Iniquitous (The Marked, #3)

by Bianca Scardoni

“That'll heal too,” he said in steady voice. “In time, everything does. You either find a way to let it go or you learn to live with it.”

Tiny drops of rain peppered my arms like memories from a life I once lived, baptizing me all over again with its purity. It had been so long since I’d felt the rain; so long since I’d tasted the flavors it stirred up in the air.

A force as fierce and native as the wind came crashing in on me, into me, soaring through my body as though it were a living breathing thing; awakening every cell in my being to its true calling, and then leaving my body just as quickly as it came.

He was everything good in this world. Beauty and light and strength. And I was the thing that lived in the dark.

He was still my forever dream and I loved him with the realest, most sacred part of my heart.

“And our little love triangle just became a square,” smirked Dominic as he followed him out of the room.

Sometimes I felt just like those trees, rooted in mud with no escape, while my life sat in a car and passed me by.

“Hey. There’s no judgement here,” I told her and then shrugged my shoulder like it didn’t matter in the least. “I’m currently bloodbonded to a Revenant while in love with a Reaper who happens to be my ex-Keeper.”

I was done with trying to fit into everyone’s preconceived box of who I was supposed to be. I was going to live my life my way, however short-lived it may be, and I wasn’t asking for permission anymore. They were wrong about me. I could handle the truth. I would listen to its heartbreaks and I would mourn the world as I knew it because that’s the kind of girl I was, and then I would pick my pretty self off the floor and do what I was supposed to do. Just like I always did.

“Why?” I asked breathlessly as I pressed my head back against the wall. The room was spinning so beautifully that for a moment, I thought I had orbited into the cosmos, but his words quickly yanked me back to earth.

“Because I am ruinously in love with you.” Everything stopped. The spinning room, my beating heart, the earth’s rotation around the sun… What the hell did he just say to me? “And I fear it may very well be the end of me—something I cannot allow to be.” He swallowed down hard as if trying to entomb his words, his truth. “But I could not lay it to rest until I said it out loud, just once, where you could hear the words and know that I am not just a monster, but a man telling a woman that he loves her.”

He caressed my cheek with his hand as his eyes softened in a way I had never seen from him before. Adoration. Desire. Helplessness. They all stared back at me through his eyes, and then just like that, they were gone.

I didn’t want to forget this. I didn’t want him to take my memory away. He had shown me his true colors tonight and they had come in all shades of red and black and all of the darkness in between. And then for the rarest and faintest of seconds, he allowed me to glimpse into his heart, to see him as he was—and now he was going to take it all away.

Trace tightened his arm around me. I hadn’t even noticed him walking up to me, but I sank into his protective warmth just the same. He was my safe place in a cruel world that only sought to devour my existence, time and time again.

Trace tightened his hold on me, anchoring me to the here and now so I didn’t run off into never-never land.

“It’s just as the prophecy foretold. ‘And behold, she will turn from the body of light that governs her people and go forth to open the heavens. The sun shall be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood. For there, under the tarpaulin of a crimson dawn, she will carve out the heart of her mother…’”

And it shall come to pass that when she pours her blood unto the consecrated earth, so too does she declare the end of the beginning.’”