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“It wasn’t your fault. Either time.”

“It was.” Grief filled my response.

“No, baby, it was mine.”

Baby.

He’d only ever called me that a couple of times. In the secret moments.

Moments we had carved in the shadows.

In the darkness like this when the rest of the world seemed to fade away.

When it was only him and me and the trust that burned between us.

I sniffled around the emotion that flooded. “How could it be your fault when I was the one who lied? When I was the one who snuck out?”

Broke every rule that my brother had laid out for me.

But that was the problem. I was an adult, and the rules he’d issued had made me feel like I was suffocating.

Rules that ensured that I would never get the opportunity to experience the normal things that a girl my age would.

Parties and flirting.

Kisses and touches and sex.

Falling in love.

The crux of the problem was I had the love part down pat, but it was so felonious in our little world that it wasn’t funny.

Silas would never allow me to have the one I wanted.

This man who laid right beside me.

So, I’d sought out the rest, thinking that maybe the last might follow.

Thinking my heart would flip and fall for someone else rather than settling for the brokenness it was destined for by loving Trevan Niles.

I knew the rules.

I wasn’t an idiot.

A Crimson Crow touching me was a crime punishable by death.

A rule that I was going to see that Silas redacted. He didn’t get to make those choices for me, and it was time he knew it.

But every time I pushed? Fought for myself? Something terrible happened.

My soul ached that it might be a curse because I never, ever wanted someone to be harmed because of me.

But maybe the whole curse was that I was fighting against the flow of fate.

“Because I never should have let you out of my sight,” Trevan rumbled.

“I wasn’t your responsibility then.”

He knew I was referring to when I was eighteen. To that horrible night when I called him screaming from where I was lost in the darkness.