Fuse

by Angel Payne

  And alarm—because I realize that where there’s magma, there has to be a volcano.

  A volcano with a god in its core.

  Never have I truly been tempted to apply the label to him—and wonder, in every clamoring, chaotic corner of my being, if it might really be true. That all the ancient mythmakers and storytellers might have been on to something the modern world has dismissed as a cute story. An adventurous tale for fireside fantasies.

  But no.

  Zeus is real. And I’m engaged to him.

  If he survives long enough to marry me.

  At this moment, I’m not sure he remembers who I am. Who he is.

  Though I’ve been summoned here by the call of his soul, I barely recognize the force of the fury he’s spewing from his mind and heart—which spins around him like a gyroscopic firestorm, his bare-torsoed body serving as the hub for hundreds of electric lassos that snap and spark and hiss, lighting up the twilight as if it’s high noon again. If sunlight were actually blue. And if everyone actually walked around in vortexes of their own anguish all the time.

  Maybe that’s why the gods chose to stay on Olympus.

  Because speaking as the mortal in this equation, I don’t know how much longer I can watch him do this. His face, contorted with self-loathing. His body, flinching from the searing self-floggings. But that’s not even the worst of it.

  What the hell is he doing to his hands?

  What he continues to do, over and over again, driving them at full intensity into the canyon wall—a rock face that was probably striated with amber, brown, and bronze as little as an hour ago. Now, the stone drips with metallic red and brilliant blue, the same pigments covering Reece’s knuckles, wrists, and forearms. He barely stops to stretch out his fists, but when he does, he glares at them like winter tree limbs weighted beneath a ruthless storm.

  Only…the storm is him, and ruthlessness is just the start of his self-inflicted bloodletting.

  As swiftly as he stops, he’s back at boxing with the cliff. He snarls from the pain and slips in the dark-red puddle around his feet, letting the falling rocks cut into his naked back but refusing to let up by one degree. Denying himself even a shred of mercy. As if I need to have that thesis confirmed, he joins a savage grunt to every blow, adding a visceral version of his pain to the surreal glow on the air.

  And the girl who just moaned about getting off the porch and taking action?

  She does nothing but stare.

  Damn it!

  The last time I felt this helpless, Reece had just fried nearly every electron in his blood to rescue me from Faline and was crouched inside a New York apartment shower stall that had turned into a plasma storm. But this canyon isn’t a shower stall, and he’s doing a lot more than crouching and shivering. Yet, like then, he’s aware that I’m here. And that his every pound impacts me too. Though it’s not my blood pooling on the ground, it may as well be.

  And that despite how he may be ordering himself to ignore me, his soul has called mine here for a reason.

  A certainty that couldn’t be better timed. Because as his next punch reverberates hard and deep into the rock, I fortify my resolve to stay.

  Even as his blows cause a twelve-foot-high chunk of cliff to shear off.

  I fall to my knees and shield my head as pebbles and dirt pelt around me. A stunned gasp gets me two lungs full of the same grit, and I cough in a fight to survive the blast.

  And in that crazy dust fog, I recognize another significant change.

  In New York, Kane had been there with one last atta-girl before I’d dared to step into the storm.

  But one look up at Reece’s profile, every virulent angle defined by grit and dust and stubble, and I now know the truth behind what my gut’s only suspected to this point.

  There won’t be any more encouragements from Kane again.

  We’ve really lost him.

  The whole world has.

  The reality gouges me as deeply as the next punch Reece takes to the cliff. Then the next. The next. The next. More sickening fist cracks. More of his primal growls, escalating into brutal, mournful barks. I force myself to watch despite the stinging tears and wet soot clouding my eyes and new spike every one of his blows hurls into my stomach. But I don’t know how much more I can take. This is more than grief. A further cry than just avoiding his tears.

  “Shit.” I gain my feet like rockets have fired beneath me—and if dread can also be rocket fuel, maybe they have. “Reece!” But my voice is the opposite, scratchy and shaky. A girl can’t be blamed after jog-hiking the distance of a few football fields and then finding her fiancé picking a fight with the side of a cliff while wrapped in a scary-as-hell electric vortex.

