“I like the way you think,” she said, sucking a drop of rain from my bottom lip. I lost the feeling in my lower half, it was that paralyzing of a sensation. I wanted to rinse and repeat that feeling a couple dozen times a day.

And this time, she showed me. It didn’t seem like she needed much practice to get her “back-in-practice,” but I suppose since everyone passing by was giving us a good ten second rubber-neck, we were accelerating her through an intensive course.

A couple passed us and, even though they were no threat and a few car lengths away, I couldn’t shut my survival instincts off even though the woman in front of me was kissing the living daylights out of me. Now that I had something priceless, all my own, to love and protect, I wasn’t about to put the indestructible killer running through me up on a shelf.

“Isn’t that the guy who got his ass beat by that chick’s boyfriend?” one said to the other, like it was common knowledge.

“Yep,” the other replied. “Looks like he’s going to take another beating too.”

That conversation got me thinking about something other than the way Emma’s mouth felt against mine.

“Call him and end it,” I said, running my hands down her neck. “I don’t want any piece of him between us for another minute. End it.” It was a plea, not a demand, but it was also a need, not a want.

Fear, raw and rugged, coated her eyes before she threw that curtain over them. “I’ve been avoiding him all week,” she said in a small voice. “I think he’s got the picture.”

“Make it official.” I slid the phone out of my dripping suit pocket, holding it out for her. “Tell him I’m your man. Tell him I’m yours and you’re mine and if he comes within a football field of you, I won’t hesitate to send him back to hell with the rest of his demon brethren.”

She bit her lip, looking down.

“Be free of him for good.” I held my finger at the ready, only needing the numbers. I’d call him for her if that’s what she needed. Hell, it would have been a pleasure.

“Okay,” she breathed, nodding her head. “I’ll tell him tonight. Now,” she clarified, picking up her backpack to leave.

“If you think I’m letting you out of my buff, lonely, desperate arms any time tonight, you’re gravely mistaken,” I teased, pulling her back to me. “You can break up with him right here. No hands required.” I adjusted the phone beside her ear, and smiled.

She took a heavy breath, attempting to draw in something she was short on. “After six years of cowering to him, I’m going to face him now. For the first time, I’m going to stand up to him so the last thing he’ll remember of me was that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.”

“Okay, Em, you’re freaking me out a bit here,” I said, rubbing slow circles into her arms. “All this talk about cowering and being afraid and standing up is painting a picture of Ty keeping you locked in a dungeon or something.”

I laughed an uneasy one, waiting for her to join in. When she didn’t, I went blank faced. “He didn’t. Did he?”

“No,” she answered, hugging me to her and, while I would never be one to put up a fight when Emma wanted me close, I got the distinct feeling this was an attempt to keep me from seeing what was happening on her face. “Of course not. This is just something I have to do in person. On my own,” she added, guessing what I was going to say next.

I clutched her to me, tucking her head beneath my chin. The girl had guts, but she was crazy if she thought I was going to let that happen.

“You must think Ty knocked something loose if you believe I’m going to let you go to that sadist alone. Hell to the absolute no. Over my dead body.”

Or, at least my dead dead body. I was bouncing on the balls of my feet at the thought, the tension was that intense. I wanted to outlet it into Ty’s snake kissing face.

Her tiny hands molded around my neck. “I need you to trust me on this,” she said, sounding calm, but looking anything but. “I don’t need to trade one possessive boyfriend for another.”

There it was, the nuke that decimated my resolve. How could I argue around that point? As much as I didn’t want to see it, as much as I wanted to excuse my alpha dominance on the situation, she was right. I was acting possessive, throwing around ultimatums and orders like I was the director of the scene of her life. Like I’d said, I didn’t want to conquer her. I wanted to conquer life with her at my side.

“Fine,” I said before I could change my mind. “But you keep your finger on my speed dial, and if he comes within a two foot radius of you, you call me. If that’s good with you,” I muttered when her eyebrow peaked.

“Quite good with me,” she replied, shouldering her bag and kissing the corner of my mouth as she turned to leave.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I said under my breath, kicking the sidewalk because none of this felt right. Her walking away from me towards Ty, a man I wouldn’t trust if the world’s fate depended on it, to tell him she was breaking it off. Ty didn’t strike me as the kind of guy that took being dumped very well.

She spun around, continuing to walk away. “I heard that,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “Meet me back at my dorm in a couple hours. We’ll celebrate me cheating on my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend whose heart I’m off to break.”

“I’ll bring the champagne,” I hollered, pretending I’d nail-gunned my feet in a dozen different places to the sidewalk so I wouldn’t chase after her. So I wouldn’t become that possessive boyfriend she didn’t want. So I wouldn’t be there to protect her if she needed it.

