Oh, no. Fuck. He was in pain.
“You were saying?” he asked in the quiet, blinking slowly, allowing everything to stretch.
Knowing this fight was far from over, I pressed deep into the tissue and massaged, moving the blood into his veins, until it circulated, pulsed, beat…
Thay closed his eyes in a pained, violent shudder.
This is what he needed. What he had been waiting for. Me.
“I left you,” I finally said, pushing past the muscle in a slow, unhurried confession. “I did not want to. But I did.”
“Why?” he bit out, slowly opening his eyes to see my face.
“Because Wolfe made Lyla his queen and then you put me on a plane,” my head slumped forward. “You might want me, Thay, but you didn’t keep me. And neither did Wolfe.”
“Because keeping you would kill you, Daphne.”
A crooked smile sank into the corner of my lips, and my eyes fell even lower. “Life support is worse,” I admitted. “And this half-life is tearing me open.” A jagged breath hit my lungs, but he did not move to cure it. He only watched. “We share a body. A heart. One soul, asshole. One.”
Thay’s jaw ticked.
“So, you can hate me for leaving you, but I hate you for ever forcing me to feel that this is exactly where you wanted me. For making me believe that all I am is the culmination of all your fuckedupness.”
Thay’s hands were all skin and muscle as he lifted me into his arms.
“I am yours, Daphne,” he shouted into me, holding me tighter. “Only yours.”
I expected him to fight, to fall into his usual bulleted list explaining every reason he never put lips on mine, but instead, he stalked back into the kitchen and placed me at the edge of the table.
Wolfe breathed, his mouth twisting around a cigarette when his attention fell on me in a thoughtful glance.
“We hurt our girl.” Thay dropped to his knees in front of me, and I bit my lip, watching the storm in his eyes swell.
“Did we?” Wolfe took a drag, perfuming my kitchen with menthol and tobacco. “And how did we do that?”
“We love her, but we refused to keep her,” Thay said low, untying my shoes and tossing them under the table. “I think we broke her heart.”
“Mmmh,” Wolfe licked his lips, passing the cigarette to Thay. “That is pretty fucked up of us.”
“Well,” Thay took a long drag. “Wearepretty fucked up!”
Wolfe smirked, bruising my throat with his eyes.
“True,” he nodded. “But I believe we were trying to save her life. I mean, since she likes the sun so much and all.”
“She does seem to prefer it,” Thay agreed, his fingertips edging up the side of my leggings to the waistband, half a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “But honestly, monsters can only do so much of the right thing until eventually it becomes wrong.”
“Mmmh,” Wolfe stepped forward to pull the nicotine from Thay’s lips before dragging the burn down his forearm to burn it out. “But that is the thing about Daphne,” he placed a hand on Thay’s shoulder. “She gets off on wrong.”
My throat bobbed, air twisting when Thay smiled and tugged. Only this time, I didn’t stop it. I watched as my leggings swept over the bruise on my knee, until there was only me in a hot pink bra and a pair of black panties.
“How do you think we should make it up to her?” Wolfe asked, forming the question like a dare.
“We could always keep her.”
My stomach tingled, the muscles between my legs tensing at the thought.
“Yes. But she might not believe us,” Wolfe pointed out when Thay’s touch turned inward, sliding to the inner part of my thighs in a long, fluid stroke. “I mean, why would she?” Wolfe’s eyes flared, bits of light and something else swirling inside them.