Zodiac Academy 6: Fated Throne

“Are you going to sit down or continue to perch there like a constipated owl?” he asked dryly and my lips dared to twitch.

“T’wit-twoo,” I made an owl sound as my answer

"I'm the girl no one ever loved, Darius," she said. "No one but Darcy, my whole life. And though I never let it show, I used to dream of finding someone who would love me like a prince in a fairy tale so I could be their princess. But I don't love you like a princess. There isn't anything soft or sweet or easy about us. It's wild and unpredictable. It hurts more than any pain I've ever felt and consumes me more completely than anything I ever could have predicted. You make my heart race with all the best kinds of fear and my gut clench with the angriest butterflies I've ever known. I have hated you more than I even knew I could hate a man and I think if I love you with as much fury then I'll burn up in it."

"So you don't want to let yourself love me?" I asked, looking down at her as she stopped barely a meter from me and the heavens raged in fury at the way we were defying them.

"Maybe not," she agreed and my gut fell, but she lifted the hem of my tank and my gaze was drawn to the movement of her hand as she dragged her thumb up the front of her thigh and removed the concealment she must have had in place over her skin there.

A lump formed in my throat as my gaze tracked the lines of ink on her flesh. I knew the design because it mirrored the one Gabriel had told me to place on my own skin. The lines which dictated the position of the heavens on the night she'd told me no. The night when everything could have been so different if I'd only followed what my heart wanted sooner. The words which ran down her thigh to the left of the design in delicate script were a mirror of those on my own skin. There is only him.

"I think I'm already burning, Darius," she breathed. "And it's time I stopped pretending I'm not."

“That’s not funny,” Orion muttered, shaking his head at me.

“I gotta laugh if I don’t wanna cry, right?