mouth with her fingers, and it sent a bolt of fire straight through him. Searing and bold and far worse than that kiss. Far more damaging.
“I know,” she said simply and then, impossibly, she smiled. “Don’t worry, Zair. I’ll protect you.”
And he understood then, with another bolt of that same lightning, that if he didn’t let her go now he never would. Never. There was a selfish part of him that didn’t care. But the part of him that wanted only to protect her cared too much.
“You have to go back to New York,” he told her abruptly.
“Zair—”
“It’s not a request.”
He stepped back from her, and it hurt. It hurt like a month of the worst kind of illness. As though he’d run back-to-back marathons for days. He hurt. And he thought that of all the sacrifices he’d made, all the things he’d done over the past five years and before, all things he’d allowed because it would protect and serve this tarnished image of his, this was the one that would cripple him.
He feared it already had.
She was everything he’d ever wanted. He’d suspected it six years ago. He knew it now. And Zair couldn’t have the things he wanted. He knew that, too. Playing this game was only making the great darkness that was his life seem that much more pronounced.
Nora shifted before him, frowning. “I don’t want to go back to New York yet. I don’t want—”
“You promised to obey me,” he reminded her, more harshly than was strictly necessary. Her eyes widened and she looked turned to stone right there in front of him, but she only waited, as if she really were obedient. As if he were worthy of taking control of a creature like her in the first place, when he knew better than to think such things. “You gave me your word.”
“Zair.” But that was all. Just his name, like a prayer.
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