Through the Fire (Daughter of Fire, #1)(65)

Even from my position perched on the edge of the bed, I could hear his teeth grinding together. I twisted around, willing him to put his prejudice down to the way he was raised and move on. I may have owed the fae everything, but I couldn’t let loyalty to them cost me Clay.

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s in the past.”

“You’re not the only one with a past,” he growled as he rolled away from me.

“I know there were others for you too,” I said, as my tears threatened to steal my voice. It was evident in every move he’d made, every place he’d touched.

“You don’t want to know how many times I tried to screw you out of my system.”

A sob rose in my throat. I wanted him to stop tormenting me with his past as punishment for my choice, but I was struck motionless by a morbid sense of curiosity. I couldn’t turn to face him, or ask him to stop. Every detail was important regardless of how hard it was to hear. I closed my eyes as he continued to talk.

“For the longest time, I wanted to do what was right for my family. Even though I couldn’t regret the fact that you were alive, I did feel guilty that I’d betrayed them.” With each word his tone turned softer, as if his speech was reminding himself of the reasons we were at the hotel together. “Then I felt guilty for leaving you like I had. I can’t lie; I struggled with it. I tried so hard to stop thinking about you, but I just couldn’t.”

He crawled out from under the sheet and moved closer to me. As soon as he was close enough, he wrapped one arms around my waist. He planted a soft kiss against my shoulder, his hair brushing against my neck as he did. The instant I was in his hold, my anger and hurt dissipated. I relaxed against him in the darkness.

“I worried whether or not you were safe, whether you’d been caught. Even whether you had enough to eat. Then I felt guilty for thinking those things. I tried to convince myself that I couldn’t love you—that it just wasn’t possible because we’d only known each other for such a short time.”

Guiding us back down until we were lying side by side on the bed, he rolled onto his side and wrapped me in his hold.

“None of the girls felt right. They all felt cold and distant. I wanted the warmth I’d felt during our first kiss.” He kissed my neck softly. “I wanted you.”

“You have me,” I said, snuggling back against his body.

“And I’m never going to leave your side again. I promise.”





CHAPTER TWENTY


DESPITE THE danger, Clay and I stayed in the hotel for the rest of the next day and for one more night, only leaving after a newspaper with details of a fire that destroyed two conference rooms at the Hawthorne was delivered to our hotel room. As soon as I saw the headline, I grabbed the paper from the edge of the bed next to where Clay was sitting.

The number of casualties was the first thing that caught my eye.

“Fifteen people,” I gasped as I read the headline. I turned quickly to the main article and breathed easily when I saw that the three girls I’d encountered in the bathroom weren’t among the deceased.

“Fifteen witches,” he corrected quickly—as if what they might have been was justification for their deaths.

“You still don’t get it do you?” Regardless of what the Rain thought, they had been people and they were murdered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, his eyebrows creasing into a frown.

“How do you know they were all witches? How do you know they were evil?”

“Dad did his research. Despite what you might think of him, he’s not a bad person.”

“Not a bad person?” I repeated in disgust. “Is this you talking or the ‘retraining’ you went through? I can’t listen to you defend him,” I said as tears stole my voice. “It hasn’t only been evil creatures that he’s killed.”

His face fell into a frown as my words made their mark. “I’m sorry, Evie,” Clay said. “I swear that’s not what I was trying to do. I don’t agree with everything he’s done, or what he’s still doing. He’s made some monumental mistakes, but he’s done them for what he believes are the right reasons.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t justify things for him.”

“It’s just hard. Being part of the Rain, believing all the things they taught me, it’s been such a big factor in my life. Sometimes I don’t know how to turn off that part of me.”

He looked so desperate for forgiveness that I couldn’t stay mad. In the hours since our reunion, I’d seen enough to know that despite occasional slips into his old mindset, he was consciously trying to see more of the world than his family’s narrow viewpoint allowed.

Covering the distance between us, I wrapped my arms around him to offer him some comfort. “I don’t expect you to change who you are, but you need to understand my side of this. I’ve been pushed into a war I don’t want anything to do with, just because of the way I was born. My life is in danger every single day, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of my ancestry.”

He pulled me closer to his body and rested his head against my chest.

“I hate ultimatums, but unfortunately, you will have to choose between me and your family. They killed my father; they still want to kill me. That will never change, so you can’t have both of us in your life—it just won’t work.”