His condemnation tainted him like a nasty aura. A fog thick with questions he didn’t have answers for. How could he be happy when so many lives had been taken? Who was he to take what I offered him when everything he cared for had been slain?

The terrible thing was...I didn’t have the answers either.

I just knew he couldn’t stop what we felt for each other because if he destroyed us now...we’d live a lifetime of aching regret.

Shoving back my fear at losing him, I crawled up his powerful, unyielding body and kissed him harder.

Pika and Skittles flew around us, their little wings buffeting us, neither of them attempting to land as if Sully’s horror and my terror created a force field around us that no arrow or parrot could break.

I dove my tongue between his clamped together lips.

I ripped off the lid of his anger.

He snatched me.

Ensnared me.

His arms swooped around me, crushing me, sharing his filth and fury, plunging his tongue into my mouth, stealing my dominance and shoving me relentlessly back into submission.

He kissed me as if he’d forgotten how to be a man.

He kissed like an animal, taking all of me, attacking me, hurting me.

He tasted of smoke and blood and death, death, death.

He pawed me as if I was his enemy and not his ever after.

Violence replaced the blood I’d lost in my heart, blistering and bright as the stars above, giving me a dagger of nastiness to match his diabolical, uncontrollable rage.

I bit his bottom lip, making him snarl.

He kissed me so hard, I gagged on his tongue. He poured a rumbling roar down my throat, complete with teeth and spit and carnage.

And I lost it.

If he wanted to hurt me, so be it.

But I would hurt him back, bite for bite.

I let loose.

I kissed him with bottomless grief and endless stubbornness.

I kissed him...but he devoured me.

His fist curled in my hair, sharing the dirt on his hands, the blood under his nails, the strings of repugnant remains with me.

I bowed in his arms, imprisoned and manhandled, no longer a participant in the kiss but just surviving his violence. My lips burned from his facial hair. My jaw ached with how deep he kissed me. I let him pour his pain into me, gagging on the rancid ruin he’d dealt with, choking on the lives he’d lost.

And through it all, we argued.

We’re over.

Never.

I don’t want you.

Liar!

His kiss tried to beat me into accepting his compulsory closure.

My kiss ripped apart his determination and screamed a resounding no!

I couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t breathe.

We attacked each other until we almost fucked right there in the sand.

Perhaps, that would work.

Give him my body in lieu of his nightmares.

Reaching between us, I fisted his rock-hard cock.

He snarled and threw me away, panting hard, his chest straining with madness.

I blinked at the wrathful god before me, and I saw past his lies before he ever uttered them.

He loved me.

But that wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.

It wasn’t agony that’d changed him but tightly bridled rage. Rage that I had no power against because it was too ingrained in him to master.

His entire body hummed with it. His nostrils flared with it. His skin crackled with it.

Pure, undiluted hate that had no outlet.

Once upon a time, I’d likened him to a volcano. His temper a steady flowing river of lava beneath the cracked veneer of decorum. He wore his civilised polish well, but he could never quite hide the diabolical vehemence inside.

That volcano was so, so close to erupting. A hissing cloud of warning was the only precursor to his impending detonation.

I understood his anger at losing Serigala.

I sympathised with his inability to shed such fury.

But I had no idea how to help him.

How can I heal him when I don’t know what happened?

He kept a palm planted on my sternum, keeping me at a distance he could cope with.

Our eyes locked.

And a large piece of me threatened to die just from witnessing his pain. He looked as if he’d been to war and returned the only survivor. Harrowed and haunted, his blue eyes muted and no longer luminescent with male virility. They were washed out and filled with ghosts of the creatures he’d lost.

He reeked of sooty smoke and metallic blood, and his body tensed as I studied him, his muscles locking beneath his squalid clothing.

He flinched as my heart pounded beneath his palm, revealing the aching pity I held.

“Don’t pity me,” he growled. “Pity them. The countless creatures who died...because of me.” His fingers twitched and dug into my chest as the rest of him stood stoic.

“This wasn’t your fault.”

He laughed icily. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.”

His voice physically scarred me, but I kept my temper from unfurling. He was allowed to be angry. And I had to be the calm where he could find quiet.

“I know more than you want to admit,” I murmured. “I know you love me. I know that I love you—”

“Stop.” He dropped his hand, curling his filth-blackened fingers into fists. “Just stop.”

He looked satanic.

He’d left a man and returned a demon. A macabre mannequin who wore Sully’s face and puppeteered Sully’s body but had switched souls with him, leaving him with nothing but darkness.

My heart hiccupped with pain. If he’d closed every door to me...how the hell was I supposed to scratch my way back in? How could I teach a loveless titan that he could be both vicious and vulnerable with me?

He didn’t have to push me away because of what he’d done and would do.

He didn’t have to hide any part of his personality with me.

The urge to hug him crippled me.

I couldn’t offer much, but a hug was a start. A hug was home and a haven and a place where he could unload and be exposed. No one should have to deal with what he’d seen and not have a place to vent or sift through his trauma.

But he shook his head to whatever invitation I gave, his jaw clenched in denial. His haunted eyes locked on the sand as if he couldn’t bear to look up and see his untouched paradise and a goddess who loved him after surviving hell.

Without his condemning eyes hurting me, I was able to study him. His hair no longer had bronze-tipped strands—soot and dirt stained every strand black. His tanned skin was barely visible beneath streaks of gore, blood, and ash. His heavy five o’clock shadow held flakes of charred fragments, and his hands were unrecognisable with lashings of blackened blood.

His t-shirt was no longer white. The parts that weren’t soaked in grim fluids of doomed animals were torn and smeared with charcoal. Every inch of him blared the fate of Serigala, and tears spilled over my eyelashes.

Just as I’d known he’d decided to stop our relationship the moment I’d watched him step from his helicopter, I knew precisely what’d happened on his island.

The playful otters.

The curious pig.

The rabbits and dogs and birds and mice.

They’re all gone.

And their last mortal remains clung to Sully as if unwilling to say goodbye to the man who’d rescued them. The man who’d buried them, mourned for them, turned rogue for them.

Daring to touch him, I stepped closer and stroked his forearm. “You need to shower.”