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I hadn’t been scared since Halloween, because what could be worse than the crimes Morgan had committed on my body? But when Luna looked at me like I hung the moon, a different kind of fear took root in my soul. A fear that I might survive without the rage. All I had to do was focus on her light in the darkness.
“A simple life, maybe,” she breathed against my lips. “But it feels like a dream to me.”
“If you wake me up, I’d put you to sleep,”
It was then I knew how much I loved her. Because her pain, so acute, brutalized my own soul as if it were her own. Because her heart had become more precious than mine. I wanted to offer her salvation like some kind of priest, but the truth was, she didn’t want it. So what was I supposed to do?
Willful ignorance is not bliss. It’s cowardice.”
What was I supposed to do with this betrayal when I loved her? When she’d changed me, and I had no idea how to go back to what I’d been before? I just sat there quietly falling to pieces, and Lex just watched me.
When I looked back at the shadowed Victorian house from the end of the walkway, I realized that Charity Lane was haunted. By the ghosts of the Gorgon sisters’ pasts, whom they allowed to possess them.
Everything was going to plan. After months of scheming, of training and yearning for exactly these outcomes, I should have been on top of the world. Instead, I felt like I was being buried alive. All because of a girl with pretty rose gold hair and eyes the color of Slytherin green.
“What kind of woman are you that you cheer for another woman’s downfall?” I whispered, falling apart but genuinely curious. “How can you perpetuate violence against women and sleep at night?” “I take a sleeping pill,” she said flippantly, tossing her hair as she turned so it flicked me in the face.
To be together instead of alone. A pack of women wolves unafraid to show their teeth.
Telling my story for the first time, start to end with only a few gasping pauses when I felt like I was drowning, wasn’t just hard. It was excruciating. I carved the words out of my own scarred flesh and offered them to the group like a blood sacrifice.
Because the truth was, falling in love with Luna had made me realize there was more to life, and me, than revenge, but it hadn’t fundamentally changed who I was.
You have to do what makes you comfortable and what makes you happy. You don’t owe anyone anything you don’t want to share.
“I was a casualty of war,” I said finally with a grim smile. “Sometimes I think the war was worth my sacrifice, but mostly, I just felt used.”
“What did I tell you?” Haley whispered again. “Hundreds of people before her and the only one she sees is you.”
Lex: “O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!” I grinned despite myself at the quote from Romeo and Juliet. Luna: I thought you didn’t enjoy the romantic plays. Lex: I didn’t enjoy a lot of things before I met you.
But the voice was garbled in low under the rush of blood in my ears calling me to go to her. To go home to her. Lex: I know I don’t deserve it. I know the moon belongs in the sky far from my earthly desires and horrors, but would you come down to me, Luna? I have things I want to say to you.
I looked enraptured, even with the fading bruises from Beckett’s fists, recklessly following a siren’s song, uncaring of the danger of drowning in the dark depths of the sea.
Because Lex was there, that shadow in the lamp light. The girl in black I’d met in the library, the bold rebel I’d seen across the quad, the beautiful girl I’d fallen in love with.
“Is it enough for you, though?”
“I need to know if you can love me even after everything I’ve done.” “Why?” The word tasted like blood in my mouth, like I’d carved it out of my heart. “Because I’m so in love with you I can barely breathe,” she admitted, voice breaking, eyes filling, like the dam had finally broken, and emotion was rushing in through the scorched earth of her fallow heart. “I’m so in love with you that every day without you is almost more agony than I can bear, and I’ve been through a lot. I need you, Lux. You’re the light in the dark for me, and you always will be. I can’t promise to be easy and good after
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I barely got the words out before she was kissing me. No, not kissing. Devouring. Eating me up like she’d die if she didn’t consume enough. Her tongue in my mouth, her teeth over my lower lip nipping and opening that split I’d put there earlier so my blood bloomed between us. It felt like a blood oath, a promise to be together no matter what darkness came, until the end of our time on earth.
“Exactly. Wild and free, dancing together. I thought it was the perfect way to celebrate. Not just the annihilation of monsters, but the start of something safe and strong for women at Acheron.”
Lex looked at me, and I realized I was her touchstone, the grounding rod for the lightning force inside her. What a gift, what a responsibility, one I’d bear happily for the rest of my life.
Love, they called it. How simple a word for such a complex and stunning structure built between two hearts and souls.
She studied me with those stone-gray eyes, and I thought about how fierce they could be, how they’d turned men practically to stone with the threat of her violent vengeance.
It was a bit like falling in love. The reckless rush of hurling your entire self into a relationship with only a tenuous hope you’d find a soft place to land. And I did.
“Falling in love with you was like stumbling from a dark haunted house into sunlight for the first time. I felt more warmth and acceptance from you in the first hour we spent together in the library than I ever had from anyone else in my entire life. You scared me, because in my experience, everything good was merely pretty gift wrap around a ticking bomb. You can’t know what it’s been like to discover every single day since then that with every layer I unwrap from you, there is only more goodness to be found. How much that has changed me and how I view the world. You are not just the light in
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“Marry me, Lux,” she said, not a question, not a demand. An offering.
“I love you so much,”
“I love you just the same.”
“Two snakes and a moon,” she murmured to me, tracing the ring with a fingertip. “I designed it myself.” “It’s absolutely perfect,” I breathed, sucking in a deep breath to steady myself. “Because it’s us,” she said simply. Us.
