.
Monster. Monster. What are you doing? She's going to realize what she's kissing and she's going to remember she can’t even tell herself you’re a good person and she’s going to?—
Her free hand comes up to pull me closer.
Into the kiss. Into her. Like the scars and the exposed teeth and the missing cheek and the lidless eye are nothing. Like I'm just a man being kissed by a woman who chose him, and the face is irrelevant, and the monster is a fiction I've been telling myself for so long I forgot I was the author.
A growl rips out of my chest.
Can't…
The growl turns into something between a snarl and a stupid fucking anguished groan and I jerk my head sideways, her fingers slipping from my hair, and I'm going to pull away completely, going to put my back to her and grind my face against the bars until the contact memory is scrubbed from my skin?—
Instead I bury my face in her neck.
My forehead presses into the curve where her shoulder meets her throat, the collar warm against my brow, and I breathe her in. Underneath the cologne and suppressants, her spice fills my head, strengthened somehow by the fact half my fucking nose on one side is gone. And beneath that, the sharp, unmistakable sweetness of omega.
Myomega.
My body folds into her. My arms wind around her and my ruined face pushes deeper into her neck, hiding in the one place that doesn't require me to be seen.
Her arms come around me, too.
One hand on the back of my skull. The other flat between my shoulder blades, avoiding the bullet wound with instinctive care.
She holds me.
I let her.
For three seconds, four, five—however long my body needs to stop shaking enough to function—I let this woman hold me in a gilded cage in the basement of a fucking opera house while my blood dries on the stone beneath us and somewhere in this building, Phoenix and Raf are fighting to reach us. I can sense them somehow, getting closer.
The somehow makes more sense now that I know we’re a pack with a fucking omega.
“Do you really love me?” Bells whispers against my shoulder.
“Yes,” I growl into her throat.
“And here I thought we promised we still hated each other.”
“We do.”
She pulls away just enough to grin up at me. “Why not both?”
And this time, she’s the one who kisses me.
A banging sound somewhere upstairs makes her jolt against me and the kiss breaks off as quickly as it began. My arms tighten automatically around her, shielding her. I can’t stop the growl rumbling in my chest.