GRAY
Willow had retired to bed after Juliet escorted her friends back to the sanctuary of their rooms. She’d barely been able to look at
me, but it wasn’t because of some sense of shame.
She was pissed, and I didn’t want to think about what realization she’d had while with her friends.
I poured my scotch into a tumbler, standing before the crystallized window. The witch who had come to repair it hadn’t been thrilled to be summoned, but she’d taken a single look at Willow’s puffy face and how she huddled on herself in the cold and took mercy on her.
I couldn’t feel it and would have remained unbothered by the cold temperatures. The heat of Hellfyre had long since burned away any sensitivity to temperature from me, a consequence of my eternity of imprisonment.
“Gray,” Juliet said, stepping through the open door to my office. Knowing she would return after seeing the girls home, I hadn’t bothered to close it. She understood me well enough to recognize I would expect a report.
“Tell me,” I said, my voice as melancholy as I felt while I took a sip of my scotch. I let it burn me from the inside, let it warm the cold hollow that had settled into me. It had been so many years—centuries—since I’d had feelings and emotions that could impact my decisions. Even when I knew Willow was mine, even when I felt that bond to her, it hadn’t been this.
It hadn’t been anything beyond obsession and the need to possess her. Now, it was a twisted, gnarled thing that made me want to see her happy
with me. I needed it more than anything, except I didn’t know how to get there. I didn’t know how to be anything besides what I was, even with my all-consuming love for her.
“She blames herself for what we did,” Juliet said, her voice somber as she dropped into a chair dramatically. Out of all the Vessels, she was the one who seemed to be the most in touch with the feelings of humans and witches. As if she remembered what it was like to have those things herself, even if the rest of us had so swiftly forgotten.
“That’s ridiculous. She blames me, believe me,” I scoffed. Her hatred was potent whenever our eyes met, and I knew I to expect a challenging journey in getting her to understand all that transpired.
“You weren’t there, Gray,” Juliet said gently when I approached her and stood in front of her. She reached up, taking the tumbler from my hand, and tossed back a gulp of the liquid. “I watched her break. She thinks she should have known better.”
I strained not to let my fury over Willow breaking down for someone else influence how I moved forward. I wanted to be the one to hold her when she cried, to comfort her in the shower when she thought about giving up.
I hated the idea of anyone else seeing through her tough exterior; to the fleshy, vulnerable heart she kept locked away.
“She never stood a chance,” I said, taking my scotch back and lowering myself onto the sofa. I knew damn near everything about her. I knew what buttons to push and how to get her to believe that maybe I was something more than her father had raised her to believe. “She’s never been protected from harm. Her father evidently went out of his way to hurt her, and her mother allowed it because of her own ignorance.”
“She’s always been the protector,” Juliet said, nodding as she thought of the little boy I’d had her remove from the situation. I could never harm him, not if I wanted to be able to come back from it. “So when you protected her from harm…”
“I used what I knew to manipulate her, although I would have done it either way. Her history simply worked in my favor,” I explained, nodding my head. Willow would eventually recover from her self-loathing, steering all of that ire onto me if she hadn’t already. It was only a matter of time.
“Did you know about her father?” Juliet asked, and I clenched my jaw as I thought of what Charlotte had done to him. She’d watched over Willow
all her life, grown attached to the girl as she became a woman. She wouldn’t have chosen such a brutal punishment for her father if it hadn’t been warranted.
“I still don’t know any of the details, yet I do trust Charlotte’s judgment that he deserved his fate,” I answered.
“Do you think it has to do with her fear of the dark?” Juliet asked, earning a raised brow from me. “Della told me.”
“You’re going to hurt her,” I said, ignoring the breach of trust. Della believed Juliet to be an equal partner in their secret relationship that they’d hidden from the Covenant, but at the end of the day, Juliet was a Vessel.
She could not love her in truth.
“One day, Willow will be strong enough to open the seal on her own. Even if she only does it long enough to allow one of us to pass at a time, I’ll have my body back. I’ll be able to give to her what you can give to Willow,” Juliet said, clinging to the hope that we could convince Willow to do just that. She was a ticking time bomb, more likely to Unmake every Vessel she could get her hands on than she was to open the seal willingly.
“It could take years,” I explained, remaining gentle as I gave her the reality check she needed. She felt the hollow place where love should have been, felt the connection as if it were a whisper of what it could have been.
It was the slowest form of torture I could imagine, knowing that I loved someone yet unable to truly feel that. I wouldn’t have wished it on my worst enemy, let alone a friend who had been there for me in every way for centuries. She’d been one of the first demons I created after the archdemons, haunted by the memory of my father and the family that had cast me out simply for disagreeing with him about the future of the humans he’d created.
His new children.
