“No. You did pull me out,” I argued, going up on my elbow so I didn’t have to crane my neck talking to him. “And it was because I didn’t want to admit that you could do that, that a man could do that. That was why it took so long to get here.” I sucked in a breath. A long one. A crisp taste of oxygen and clean air, tinged with Keltan and the aftermath of our coupling. “And because Gray,” I continued in a whisper.
He frowned. “Because Gray?” he asked, confused.
“Grayson,” I corrected.
Keltan’s body stiffened with realization. “He’s ‘him’?” he clarified, referencing an e-mail from a year before.
Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who had them committed to memory.
“Yeah. He’s him,” I agreed.
Keltan was silent. Not pushing me to continue, giving me time. Though I could feel the tightness in his body, the brace.
“He was my first love. A teenage love, one I was certain was it.” I gave him a look. “I knew shit about it. But teenagers know everything about life. Until they’re adults and realize they knew less than everything. A little more than nothing but a lot less than everything. Especially about love. But then it was what it was. I gave my entire heart to him.” I paused. “Blind. Or weak. Or just too young to know better. Take your pick. But that’s how I found myself in an abusive relationship and didn’t realize it until he tried to rape me. That was, of course, after he’d beaten me so badly he’d broken my wrist and three of my ribs.”
The air, once crisp and clean, was polluted with the memory of such things, with the pure fury seeping from Keltan’s every pore.
Though his face was carefully blank.
Still.
But not the good kind.
“There’s more?” he grunted, the words rough.
I swallowed. “Yeah. There’s more.”
He waited.
“I had a choice that day as to what I would let that make me become. What it would turn me into. I’ve thought a lot about that choice. It was a phone call. The one I made when I crawled into the bathroom and locked myself in when he was done with me. The person I called would dictate which road I would take from there.”
I paused again, not ashamed, exactly, of telling the truth, but the truth had a way of doing something to the air. Changing it. Maybe even taking it away completely if it was bad enough.
But we’d had enough of untold truths.
“I called Bull,” I said quietly.
The flex of his hands around me was Keltan’s only immediate reaction.
He eyed me, though they were unreadable. “You called Bull,” he repeated.
I nodded. “I gather you understand what that means.”
“I hope it means Bull was burying a body that night,” he said.
I flinched, not at the memory but at the way Keltan said it. Without question. Or judgment. The air, which I thought had turned bitter with the truth, stayed the same as it had moments before. It was my mind that was convinced it was bitter. My heart reminded me it was clean.
“Yeah,” I breathed the single word.
He pulled me so I lay on top of him, my naked body delightfully pressing into him, but more importantly, my naked eyes plastered to his.
“You made the right choice, baby,” he murmured. “The right road. And not just because it brought you to me but because it made you who you are. Showed you who you always were. Not blind. Certainly not fuckin’ weak. ‘Cause, babe, that’s a call not even some of the theoretically ‘strong’ men in my unit could have made.”
I blinked at him. “But it was essentially murder,” I clarified.
“No. Wouldn’t say that. Murder is classed as the unlawful killing of another human being,” he said. “Not only was ending the life of someone who beat and tried to rape—”he spat the word like it was physically painful to say. “—a teenage girl considered the most lawful thing that could have been done, by the thoughts of any rational person.” He paused, his eyes turning foreign, empty, dangerous for a moment before they shuttered that part of him that had done those things that haunted him. The killer. The killer left and Keltan returned. “But the thing that tried to do that to anyone, the thing that tried to do that to you?” He grasped my head in his hands. “Wasn’t human, babe. Not at all. So no. I don’t think that’s murder. It’s called justice. And that choice? It makes me love you more. Not that I thought that could be possible. In fact, it’s not. To love this Lucy, my Snow, more. But it makes me love that Lucy more.” His eyes twinkled with something other than pure fury, lightening the moment. “As long as that doesn’t make me sound like a creepy old man.”