Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,55

of a lyric came easier, twisted to almost the thing I meant to say.

“Somehow I’ve stayed like glue-ue-ue,” I sang softly, gazing through the trees toward the river. “Full of snow and frost I was until I found you.”

“Sorsha?” Snap said without moving to dislodge me. Moonlight glimmered across the ripples in the water, and my chest constricted.

Mangled lyrics didn’t cut it. Just say it. Once, out loud. He deserved to know, even if he couldn’t really understand it.

My fingers tightened around his. My lips parted, and the words fell out. “I love you. Just as you are, with everything that makes you a devourer too. I should have told you back then, when it mattered a whole lot more, but—this is the best I can do. I love you.”

Snap had gone rigidly still beside me. Shit, I’d probably terrified him with the seemingly random declaration. His hand released mine, and I lifted my head to give him space—should I apologize? How did I apologize for that?—but before I’d had a chance to say anything, his arms were wrapping right around me, tugging me into a full embrace.

My heart skipped a beat. I wanted to look up at him and take in his expression, but I was afraid of shifting in his hold and breaking the moment.

His chin had settled in a familiar position on the top of my head. A faint shudder ran through his body, and his arms squeezed tighter. His next breath came with a hitch. Then he spoke, his bright voice so faint it sounded as if it were coming from a deep, dark hollow inside him.

“My peach?”

My pulse hiccupped. Had I heard that right? He couldn’t have—unless someone had told him about the nickname he’d given me?

There was only one possible answer. “My devourer?”

Another shudder passed through him, and then all at once he was pulling me right onto his lap, turning me at the same time to face him. “Sorsha,” he said, still strained but with a ferocity of emotion I hadn’t heard from him since we’d rescued him. Like a demand. Like a claim.

A burn crept into my eyes. “Snap? Do you—?”

I forced myself to raise my head despite my fears of shattering the moment. Snap stared back at me with a look so fraught yet full of longing that the hope I hadn’t quite dared to let loose before flooded me.

I touched his cheek, and he leaned into my caress, the edge of his jaw coming to rest against my temple. His breath stuttered in a warm wash down the side of my face. His embrace tightened.

“The look on your face,” he murmured. “I—” He jerked back with a flinch. His arms fell to his sides, his expression tensing with a neon glow flaring in his moss-green eyes. “I’m a monster.”

The admission cut through me. I swiveled around in his lap, gripping his face when he made to move even farther away. That was why, after all—not the Company’s torments, although no doubt they’d contributed.

He hadn’t devoured himself just to escape their experiments. He’d devoured the moment he’d become the thing he’d hated about himself and accidentally taken everything else about the last few months with it.

“Yes,” I said, looking straight into his eyes. “You’re a monster. So are Ruse and Thorn and Omen. Some days, so am I. I love you with all the monstrousness included. I didn’t—I was just startled. I hadn’t known what to expect. It didn’t change how much you matter to me, not one bit.”

“I didn’t just kill that man,” Snap said. “I shredded apart his soul bit by bit, and every moment of it was agony for him.”

I gave him a grim smile. “And I’ve burned alive more people than I can currently count. I don’t imagine they enjoyed that experience very much before it killed them.”

“I liked doing it. I reveled in it, in all the pieces of his life I got to consume. I—” His voice dropped. “For a moment, I wanted to devour you.”

That would be the ultimate act of making me his, wouldn’t it? I wasn’t going to volunteer, but the admission didn’t stir any of the horror he’d obviously expected it to.

I stroked my fingertips over his cheek again and into his golden hair. “But you didn’t. Do you have any idea how many awful things I’ve wanted to do in my entire lifetime? No one has control over what ideas or feelings pop into their head. We are the things