His own torment and grief and guilt.
What was happening?
What did he know?
Jace paced, roughing a hand through his hair, his voice quieted as he hissed the words. “If I knew who was responsible, I would erase them, Faith. If I knew exactly who Joseph was involved with, I would have had Mack beating down their door the second this happened. But I don’t.”
He hit his fingertips against his chest, pain wheezing from him on his sharp breaths.
“The only thing I know is Joseph was never good enough. Never deserved you. And I never should have given him the chance to let him steal you from me.”
Steal me away?
I stood there shocked when he blew out of Bailey’s door as if it’d all become too much of a burden for him to bear any longer.
Footsteps pounded down the hall, and I craned my ear, listening for him to take the stairs and disappear out the front door the way I’d been terrified that he would do all along.
Forever.
But then I felt it. Jace came to a sudden stop.
As if he hadn’t expected to do it, either.
His hesitation bled through the old walls before I heard the creak of the hinges of the neglected door.
The room I’d scarcely been able to bring myself to enter for all these years except to clean it every now and again, hit by a landslide of memories every single time I went in there.
There was nothing I could do to stop myself from moving that direction.
Drawn to the magnet.
Drawn to the light.
I was a shaking mess when I came to the door that was left open an inch.
When I nudged the crack wider, I found Jace standing in the middle of the room with his back to me, staring out at the garden of roses that filled the window as if the gorgeous scene had been framed.
All that hostility and rage brimming from his muscles.
My beast.
His shoulders tensed when he felt me inch in from behind him, and his hands fisted at his sides.
Shock reared me back a step when he suddenly whirled around.
It was almost fear that skated through me with the look on his face.
He pointed toward the wall. “When I came here, I thought I’d hate her.”
Hurt blistered beneath the surface of my skin, unable to fathom that he’d even let a thought so cruel slip from between his lips.
He took a looming step forward. “I wanted to. I wanted to hate her so badly because she wasn’t mine.”
If it weren’t for the deep sincerity breaking in his voice, I would have walked out. Turned my back on him. Instead, I was blinking at him, trying to process what he was saying. What was hidden in the deep emotion that burdened his words.
His eyes pinched closed, and when he opened them, they were blazing.
A thunderbolt.
Striking through me the way he always had.
“You want to know why I came here, Faith? You really want to know?”
My head started bouncing all over, as if I were begging for the answer but couldn’t control the quakes that rocked the floor.
His fist came down hard on his chest. “Because I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. Not for a day. Because you’ve consumed every one of my goddamned thoughts since the second I left.”
His body angled toward me. “Because I’m. In. Love. With. You.”
He punctuated every single one of those last words with the desperation that rolled from his tongue.
“Because I always have been, and I’m always going to be.”
His tone softened in some sort of grief. “And I fucking love her, too.”
Oh.
I almost folded in two, slammed with the magnitude of it.
Because I’d finally caught up to what he was sayin’. I finally understood the way he’d been looking at her.
Desperation lit, caught up in the dense, dense air.
The strike of a match.
Tossed right into the rippling energy.
Gasoline.
My throat grew dry in the same second my heart boiled over, and there was no containing what I’d tried to keep buried deep inside me.
“And I never, ever stopped loving you. I might have hated you in the middle of it, but I never stopped, Jace. How could I? Not when you were the boy who made me realize what it was like to really love. The one who’d taken a fantasy idea in my mind and made it a reality. You touched me in a way no one else ever could. I think I’ve loved you since the day I met you.”
The admission fractured out of me. Just like the last pieces of those memories that I’d been so desperately trying to cling to since Joseph was ripped out of my life.
Guilt churned at admitting it aloud, as if it might be a dirty secret I’d kept for all these years.
But it wasn’t close to being as great as the love that poured free with the confession.
Because Jace Jacobs?
He could never be erased from me.
Thirty-Four
Jace
The room echoed with our proclamations.
As if the words were etching themselves onto the walls. A knife dug deep into the wood.
A statement made.
Permanent.
No going back.
It was the room where I’d first taken her. Loved her. Where she’d taught me that life might hold more meaning than simple survival.
More than just a struggle.
More than just brutality.
With her?
It’d been more.
It’d been everything.
I’d lost it. Let it slip through my fingers like a fool.
I stalked toward her, no longer able to tolerate the space between us. Every echo of my footsteps vibrated through the floorboards.
Because it was fucking alive.
The air and the energy and the feeling.
The connection.
The truest thing I’d ever had.
Faith was trembling when I dove my fingers into those long locks of chocolate hair and captured her mouth.
Possessively.
Desperately.
With all the fear I’d felt this afternoon.
With all the devotion I felt in that moment.
All my defenses down.
My lips pressed and pulled and sucked, and she whimpered into the assault, “Jace.”
I pressed her against the wall, my forehead rocking on hers, the words a breath of a whisper against her lips, “I mean it, Faith. I fucking love you. I love her. This . . . this was what I was always meant to do. Protect you and love you. I’m supposed to be here with you.”
Her fingers gripped my shoulders, pulling me closer than I already was. Like she couldn’t get close enough. “Then why’s it feel like I’m the one who has finally made it home?”
Her fingertips fluttered up over my face.
Across my lips.
My nose.
My brow.
Not quite touching when she flitted them over the row of stitches that had been made at my temple. Like she’d give anything to heal them.
What she didn’t know was that, just by standing there, she already was.
Until that moment, I wondered if I’d ever really known what devotion meant. As a kid, I had been too scared and broken and insecure to realize what she’d really needed was me.
“Because that’s what this place was always supposed to be. Ours.”
Didn’t care if it was some kind of blasphemy. A straight shot of betrayal sent Joseph’s way.
Fuck him.
After today? After seeing what he’d gotten them into? I couldn’t find it in myself to give half a shit about what he might want.
He’d stolen what was mine.
And I was taking it back.
My hands found the angled curve of her face, lifting it to me, and I stared down at her through the flood of moonlight that poured into the room.
Or maybe it was just the girl who was lighting it up.
“Do you remember?” I asked her. “The night you gave yourself to me? What I told you?”
“That you’d love me forever.” Her hands wrapped around my wrists. Her voice dropped.
Low with seduction.
Still, the girl was so damned sweet that it still managed to come out sounding shy. “I remember everything. The way you touched me. The way you loved me. But I’d already belonged to you, Jace. Just like I do now.”
I pressed her up harder against the wall, her back hitting it with a soft thud, an echo that wound with the promise that fell from my mouth. “I lost you once. I won’t let it happen again. I won’t let you go.”