Wait…what?
Hate her? What the hell is she talking about?
“It doesn’t change the fact that you’re mine,” my keeper clarifies firmly, reaching up to brush snowflakes out of my hair before I can protest.
She removes her coat, tears a strip out of it, and takes advantage of the fact that I’m propped up to start wrapping my bleeding midsection.
“I did try to prevent this,” she goes on, not even flinching at the cold emanating from me. “If you four had just accepted my rejection at the beginning, you would have had a different keeper, and none of this would have happened. Unfortunately for you, that was your one chance out. Now, I’d sooner raise myself from the dead than let you go.”
I still can’t move, but a sound somewhere between agony and relief escapes me by accident when her fingertips glide gently over the scar on my face again.
An unbearably tender sensation follows everywhere she touches. It’s like being infused with pure peace.
And gods, thiswarmth. I haven’t felt anything like it since she stopped breathing in my arms.
Just the reminder of that moment when everything shattered has my reality again rearranging itself. Between the exhaustion, pain, and shock, I can’t get a grip.
“Prove this is real,” I demand raggedly, closing my eyes when her fingers trace the scar down my neck to where it dips below my clothes. “Say it again.”
If she’s real, I need her to ruin me again.
Maven knows exactly what I’m talking about. She considers for a moment before her free hand slips into my hair. She tugs my head back gently to make me look at her again, but it’s just enough that my heart skips another beat.
“I love you,” she admits quietly, still endearingly reticent about those words. Then her eyes narrow in steely warning.“Which is why you're about to promise me that you will never again sit on your ass doing nothing when you’re in danger.”
It’s her. She’s back.
“I promise,” I manage.
And finally her lips are on mine, so heated and perfect that two things happen. My long-neglected cock twitches, and my fragmented heart starts to pound. This moment is beyond surreal. I think I’ll wake up any second, but when she continues to kiss me, something savagely dark and incurable cements itself deep inside my bones.
Maven thinks I regret being bound to her? How fucking asinine. She should be a million times more worried about who exactly she just confessed to loving, because I am not the same match she knew.
I thought I wasn’t worthy of her before, but now…
Gods. Would she still want me if she knew how much I’ve changed?
I should warn her about it, but I’m too damn selfish. Too desperate to never miss her warmth again.
When she finally breaks the kiss, more emotions bombard me as it finally starts to sink in. She’s here, but she’s not dressed warm enough. She’s in single layers of ill-fitting clothes and must be fuckingfreezing.
And then I spot the dried blood on her clothes.
Absolutely. Fucking. Not.
“How did you get here?” I demand, suddenly unable to think about anything except getting her out of this active zone.
She tips her head in a western direction. “Felix transported me here. He and Kenzie took cover in an abandoned store half a mile that way.” She pauses, rising to her feet—no, foot. Something is wrong with the other one. “I sense shadow fiends headed in this direction. Stay here on the defense while I take care of the fiends and fetch Felix.”
Yeah, right. Her, leaving me?
Not an option ever again.
The residual adrenaline racing through me in the face of my keeper’s impossible return is pushing me into full-blown crisis mode, and it only gets worse with every second I stare at her injured shoulder and ankle.
She needs to be healed.Now.
Shakily, I get to my feet, slipping out of my ripped, snow-dusted trench coat and cursing the fact that this filth is the most I can offer her. Maven protests me giving it to her, but she gets even more annoyed when I scoop her into my arms despite the screaming agony lacerating my side.
