The weight of his palm resting on her shoulder was a comfort Adara never thought she’d experience. She lifted a hand to rest on his, thumb idly stroking his soft skin as she stared into the dark, pondering what in Dominic’s past had gone so horribly wrong to haunt him lifetimes later to this day. What had broken him? Had made him believe he should face this alone?
Dominic might be heartless, but he was not emotionless. Deep down, part of the boy he used to be was still in there. It was that person she cried for, held, and prayed for. It was that person she swore to protect at all costs. It was that part of Dominic Nite that Adara would never forget existed, and she would always fight for him—even if it would cost her victory.
Eventually, exhaustion swept over her, gathering her in its waiting arms. Her eyes fluttered closed, letting the world drift away into complete darkness.
Adara didn’t know how much time had passed or how she had moved, but she lay upon something much softer than the floorshe’d fallen asleep on. The plush ground dipped beside her. A weight settled around her abdomen. The scent of pine and sea wrapping around her had her sighing with content as the warmth of Dominic’s chest seeped into her back. The faint press of lips against her forehead.
Adara could have sworn she dreamed it as Dominic murmured, “Please,pleasedon’t fall for me.”
Chapter 42
Thememoriescamebackin fitful dreams. Not just memories of his drunken father in the doorway holding that blood-crusted whip in his hand and beating Dominic into oblivion, his sister screaming and crying for help, until she, too, suffered the same fate. Only she did not make it out alive, as he had.
No, these memories were worse. They were the ones he’d tried so desperately to forget. The memories came back to him as if induced by Adara’s story, urging him to finally connect the pieces with his own. They crashed back with the force of a tidalwave and Dominic realized Ace had been right all along. He did not want to remember the way his and Adara’s story fit together in such jagged, mangled shards that pierced his chest.
Dominic jolted awake. The old, rickety bed beneath him was uncomfortable. The tattered fur blanket hardly fought the biting chill of the desert night, but it was better than nothing. He rolled to his side to face Adara. She was such bliss and such agony, and she would destroy him if he didn’t kill her first.
Dominic refused to focus on the past. Instead, he gazed at Adara’s tranquil features, finally at ease, an expression he rarely saw her wear around him. A strand of hair lay over her face, and he gently moved it behind her ear, not wanting anything to cover her beauty, despite the blood and sand sticking to her. He’d been with plenty of girls—the number of keys he’d collected over the years told him that much—but none had ever tugged at him the way she did. Adara had this pull to her that always drew him in, like the waves of the ocean. No matter what, they always came rushing back to shore, just the same as he would run back to her.
Dominic ran a hand through his hair. As he watched the breath leave her parted lips, feeling the steady thrum of her pulse beneath his fingertips along the soft skin of her neck, he wanted nothing more than to press his lips against her. Against her pulse, to feel a heartbeat, so foreign since he lost his. Against her lips, to steal the breath—thelife—she consumed with each inhale.
He was utterly screwed.
Adara had made him want to live. Not survive like he’d been managing all these years, but trulylive.Feelthe life he’d been given—the life he’d ripped from himself and wanted back. All so she could one day look at him the way he looked at her right now and want nothing more.
Dominic pulled away before he did something he’d regret. He’d already lost his heart to Adara once. He couldn’t lose more of himself to her.
He finally knew what it was to feel what all those poor souls whose hearts he manipulated, whose keys he stole, felt.
None of it was real.
None of it waseverreal. Whatever he felt was merely an illusion.
Dominic slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her back to his chest. She shivered in the cold breeze floating in through the broken slats, but stilled once she felt his warmth.
In that moment, he made the decision to hold her like one would hold their breath to stop from drowning—as long as he could before the pain became too much to bear and forced him to let go—leaving him gasping, begging for more. But the problem was that the more he got a taste, the more it left him yearning for.
It was a curse to be able to feel something he could never hold onto forever.
“Would you stop doing that!” Adara yelped as she awoke and practically threw herself off the bed, out of Dominic’s arms.
“But you’re warm,” Dominic replied, already missing her body.
“Gods,I can’t wait to get back to Andreilia just to have my own bed again,” she muttered, hands brushing at her rumpled tunic and pants, as if she could wipe away the taint of his touch.
“Just wait,” Dominic said, folding his hands behind his head and leaning back, “you’ll be begging to sleep with me once you’re without me for one night.”
Adara scoffed, a crude smile playing at her lips. “As if I’d be the one begging.”
He shot her a smug smile. “I’ll have you crawling back to me in no time.”
“I should have left you to die last night,” she said, arms crossed over her chest. Then she assessed the room—his childhood bedroom. Books were stacked beneath the broken leg of the bed to make it even. A blanket was draped over the holes in the ceiling. She suddenly relaxed, a hand drifting to her shoulder, peeling aside the bloody lapel of her beige tunic to reveal the bandage Dominic had placed over the nasty gash on her shoulder. The wound had been healing by whatever otherworldly power she possessed along with the antidote he’d given her, but he’d taken it upon himself to apply a salve and bandage when he’d woken in the middle of the night.
Not an otherworldly power, he noted, but a combination of science and magic. A result of the Shadow Empire’s experiments to make her and the other heirs into the ultimate weapons, able to heal quickly. That was what she’d said in her story.
Her eyes softened as she glanced at the dressed wound, then to him, then around the room again.
“I see you weren’t expecting me to extend the same courtesy to you as you did to me,” he said.