  “Reece!” I edge as close as I can to the outskirts of the sizzling wheels of light, fighting fear as their velocity blows my hair back and yanks on the fine hairs of my arms. “Please!” I yell out. “Baby, it’s me. You know it is. If you can hear me”—holy crap, please hear me—“you’ve got to stop!”

  The gyroscope falters.

  His sweat-slickened chest rises and falls on a hesitant breath.

  “Oh, thank God.” I allow myself a full breath too.

  He pulls his next punch.

  Yes. Yes!

  But lands the next one twice as hard.

  “Gaaaahhh!” It’s the expression I usually save for snark or shock, neither of which apply right now, but typical profanity isn’t enough for the fear and frustration as he knocks new rocks loose. They’re the size of bowling balls, splashing into the puddles of his charged blood and detonating like geological mortar bombs.

  I dive back down, dropping my head against my knees and clutching my hands around my neck, but not before desperately screaming his name again. Not that it makes a damn difference. Not against the lightning of his electric armor, the thunder of the cascading rocks, and the gale of his fury, swirling and growing on the air like a living creature.

  Until suddenly dying into silence.

  But not exactly silence.

  Now, I can just hear other things better. The ringing in my ears, like Notre-Dame’s belfry on Christmas. The disorientation of my mind, like bats cavorting around that belfry. The thrum of my heartbeat as I slowly inch my head up and my sightlines are filled with something besides the sky and the trees and the hills.

  Something a thousand times more beautiful.

  My Reece, the most perfect creation God has put on this planet for me, still standing there.

  But only for one moment longer, until he lets his arms drop again.

  Their weight becomes his burden, pulling him all the way to his hands and knees, making the mud slurp and sizzle around him at the same time.

  The vortex wavers again.

  Then completely fizzles out.

  He’s motionless. So am I. And feeling a thousand kinds of awful about my paralysis, because it has nothing to do with dread anymore but everything to do with a slam of pure awe.

  “Ohhhh, God.” The sound spills out of me with a strange mix of reverence and remorse. How can I be this transfixed by his terrible, dirty glory? By the otherworldly blue veins glowing across the clenched muscles of his arms? By the mesmerizing disappearance of them beneath the mounds of mud covering his hands, only to reemerge and fan along the ground as his electrons find the tributaries of blood in the sludge.

  Never has his power stunned me more.

  Never has his desolation joined it—and sucked all the air from me.

  But never have I felt more abysmally ill-prepared to help him.

  Crawling to him means I’ll have to navigate through all those skeins of electrical thread. But staying right here means he’ll keep glowering as if I’m a complete stranger. That he’ll keep rolling his head and adding his stare to the lightning tracks in the mud, as if he’s become a stranger to himself.

  I hold my breath. And start to slog forward.

  And whisper, with every filament of patience and passion in my heart, “Reece. It�
��s me.”

  Still realizing he could choose to supercharge this muck any second—immobilizing if not killing me—but praying he won’t.

  And somehow, in that deep part of my soul where truths like “the sky is blue” and “nobody buys less than fifteen things at Target” live, knowing he won’t.

  Even though the man still glowers as if he doesn’t know me or want to know me, I inch closer to him. Not letting my gaze leave him. Showing him, every time I shift nearer, I’ve refused to give up on him. Not now. Not ever.

  Even when his face twists as if I’ve brought a knife and suddenly used it on him.

  Even when he snarls as if tempted to yank the blade out, figuratively or not, and use it on me.

  I stop—but only to raise a hand, palm out. “Stop,” I rasp. “Just stop it, mister. You’re not in your damn tower at the Brocade anymore.”