My stomach turned, and then turned again. My instincts, my gut, was firing on all cylinders, ordering me to go with her. Screaming at me that something wasn’t right. However, I was no longer a one man operation, able to submit to whatever I was feeling at the time I was a half of a whole and, as novice as I was at relationships, I knew the quickest way to find yourself out of one was to go in the opposite direction of the other half. No matter how strong the bond was, it could only hold so long when its halves were fighting in the opposite directions.

I watched her go, having no faith in the decision I’d made to stay behind.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The first hour I didn’t move from my sentinel over the sidewalk. I bent my head into the rain, shielding the dry spot her body had formed against mine. But then the storm picked up, and the wind swept the rain from every angle, and no amount of shielding from me could keep her spot protected from the storm.

The second hour, I wound up sprinting around the courtyard, burning off nerves with high knees, jumps, and side-shuffling. To any passersby, I knew I looked like the man they’d heard referred to as the one who’d gone off the deep end, my suit plastered to my body, running football meets cross country drills in the middle of campus. At ten o’clock at night. In a rain storm.

I was on my fifty-seventh set of push-ups when my phone shrieked. Scrambling to get to it, I was on my feet and jogging towards Emma’s dorm.

“Emma?” I answered, feeling a fresh dose of nerves.

“Patrick,”—it was Julia, and Julia like I’d never heard her, terrified—“get yourself the hell over here. As fast as you can.” Her voice was shaking on the other side. “It’s Emma.”

That was all I needed to hear, my jog accelerated until the buildings were blurring sheets of dark brown and black as I swept by them. Rain drops hit me like pebbles from the inertia, the ground beneath me gave at every footstep, and the wind cut my face until, if I’d been any less Immortal, it would have stung.

I was outside her dorm in thirty seconds, ready to rip the door from its hinges when I found it locked.

Taking a quick surveillance of the surrounding area, finding it free of people as far as my preoccupied mind could tell, I chanced it.

“Damn it all to hell,” I said, going from banging at the front door of the building to banging on Emma and Julia’s door.

A couple students milling out of the bathrooms took a double take, but I really didn’t give a rat’s arse if they saw me appear from nowhere. Even in their most wild of dreams wouldn’t they devise the truth.

“Julia!” I shouted, hammering on the door. “Emma? Let me in.” I was about to take this door from its hinges too when I heard someone scurry across the floor as the lock turned over.

I threw the door open and took in the scene like I’d found myself in my own personal nightmare. The worst kind of one. The one your parents told you wasn’t real and was just a figment of your imagination. I wanted to believe that now, that this wasn’t real. That this was a figment of my imagination.

But blood had never run with such precision down someone’s face in my nightmares the way it was on Emma’s.

“What the hell happened?” I whispered, my words barely choking their way out. Shutting the door, I rushed to Emma. She was draped in a white sheet, curled in a ball on top of her bed. Julia’s hands appeared between us, tucking the sheet tighter around her.

“I don’t know,” she answered, her body trembling like her voice was. “She just showed up here like this a couple minutes ago. She wouldn’t tell me what happened. I wanted to call the cops or 911 or something, but the only thing she said to me was to call you.” Julia grabbed the black comforter from her bed and parachuted it over Emma. “That’s all I know.”

“Emma?” I whispered, lowering my head until my eyes were at her level. But her eyes didn’t resemble eyes anymore. Both were so swollen shut they looked like they were plums about to explode. Bright red bruises were splattered over her face like a road map. Blood, both fresh and dried, matted the entirety of her hair, along with the majority of her neck and face. And this was just the damage sustained from neck-up.

I didn’t have the heart to pull the sheet back to inspect the rest of it yet. Although I knew I had to. It was now my job to do so.

“Emma?” I whispered again, having to bite my hand so I didn’t burst into tears or bust open the room.

One corner of her mouth lifted before sagging back into place. “Hi, handsome,” she replied, her voice a ragged whisper.

I bit my hand harder, but it didn’t stop a tear from leaking its way free. I pressed a soft kiss into her mouth, my salty tear mixing with her metallic blood. I had to share this gentle peace with her before I asked my next question. Before I turned into a merciless angel of death.

“Ty?” I said, sneering the word like it was poison.

Her head made the smallest recognition. “Ty,” she answered.

Running one hand down her face, my hand came away coated in red. I could have made an impression on paper of my handprint dipped in Emma’s blood.

Red was what I was coated in, red was what I saw, red was what I felt.

Rage was what I became.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said, my eyes falling on just the thing I needed. Grabbing the baseball bat from beneath Julia’s bed, I spun it in the air, catching it in the other hand. “He’s a dead man.”