Every Last Breath - Armentrout Jennifer L. - Страница 36

Reaching down, my fingers curled around the edge of the comforter. “Roth...”

He sighed as he raised a hand, scrubbing his fingers through his messy dark hair. “I know. You can’t walk away from any of this. None of us can.” He dropped his arm. “So that was what I was thinking about while I was staring at you.” Those amber eyes flashed with mischief, and I relaxed. I wasn’t ready for the world outside to intrude. “Did I tell you that you’re beautiful?”

“Yes.” Lifting my hand to the poof that was currently my hair, I laughed as I pressed my cheek against the pillow. “But I don’t know how you could think so. I’m a mess.”

He tipped his head to the side and pivoted around, heading toward the bathroom. After a few seconds, he returned with a hairbrush in hand. With his jeans unbuttoned, they hung indecently low. I could definitely see where Thumper ’s tail was heading.

Not that I hadn’t really seen that earlier.

Cheeks flaming, I pressed my entire face into the pillow, hiding what had to be the goofiest smile known to man. Despite all the craziness we were facing and the uncertainty of what the next hour or tomorrow could drop on us, my little piece of the world felt bright and warm.

What Roth and I had shared, what we had done, was beyond beautiful and wasn’t something I could simplify with words. For it to have been that way between us, we had to be in love with each other—

madly, deeply in love.

I was the corniest cornball in a cornfield full of popcorn.

Roth touched my shoulder. “Sit up.”

“Meh,” I murmured into the pillow.

He chuckled. “Sit up. Please.”

Demons rarely said please. I was beginning to think it was a word not in their core vocabulary, so I sat up, tugging the comforter to my chest. Roth slipped in behind me. One leg was bent against my side, the other dangled off the edge of the bed.

I looked back at him, but before I could speak, he lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me. The touch of cool metal against my tongue was all too brief. He pulled away and gently turned my chin so I was facing away from him.

“Let me see what I can do with this,” he said, gathering up my hair. “You’re right. This is a mess.

You look like you could’ve been in an ’80s music video. What did you do to it?”

“I didn’t do anything. That—” I pointed at my head “—is all your doing.”

He started to ease the brush through my hair. “Blame the demon. I see how you are.”

As Roth worked his way through the tangles, it really hit me that the Crown Prince of Hell was actually brushing my hair. That was beyond bizarre but also incredibly sweet. My warm and fuzzy glow from earlier was turning into emotional weepiness. Tears pricked at my eyes.

I needed a mood stabilizer.

Roth was extraordinarily patient when it came to working out the knots, more so than me. At this point, I was usually cussing and yanking the brush through my hair. He hummed under his breath as he worked, and I immediately recognized the tune.

“Is ‘Paradise City’ your favorite song?” I asked.

“The song just kind of got stuck in my head,” he said. “For a couple of years, all we could get down below was the classic rock station, and the ‘grass is green’ line always stuck out to me.”

I grinned as I pictured Hell getting Sirius radio. “Why?”

There was a beat of silence. “The grass is never green down below, Shortie.”

My lips slipped down at the corners. “It’s not? What color is it?”

“Gray,” he answered. “Everything is pretty much gray. Except for the blood. And there’s a lot of blood.”

A shudder worked its way down my spine. “Sounds lovely.”

“It’s a weird place. Like I said before, it mimics topside but does a shitty job at it. Everything is shiny at first, almost...pretty. Every single time I go down there, it’s like that—it’s like that for everyone, but it doesn’t take long for things to start to go downhill. It fades. Buildings crumble, the sky looks like it’s polluted with dirt, and the grass...yeah, it’s gray.” He eased the brush through my hair, stopping at another tangle. “Everything is twisted and tarnished down there. Things are real up here. Down below they are sad replicas that fall apart.”

I remembered when Roth had admitted before that this was one of the reasons he enjoyed coming topside. My heart turned over heavily. “Will...will you have to go back?”

He didn’t answer immediately, causing knots to form in my belly. “I don’t know, Shortie. If the Boss calls me back, I can only disobey for so long.”

Closing my eyes against the ache in my chest, I knew this was something we were going to eventually have to face. “Has the Boss called you back yet?”

“No.” He paused, pressing a kiss against my bare shoulder. “The Boss kind of lets most of us come and go as we please, unless we are needed for something. As long as I stay on the Boss’s good side, I should be good.”

That wasn’t reassuring. “But I thought the Boss was displeased with you.”

“The Boss is always displeased,” he replied. “There’s a big difference between him being displeased and me being on the Boss’s bad side.”

I took that statement to heart, but I couldn’t imagine Roth staying on the Boss’s good side forever.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, returning to my hair. I could feel him separate the now-untangled strands into three sections. “Right now, that’s not the biggest of our problems.”

I snorted. “True. But I can’t help but worry that one day, you’re going to...that you’re going to just disappear.”

“I want you to listen when I say this.” He rested his chin on my shoulder, and when I turned my head toward his, he was peering up at me through thick lashes. “Nothing in this world or down below is going to keep me from you. Nothing, Layla. That’s a promise I will never break.”

A deep, powerful emotion stirred inside me. “I will make you the same promise.”

Those thick lashes swept down, shielding his eyes. “You will?”

“Yes.” And I meant my next words. “I’m not going to let anything keep you from me and that includes your Boss.”

Roth chuckled as he lifted his head, pausing to press a kiss against the side of my neck. “I like it when you get all feisty.” He returned to my hair, moving it back into the three sections. Several moments passed. “When I was in the pits, I really didn’t think I was going to get out of there. I figured the Boss would either not care enough to pull my happy ass out of it or would forget.”

I bit down on my lip as he spoke. Roth had never talked about his time in the pits without being sarcastic about it.

“I honestly have no idea how long I was in there. Time moves differently down below,” he continued, twisting the sections of hair around each other. “It wasn’t pleasant.” A dry laugh cracked out of him. “Actually, it freaking sucked, but you got me through it.”

It took a moment for his words to sink in. “How?”

“Easy. I thought about you. You were all I thought about.” His voice was quiet as my heart squeezed painfully. “I focused on the time we spent together, and as crazy as it sounds, I thought about you being topside with Zayne.”

I winced. How was that helpful?

Seconds later he answered my unspoken question. “Knowing that you’d be safe and would eventually be happy made it somewhat more bearable. And I know—I know—that Zayne would’ve laid down his life to protect you. Probably still would. You’d be okay. So knowing that helped when it got...well, when it got hard.”

A lump formed in the back of my throat. “I wish I could take away the time you’ve spent in the pits.”

His knuckles brushed along the center of my back as he continued with the braid he was making.

“You already have.”

The lump tripled. “And I wish you never had to sacrifice yourself.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing.”