  I lower my hand, cupping it atop one of his knees, affirming that I used the noun on purpose. It’s a throwback to the first days of our intense mutual attraction—and the special language of our souls, fusing us just as strongly now. Back then, he was just my hotter-than-sin boss who saw every reason we connected and I was the anxious new girl looking for every excuse we couldn’t. But in the end, he bashed down every wall of my resistance. He showed me that the guy in the tower didn’t want to live in the clouds by himself anymore. I succumbed to his love, expecting to be dragged back to the tower, only he did something much better. Built a new one. For me. For us.

  Which is exactly what I’ll do for him right now, if that’s what it’ll take to get through to him. To penetrate the agony racking his body and claiming every inch of his beautiful, noble face…

  “It’s just me, Reece. It’s just us, okay? You and me, baby. Remember that? Remember this?” I fight to keep the tears from my throat, but they undermine me anyway. “Baby, listen to me. I’m here. You’re not alone.”

  I’m cut off by a growl so deep and dark, it takes a long moment to register it’s really emerged from him.

  “Maybe I should be.”

  He casts a shadowed glare around at the dirt and destruction.

  “Yeah.” His volume is just a rasp, but his tone is defined. “Maybe that’s exactly what needs to be happening here.” With a grunt, he slides backward. “Maybe alone is just fucking perfect.”

  “Guess what?” I dip my head to emphasize my direct seethe. “Life doesn’t always give you perfect, buddy.”

  Spokes of lightning ignite in his eyes just before he snarls, almost as if in warning, “Emma…”

  “I’m not leaving.” I push up to a high kneel, flicking my fingertips to rid them of bloody mud despite how the stuff still sends mini jolts through my skin. “And you’d better not even try to make me, Mr. Richards.”

  “Emma.”

  “I’m. Not. Leaving.”

  “Goddamnit, woman.” He copies my pose but goes full-scale Bolt with his posture. As he stretches his fingers toward the ground, blue lights dazzle and dance out from the elegant tips. As he straightens his torso, at least an inch of new breadth coils across his shoulders.

  “You really trying intimidation now?” I counter his muscly Rasputin with my personal Maleficent, baring my teeth but smiling my challenge. “What, because you think it’ll work on me? Well, here’s another piece of news, mister. If you want a little bunny to frighten, I can show you a whole canyon of them.”

  “Fuck.” His stance doesn’t change, and his voice plunges into a dark grate. But his glare keeps intensifying toward the opposite, his eyes turning into brilliant silver storms. Twilight settles deeper into the hills around us, enriching the pigments of the shadows until they’re lush shades of purple and green and gray, providing a starker contrast for this man’s pulsating fingertips and electric irises. He exposes both without shame, obviously clinging to a last hope of daunting me with his mutant light show.

  Until he finally seems to remember what that glow really does to me.

  Or perhaps…as he realizes what I do to him in return.

  What we do to each other now, surging toward each other through the mud on our knees. How the force of our attraction magnetizes us together, the spark of our passion turning to full flames as we collide, discovering each other all over again with heated fingers, meshing kisses, guttural groans…empowered passion.

  He slides his hands along my sides, down my hips, around the curves of my ass. I run my fingertips from the center of his sternum to the top of his waistband. Then lower. Lower.

  Yes.

  Oh.

  Him.

  His glory and girth and pulsation. His size and heat and sensation.

  His mesmerizing, hypnotizing force as he gulps deeply. “Holy God.”

  My shivering delight as I smile softly. “You rang?”

  A moan erupts from someplace low and sinful in his throat. His flesh swells and throbs beneath my fingers. He’s huge and hot, even beneath the tight black leather. I sigh in throaty triumph, but it becomes a yelp as soon as he grabs my wrist, yanking me away. Shame—or maybe not—that the guy mistakes my surprise as surrender. The second he slackens the hold, I move in even closer, cupping him with twice the determination.

  He amps the groan into a full grunt. Ends it by kissing me again, briefly but brutally, before spitting out, “Ignorant, stubborn woman.”

  At once, I retaliate. “Ridiculous, senseless man.” And barely refrain from grinning again as his balls vibrate under my fingertips. If he wants to play adjectives-only Scrabble, I’m so in. I have a list ready to go. Obstinate. Audacious. Courageous. Luminous. Brave. Beautiful. Prideful.