He said that pride was a sin, and that mine would condemn me. He claimed it was my own selfish desire for attention that drove me to become obsessed with my own needs and never turn my mind to him any longer when I discovered I could manipulate others into giving me what I needed.
I’d wanted my father’s love but settled for the love of the children I created in the home he cursed me to.
Now, staring at the door to my bedroom and knowing Willow slept behind it, I wondered if they would feel neglected in a similar way when I inevitably started a new family with her. I would do anything I could to
make them feel valued, nevertheless I couldn’t deny the sense inside me. The feeling that spoke to what lengths I would go to protect our children.
I would burn it all down rather than see them harmed.
“She’s going to try to kill you,” Juliet said, ignoring my statement about Della entirely. There was nothing left to say, not when we both understood it would be a long battle.
“I’d be disappointed if she didn’t,” I said, setting my tumbler on the coffee table and standing unhurriedly. The knowledge that Willow waited beyond that door, warm and sleepy and feeling like home, was suddenly too tempting for me to ignore. I needed to lose myself in her after the chaos of my day.
“Leviathan said she doesn’t think she knows you,” Juliet inserted, interrupting me as I prepared to make my way to Willow.
“She knows me,” I said, brushing off her commentary.
“Does she? What have you told her of yourself? If you want her to fall in love with you, then she has to at least know you. Yes, she feels the connection the two of you share due to the destiny that unites you. However, that doesn’t make it love, especially not with all the bad you’ve given her,” she said, pushing to her feet. She approached, touching the buttons of my shirt and parting them to reveal more of Willow’s mark. I flinched back from her touch, unable to stomach the feeling of her hands on me.
From how her brow raised and the soft laughter in her throat, the volatile reaction was as surprising to her as it was to me.
“What would you have me do?” I asked, staring down into the face of one of the people who had been there to witness my suffering after my father’s rejection. Loving Willow and accepting that I wanted her to love me back would mean putting myself at risk of rejection all over again.
“Get to know her,” Juliet said with a chuckle.
“I already know her,” I said, pointing out the truth. I’d researched her in- depth, and had spies report her moves to me. I knew what grades she’d gotten in high school, for fuck’s sake.
“Do you, though? What you know is what is documented on paper, not what exists within her. You don’t know what her father did to her or how that affected her. You know better than anyone that the simplest of events can alter us in ways nobody understands but us,” she said, pausing to let those words sink in. “But regardless of whether or not you think you know
her, she doesn’t think that. No woman wants to be reduced to a list of facts on paper. She is a person, Gray, and you need to treat her like one.”
“She won’t answer me if I just start asking her the hard questions,” I said, knowing the truth in those words. Willow would only push back if I began interrogating her about her father and the life she’d lived with her mother and Ash.
“You’re courting her, not interrogating her. It’s a give and a take. You will have to give her your truth to get hers. Let her know you, Gray, or so help me, you will lose her in a way you cannot recover from,” Juliet said, clenching her jaw in frustration.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that, as a woman, she understood how Willow’s brain worked. For so many centuries, I’d considered her a friend. We’d seen eye to eye, and I’d seen the ruthlessness with which she survived in a world dominated by men that I forgot she wasn’t like me entirely.
“Fine,” I grumbled, unhappy with the turn of events.
I stepped around her, making my way toward the closed door to my bedroom. Pushing it open slowly, I took in the sight of Willow curled up in the center of the bed. She hadn’t bothered to change or get under the covers, and if what Juliet said was true, I suspected it was because of the emotional exhaustion of her day.
Johnathan stretched on the foot of the bed, twisting his body to rub his cheek into the bedspread before turning to his back. He hissed when I picked him up without finesse, carrying him to the couch and dropping him onto the cushion. His violet eyes glared up at me, narrowing in annoyance as I pointed a finger in his face. “The bedroom is off limits to you,” I warned, watching as he tipped his head to the side.
He may not have been able to speak, though I knew exactly what the motion meant.
Is that so?
“You can pretend to be a cat all you want, but you and I both know all she has to do is snap her finger, and you’re a human with a dick. Stay the Hell away from my wife,” I said, ignoring Juliet’s disbelieving laughter as she sat down on the sofa and patted her lap for Johnathan to cuddle up with her.
I left them to it, heading for the bedroom and closing the door behind me. Stripping off my clothes to the sound of Willow’s relaxed, even
breathing, I lifted her off the bed to pull back the bedspread and cover her up before climbing in beside her.
My boxer briefs rubbed against her jeans as I pressed myself against her back, wrapping an arm around her waist and enjoying her warmth.
She sighed happily, murmuring a sleepy, “Gray.”
“Go back to sleep, Witchling,” I said, ignoring the desire to use the moments when she was soft and pliant, half-asleep and willing, for my own pleasure.
The next time I got inside her, it would be her who begged me for it.
