Slowly, he called back the shadows threatening to emerge from my skin, his eyes remaining fixed on mine until every last one of them was gone.
The auroras flared to life around the endless expanse of his pupils, glacial light colliding with something feverish and raw inside me.
Then his mouth was on mine.
There was nothing gentle or careful about this kiss. Instead, it was breathless, and consuming, and desperate. And I loved it all the more for that.
His body slammed against mine, pinning me to the slick marble wall, his kiss all teeth and a savage sort of hunger.Steam billowed around us like a storm, heat and frost clashing everywhere my skin met his.
More. He needed more. And shards damn me, so did I.
Draven released my wrists, his hands trailing liquid fire down my body as his fingers gripped and squeezed my chest, my hips, my thighs. I clawed at his back, desperate to draw him even closer, to erase what little distance was still between us.
Every part of my body answered his as he ground his hips against me and buried his face in my neck.
A gasp hissed past my lips when he bit down hard enough that I was sure he’d broken skin, and still, it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.
My fingers twisted in his hair, pulling him closer, and the low sound that tore from his chest vibrated straight through every brittle and exhausted part of me.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, the world narrowed to the frantic, aching need to feel something other than the crippling weight of uncertainty and fear.
All of it burned away beneath the scrape of teeth and panting breaths, and the way he growled my name, over and over again, like a curse. Like he was trying to exorcise it from his body and couldn’t.
Then he was lifting me, wrapping my legs around his waist. His forehead pressed to mine, our breaths colliding, the space between us dissolving into nothing but heat and desperation.
Time stretched and collapsed in on itself. Minutes, hours, maybe even days, blurred together as we lost ourselves in each other. In the pain and pleasure that we wrought from one another again and again.
It didn’t fix anything. It didn’t solve the monsters at our door or the wounds between us. It didn’t make us whole or stronger or magically bound in some new, unbreakable way.
But for a few stolen breaths, we drowned the world before it could drown us.
And shards help us, maybe that was the closest thing to salvation we had left.
Chapter 12
Everly
It started with the faint memory of pain. Like someone was pressing on an old bruise that hadn’t quite healed.
Visions shifted in my mind, each one flashing brighter and louder than the last. No. Not just visions.
Memories.
The familiar tug of a scalpel dragging along my back, the burn of iron manacles against my wrists as I tried to pull away. My uncle’s deep voice telling me to be still and quiet ringing out louder than my screams, followed by a cacophony of voices.
The wordHollowechoed over and over again.
Hollow.
She’s a Hollow.
A Hollow.
Another Hollow…
Their verdict echoed through the stillness in my lungs, filling the place where air should have been and robbing me of the breaths I kept gasping for.
The pain intensified. It spread like a wildfire racing through dry leaves on a forest floor. Shadows tore through my veins,chased by a violent, bone-deep cold that left my body feeling brittle and fragile as glass.