  Yes, even with every single one of those words. With every damn moment of his chaos. With every crazy, complicated piece of baggage he brings to this life of ours—bringing me back to the sole term that fits it all the very best.

  Perfect.

  Yes, even now.

  Even with my knees sunk in the mud and my senses filled with his despair—and my head being yanked back as he twists a hand into my hair and then smashes his face against my neck, unfurling a moan of such dark torment, it takes over every inch of my skin like a cloud of black smoke from a Call of Duty plot.

  Like a doomed warrior from one of those battlefields, he snarls into my nape, “Not a man. Not a man, damn it. A killer.”

  A new wind gusts through the night, still threaded with the warmth of the day, though I’m chilled to the bone. “Oh, God,” I whisper as compassion rushes in and jerks my hands around his head instead. I haul him harder to me, gulping against tears despite how I thought I was ready for this. How I braced myself from those moments I watched, along with the rest of the world, as Reece hunched over Kane’s prone form on that skyscraper roof. While everyone else, including his family, saw a man confronting the nemesis he’d once called friend, I saw different things. The defined tension along the ridge of his back. The way he cradled yet subdued Kane at the same time. But most of all, how he finally threw his head back with such sorrow and fury and loss—but more. With pain so virulent, it was like he poured salt into his own wound.

  And now I know exactly why.

  I know, without him having to say more. But I clutch him tighter, letting him know it’s all right if he needs to get those words out. Ensuring him that I’m agonizing right along with him, grieving the loss. Remembering a friend who was always as calm as the moon on the outside but burned like Mars on the inside; a soul as deep as the galaxies but as strong as the sun; a gladiator who’s become the latest victim of the Consortium’s evil. No matter how it went down or what he did before it happened, I know that. I believe it. Kane would never have wrought all that destruction and hurt all those people for his own jollies.

  Which was why he couldn’t bear existing in this realm anymore.

  A fact the man in my arms still can’t seem to comprehend.

  “No.” Though my tone is gentle, I demand his attention by twisting at his hair. With his damp, thick strands filling my grip, I dictate, “Damn it,
no, Reece. You’re not a killer.” Then burrow my lips against the strained cords of his neck, kissing him fervently between my rasped rebukes. “He wanted to leave…didn’t he? And you just helped him do it. If he’d stayed, he would have been Faline’s trick pony. He would’ve been deeper under her control. Probably forced to do even worse things than—”

  His rough groan cuts me short as he hunches in lower. Then seizes me tighter. Then makes the muck around us slurp as his chest pumps viciously against mine and his throat convulses around taut, animalistic sounds of suffering. “I hate her,” he finally croaks. “I hate her for what she did to him. What she made him.” The virulence of his words is matched by the barely reined savagery through his body. He’s a huge, heaving oak tree next to me—and more and more, around me. “For what she’s made me.”

  “I know.” I spurt it past the moisture of my tears, unstoppable now, while sliding my hands down to the center of his chest. It’s a symbol of where I yearn to touch him the deepest, aiming for the core of pain under his rage and desolation. “But you did what you did because of love. Because you knew he was suffering. You needed to help him. You wouldn’t have given yourself any other choice.”

  He responds with a low, terrible moan, fully communicating the harsh clash in his soul. I don’t move my hold, needing him to know I understand. How I feel him longing to believe me yet struggling to accept what’s happened. That he used the strength of his existence to cut short another’s. A friend’s. That he needs to figure out how to go on from here…

  I feel it all. I accept it all.

  As an aching sigh takes over, I blink against heavier tears—blending with the dark but dry eruptions erupting from deep inside him, as if whole cliffs of his soul have been sheared away by blowtorch.

  “It’s all right, my love,” I desperately whisper. “It’s all right. You’re all right.”

  Okay, maybe not right. Not yet.

  And he’ll sure as hell never be the same.

  Today will change him forever. And, in some ways, will change us too.