REED
The words tasted like poison in my mouth.
"You're nothing to me. You were nothing before. You're nothing now, and you'll always be nothing."
Even as I said them, I wanted to take them back. I wanted to swallow every cruel syllable and tell Asher the truth instead but the truth was dangerous.
The truth was that I'd spent three days in the wilderness watching him fight and bleed and survive, and somewhere between the first rogue attack and that moment by the fire, everything had shifted. The hatred I'd clung to for so long had cracked open, and underneath it was something terrifying. It had slowly turned into want, need, desires, hunger, passion, and something that felt dangerously close to—
No.
