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Grimm’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not back in Merveille?” “We’re still a day’s ride from the city,” she confessed. “I just needed to see you. Just for a moment.”
“Little traitor,” she mumbled. Grimm gave Mabon a generous scratch behind his ears. “Well,”—he gestured toward the door, ignoring the knot of worry at the back of his mind—“what are we waiting for?”
He wasn’t quite prepared for the depth of heavy guilt that came to land on his shoulder where Mabon had left it. This place was so utterly Agatha. And he had taken her from it. She would argue it was Hespa, a prophecy, a Grimoire, or all three. She would never blame him.
She turned to him with a goblet of mulled wine and he thought he’d burst. No—what he thought he’d felt for her did not hold a candle to this. He was irrevocably, desperately in love with her.
When he opened it, his pulse stuttered at the name scrawled at the bottom of the title page: Ira Laughlin. He’d asked about him on their wedding night, and though he’d not expected at the time to fall in love with Agatha, he
“Will you tell me about him?” Grimm’s voice was raw and he hoped she wouldn’t notice. “Who?” Her beautiful face scrunched up in confusion. “Ira.”
“How did you know his name?” “You used to have nightmares. Every night you thrashed and cried out. Sometimes I would take your blankets off and open the window, just to see if cooling you off would help, but it never did. I began bringing in extra blankets in hopes that would calm you. It never worked, either. Eventually, you stopped having the nightmares.” Grimm shrugged. “But every time you did, you always said one name. Ira.
“You chased them away, Grimm. After a hundred years of nightmares, you chased them away.”
that there could ever be a difference in a human’s worth because of their skin, or origin, or preferences, or social status.”
A violent memory slammed into Grimm and he reached up to touch his temple. A beautiful woman all dressed in black. The begging last words of a good man. The remorse of a killer. A slice. Blood hitting wood and leather. And a soul slamming into him. “I—I think I was there…”
He remembered it—a story. One that had caused him to vomit when he’d found it by accident in a History book as a boy. A book he was not supposed to have. It had belonged to Professor Ludwig, and he’d stolen it. It couldn’t have been his Agatha, not the woman in that terrifying story. Goddess, tell him it hadn’t been her. “We were tied by our feet to the legs of a warhorse.” No...no. “The king commanded that the horse be whipped relentlessly, dragging us through the streets and past the gates of Merveille until my back was ripped to the spine and—”
“I had to watch him, Grimm. I had to watch, screaming, as his skin was ripped from his bones. Even as his skull shone through the gore, he never let go of my hand. Until
the moment he lost consciousness he kept telling me it was okay—that I was going to be okay.”
“I want to show you who I really am.” “I know who you really are, Grimm. I won’t flinch away from you in your true form or any other.” Gods, the sincerity in her eyes. He had to do it before he lost his nerve. “Are you certain?”
At first, he thought it was horror written across her face, but he realised with knee-trembling relief that it was awe. She raised a hand to his chest, her fingers grazing the exposed bone—ribs bursting out of his decrepit skin. Agatha ran a finger down the length of his arm, sinew and muscle shrouded in billowing black smoke. His darkness reached out to caress her and she leaned into it,
letting it envelope her. When she reached his skeletal hand, she lifted it to her cheek, his bony fingers curling around the nape of her neck to rest precisely where he held her when their lips met. She took his other hand and wrapped it around her, setting it to rest on the small of her back.
Agatha reached up, standing on the tips of her toes, and took his hood in her fingers. He knew she could physically see every beat of his decaying heart right in front of her. Still, she slowly removed his hood and explored the ...
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Grimm shuddered, shifting back into his body in an instant, and he crushed her mouth with his.
The freckles dusting her cheeks that he’d so pleasantly found dotting her stomach as well. The ample curves of her backside and her breasts unbound and outlined in her thin nightgown, taunting him as she prepared something for them to eat. He could still feel those soft curves. Still taste her, every inch. Still hear her breathe his name. The feel of her teeth snagging on his bottom lip, her nails dragging down his back, his hands on her hips, pulling her closer—