But it was his words that sent my pulse into overdrive.
“If you get pregnant…” He inhaled deeply, the pause ratcheting my heart rate. His hand clenched in my hair. “You’ll die, Evie. A child will kill you.”
My stomach dropped, and I jerked back to meet his eyes. “What? How? You mean, childbirth? Or after?”
I flinched against the sudden image of a spider-baby skittering from its bed and sucking my blood while I slept.
He tightened his hand around my nape, his gaze stark and unblinking in the moonlight as he rasped, “I don’t know.”
The mere thought of pregnancy made my blood run cold. “Find me another IUD, and I’ll let Michio replace it. What else are you not telling me?”
He licked his lips, his attention bouncing between me and our surroundings. “The night I met you, Annie said…”
My entire body froze in remembrance of that night. Chasing her ghostly manifestation through the woods. Falling into the fire. Meeting the Lakota. My daughter’s spirit had been so vivid and real in the mountains, her toothy smile so full of life.
A tremor shook my fingers. I curled them against my thighs. “Annie said?”
He closed his eyes, and his mouth tightened.
No, he couldn’t shut down. Not yet. I placed my hand over his, holding it against my face. “Please?”
His eyes opened, locking on mine, and his expression sharpened with severe lines. “She told me all the ways I would save you from death. The hunting trip in the mountains. The sailor in Dover. The Drone’s dungeon on Malta. The volcano in Iceland. The cliff in America.”
The air shriveled, sucking all the moisture. My mouth dried, and my throat sealed up. I would’ve died in those places? How was I supposed to wrap my mind around that? “You were there. Every time. God, you’ve saved me over and over…”
“Except the cliff,” we said in unison.
I dropped my hand, and his followed. Straightening my stance, I lifted my chin. “So we avoid cliffs in America.”
“We can’t—” He snapped his teeth together, and his body stiffened with frustration. “She said if I change your path, an unpredicted death would take you.”
“That’s why you didn’t tell me the details of the visions?” Or Roark and Michio. So we wouldn’t make decisions based on prophecy, decisions that would alter those premonitions and send me on a path he couldn’t see. “That’s why Annie didn’t tell me.”
He nodded and leaned closer, a hint of hickory dancing on his breath. “I let you lead the way for two years, didn’t sway your course, and intervened only as her predictions happened.”
Oh, Jesse. My God, the burden he carried all this time. I rewound every event since I met him, playing and replaying those near-death encounters. Then I drifted back to our conversation in Italy. He’d told me then about the spirit world and his interactions with Annie and Aaron’s ghosts. The veil between our realm and theirs shows me other things, darker things. Things I must keep from you.
He’d claimed he could prevent those things if he kept distance between us. So damned vague. But he always had this uncanny ability to show up at the right time, when I was bleeding, cornered, fighting for my last breath. Now it made sense…in a bizarre, fucked-up, out-of-this-world kind of way.
I didn’t like it. It made me feel like an unwanted tether, a noose around his neck. “You’ve been shackled to my ass for too long. I’m not your responsibility.” I lowered my voice, vulnerability trickling in. “I don’t want to be this…this obligation to you.”
“I’ve told you this, Evie, and I’ll tell you again.” He framed my face with his huge hands, tipping back my head to peer into my eyes. “I want this. Fuck, the moment I saw you in the mountains, before Annie shared her visions, I knew I would live to protect you. But…”
I stared into the fiery abyss of his eyes, soaking in the rawness in his voice and the strength of his words. His honesty was as mesmerizing as his beauty. I gripped his wrists, a silent plea to continue.
“I just hoped…” He slid his hands from my face, pulling out of my hold, and stepped back.
“Jesse.”
A private smirk twitched his lips. I knew that smirk. If it had a voice, it would say, "Fuck off. We're done here."
The pause that followed grew dark and steep, erecting a cliff between us. A fuck-off cliff, reverberating with fuck-off echoes.
He turned away and inspected the trees.
I wasn’t ready to fuck off, dammit. “You hoped…”
“Doesn’t matter.” He strode toward the water hole.
I ran after him and jumped into his path, facing his foot-taller frame. “What did you hope?”
He stared over my head, focused on nothing…and everything.
“Come on, Jesse.” I placed a hand on the brick wall of his chest. “We’re making progress.”