love her, because he loved the elf.
Mackenzie would never have his heart.
She huffed and teleported again, landing in her bedroom inside the guild and sinking onto the end of the double mattress.
She didn’t want his heart anyway.
And he would never have hers. Never. No matter what.
She swore it.
Chapter 18
Rain hammered down on Hartt as he stood in the middle of the alley between the redbrick buildings, feeling numb and not only from the cold. He stared at the spot where Mackenzie had been, reeling and confused, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
She had left him.
Had told him she never wanted to see him again.
An ultimatum that had the primal, darker side of him howling with rage and a fierce need to find her and pull her into his arms sweeping through him.
That need to track her down and be close to her, to hold her to him and refuse to let her go had been born in him the moment he had realised she had left Underworld without a word. Slipped out into the cold night like the assassin she was. He hadn’t noticed she was gone until he had felt bad about leaving her out of the conversation and had turned to include her.
The weight that had settled in his gut, a writhing and wretched feeling, had only grown worse when Kyter had told him she had been gone for at least five minutes. He had wanted to throttle the male for not telling him.
Had wanted to throttle himself for not noticing.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed.
But, gods, he noticed her absence now. It cut at him, clawed at his heart and his ribs, beat at his mind, until he felt like a savage animal caged within his own body, desperate and wild with a need to hunt her.
To have her back at his side.
He needed her close to him again.
He clenched his fists and denied that need, just as he had denied the need to stop her from leaving, even when he had wanted to make her stay. He had wanted that with all of his heart—the same heart she believed belonged to another.
That was the reason he had held himself back. That and the messed-up instincts or whatever it was that kept plaguing him whenever he was around her, and whenever he was away from her.
This primal need that roared at him to find her.
It was growing clearer with every passing moment, with each minute he spent in her company and every agonising second they were apart, and he couldn’t ignore it any longer. Mackenzie was right. It was time he took a good, hard look at his feelings. That was the reason he had let her go.
He couldn’t think clearly when she was around him and he needed clarity.
He needed to think things over and think hard about what she had said.
Did he love Iolanthe? He thought he did, but what if he was wrong? What if he wasn’t? He had loved Iolanthe for as long as he could remember, and while there was a time where he had put her to the back of his mind, those feelings had roared back to life inside him again when he had seen her that fateful night in Underworld. They had remained strong since then, had kept his mind on her and kept him distracted.
He debated going back to Underworld, a test to see how he would react to Iolanthe, and how she would react to him if she saw he was hurting.
Saw the wound Mackenzie had made in his chest by leaving him.
He shut down that need because no good would come of it. He needed distance from both of them, needed solitude and quiet, a place to think and get his head straight. Seeing Iolanthe or Mackenzie would sway him one way or another, and he was in no mood to be pulled apart in an emotional tug of war.
So instead of returning to Underworld, he returned home, teleporting not to his room but to the main entrance of the guild. The impressive gothic façade towered above him and he tilted his head back, running his gaze up the huge arched wooden door of the cross-shaped building to the circular stained-glass window that sat above it. Light flickered behind it, illuminating the colourful depiction of a battle featuring both him and Fuery.
He lifted his gaze higher, to the steep pitched black roof and the two five-storey tall towers that flanked it, and the dull grey