Page 67 of Heavensent & Hellbent

“I can’t concentrate on this when I know you’re keeping something from me.”

“We can talk about it tomorrow,” I said quickly.

“I know when you’re lying,” he shot back.

I frowned. “You barely know me.”

Zain’s jaw clenched. “I’ve loved you in endless lifetimes. I’veseenit,feltit. And you think I don’t know you?”

My throat ran dry at the seriousness of his tone—at his words. My love language was words of affirmation. The things people said to me always cut me deep—good or bad. And what Zain said was both, or neither. Maybe something in between.

“You don’t…” I began. “If you knew me, you wouldn’t be lying here with me.”

He put both his hands on my cheeks again, eyes narrowed, though there was a softness to his gaze that saddened me. He didn’t know. He couldn’t.

A passing thought took hold. I’d seen him kill a jinn with the same tenderness with which he was handling me now. Hands on either side of the jinn’s face, right before he broke its neck.

I scrambled out of his touch and out of the bed. His hands stayed in the air for a moment, like he was confused that I was no longer there.

“Are you here to kill me?” I asked, the words escaping my mouth before I even had a chance to dissect them.

“What?” he spat out. “Why would you ask that?”

“This was a bad idea,” I said, mostly to myself. Why had I let him in? What was I thinking? How could I truly think we could act like everything was normal, even for one night?

Zain got out of bed and crossed the room to me. I backed up until I was at the door, and, remembering I couldn’t make any noise, I avoided pushing too hard up against it.

He towered over me but bent his head so we were at eye level. “Rox,” he began before stepping back, horror written on his face. “You lookscaredof me.”

“Iamscared,” I started. “But not of you…I don’t know.”

“If you don’t want to be a part of any of this, I understand. I told you I did—”

“Stop,” I snapped. “It’s me—it’s whatIam that’s the issue.” My vision became blurry, and it was only when I touched my eyes and found them to be wet that I noticed I was crying. “I’m everything you hate.”

History was repeating itself.

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Zain said with a fire that shattered my heart all over again. “How can you say that?”

I wiped my eyes roughly with the back of my hand, shaking. I just had to say it. No matter the consequences.

“Zain, I’m a jinn.”

28

The air lay thick between us. I was acutely aware that I had been holding my breath since I uttered the words that changed everything. It felt like if I didn’t breathe, I could stop time, stop Zain’s inevitable reaction, stop the reality of the situation.

Initially, his gaze didn’t waver from my face. Instead, his dark eyes narrowed, assessing. He must have read the seriousness on my face fairly quickly, because he took a step back, breaking our eye contact and gazing down at the floor, shaking his head.

I breathed out then. It came out ragged.

“What are you talking about?” he whispered, though I thought some part of him had suspected the truth. Even though our dreams weren’t identical, snippets of our past lives must have reached him, too. He must have known that our love was forbidden in every life.

“The reason our relationship always ends in flames isbecause we aren’t meant to be together, yet we still find our way to each other—”

“Have you always known?” His tone was cautious, colored with the possibility of betrayal.

I shook my head. “Of course not, no. I suspected it, only from what people told us, and my most recent dreams. Then I…” I gulped, glancing away from Zain. “I used the lighter you gave me on myself. And it stunned me.”