I look up at Talon. His smirk is gone. That dark green eye, sharp and knowing, is locked onto his fingers where they curl around my skin.
He feels it too. He must.
And the sultriness of his voice... It’s a crime.
My heart shouldn’t be pounding like this. But in the name of the entire universe, it does.
I canfeelhim.
Not just his hand. Not just the pressure of it against my wrist.
I can feel his heat. It's sinking into me, wrapping me, dragging me back into the world of the living even though just moments ago I was ready to disappear forever.
His thumb traces a slow, absentminded circle against my skin—or theideaof my skin, since, technically, I don’t have any. Butsomehow, it still has the same devastating effect it did the last time a man touched me like this. Which was…
A long time ago.
His grip tightens—just slightly, just enough that my entire being snaps to attention.
“You can feel it, can't you, Little Grim?” he murmurs, low and rough. “Does it feel good?”
Oh. Oh no.
His other hand lifts. Just a few inches. Just enough to make me realize that this man absolutely knows what he’s doing.
I should run. Should phase out. Should tear myself away from whatever the hell this is.
But I don’t.
Because his fingers brush over my forearm, and I don’t just feel it.
Icraveit.
I try bite back a sound—something deeply, deeply unholy—because I refuse to give him the satisfaction. But Talon hears it anyway.
And that’s when his smirk returns, slow and sharp and devastatingly aware.
“I feel it, too,” he tells me. “It's not fully there, but you're… so warm.”
Warm? Me? The dead one?
I’d argue, but my brain is currently buffering. Because no. He’s the one on fire. His touch is melting me, seeping into parts of me that have been locked away for years, and now he’s waking them up. He’s making themache.
The thought I had when I first saw him slams back into me, twice as strong. This man is beautiful. The kind of beautiful that would have most women dropping to their knees—some metaphorically, some very literally. They’d lap up his teasing likeit’s their last sip of water in a desert, chase the heat rolling off him like moths with no sense of self-preservation.
I ignored it all this time.
Why would I care? What’s a little beauty gonna do for a dead girl?
And yet… somehow, it does plenty now.
His burnt-orange hair is a mess, like he just rolled out of bed—or like he should still be in it. And his dark green eye—God, it’s not just green. It’s deep, shadowy forest green, flecked with orange, like he’s got a whole damn wildfire smoldering inside him. Dangerous. Gorgeous. An irresistible kind of menace.
And the way he touches me—it's not just touch. His fingers barely skim the length of my forearm, the lightest drag, but somehow, he looks at me like I just handed him the key to the universe. Like this small thing is something more.
Afterlife help me.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, voice like molten sin. “You like it, don’t you?”
