Read The Given for Free Online

“After all, confession is good for the soul.”
    Pures didn’t have souls, but Sarge confessed anyway.
    â€œI could have told you at any point that your wife was still alive, but I guarded that information and used it against you instead.” The words poured from him like they’d been building inside of him all these months. He nearly shouted, as if thrusting the confession at Grif would relieve him of its weight. “I also knew Kit loved you so much that she would insist that you return to that first love. It hurt you both. I hurt you both, and I feel your pain even now.” He paused, then offered Grif another wry smile. “And yes, I feel that, too.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat.” Sarge lifted a hand, finger shaking with palsy as he pointed at Grif. “The agony of not having seen Ms. Craig in six long months.”
    Grif looked away. There was agony, yes. It was sewn across his heart, stitched there in Kit’s initials . . . therefore he rarely bothered anymore about his heart. But the rest of Sarge’s statement wasn’t quite true. He had seen Kit, though she didn’t know it. He’d used his ability to enter and exit buildings undetected to watch her while she slept. He needed to see for himself that she was okay, something that would be easier on them both if she wasn’t awake.
    Yet there was torment in that as well. He’d only visited her three times, but on the third he’d been compelled to let her know he was there. She should know he was thinking of her, he’d reasoned. That despite their separation, the need for it, he would always be there.
    So he plucked a feather from his wing and left it on the pillow next to her, watching her breath stir the individual vanes, remembering the way it’d once felt on his neck and chest and mouth.
    Kit must have remembered, too, because the next time he came to watch her sleep, he found that she’d left him something as well.
    The note read:
    This isn’t Twilight, and I’m not your Bella. If I catch you stalking me again I’ll pray so hard that your boss in the Everlast will have no choice but to listen. God knows that feathered beast owes me.
    Funny how the dearest memories could evoke the exact opposite reaction in people.
    â€œI didn’t know,” Sarge said softly, reading the memory.
    No, how could he? He was a created being, not a birthed one. He had the power and intelligence and expanse of the Universe at his disposal, but he was also soulless.
    Sometimes, like six months ago, that made him a monster.
    â€œI didn’t know,” Sarge repeated, voice cracking this time, “that love in the heart was as indispensable as breath in the chest.”
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it,” Grif muttered, feeling his own chest seize up, the stitches coming undone.
    â€œI didn’t know,” Sarge said again, “that I was digging out that poor woman’s heart with a dull knife.”
    â€œStop talking!” Grif’s voice bounced off the hollowed planks overhead and thundered along the ones at his feet. Sarge actually cringed; he truly believed Kit’s pain was his own fault, yet even after all he’d done, Grif knew better. He was the one who’d returned to the Surface, broken the rules, and fallen in love with one woman while still searching for another. With one foot in the present and the other stuck firmly in the past, it was Grif who had broken Kit Craig’s heart.
    And true agony was in having to live with that.
    I want to die,” Kit said, only two months earlier.
    â€œNo,” Grif whispered, but his hiding place swallowed the word, smothering it in shadows. Despite her written warning to stop stalking her, to go away, he still followed. He’d always follow. And now, despite his aversion to tears, he was crying, too.
    She was folded up in the fetal position, her good friend Fleur curled around her as if