Eyes snapping open, unseeing, I trembled all alone in dark sheets. In a dark room.
Soaked.
Drenched in anxious sweat, and… perhaps something more.
Cheeks flushed hot, my pulse thrashed in my blood. Felt in the hollow at the base of my throat. In my eyes and…
… between my legs.
Dreaming.
I’d been having a nightmare.
It wasn’t real. I hadn’t sobbed, hadn’t begged to be fucked raw by my enemy as he—
“Mila?”
I jumped, a ragged screech spattering over my lips as I lurched away from that voice. Fingers clumsy, I scrambled to pull damp sheets up to my chin as if they might save me from a predator greater than any I’d ever known.
Asher.
He was there.Right there.Sitting on the edge of the bed. Looming in the dark. A shadow that blended with the night, and for a moment, as I was ensnared in that inky glare, I couldn’t so much as draw a single breath.
He was so much more than the cruel, alien shade in the fog. Intense in a way that defied my senses, that pained my eyes to see after so long in the dark.
Vivid in a way that couldn’t be real.
Dead.
I’d died with Sasha, and this was to be my punishment. To be tormented for my part in her end… eternally bound tohim.
A breath hissed between the points of my teeth, and I squinted. Peeling truth from the ether.
Something was wrong.
My senses were… off. Skewed, just a little. Enough that I could sense a lie, but couldn’t quite catch the thread that needed pulled.
I scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my palms. Trying to peel away whatever magics were obscuring my sight enough to make everything blurry.
When I looked again, it was to find him perched on the edge of the mattress.
Surrounded by a slight shimmer I’d never noticed before. He was coiled as he watched me.Ready. Eyes glittering in the dark, but… they were sunken. Rimmed in strain. Glassy, as ifhe’dbeen woken from a nightmare to find his enemy looming over him in sleep. And his hair—it was messy. Standing on end, it poked out at odd angles as if mussed by sleep or…
Twisting, desperate fingers driving him faster, begging with touch and nails and breathless sighs…
I swallowed the lump of something caught in my throat, and let my eyes wander. My gaze catching on hard edges and twisting shadows that were there one moment and gone in the next.
Couldn’t help myself.
Couldn’t help but notice that he was stark naked, and… painfully hard. Shining and taut, his pulse thrumming in a pearly drop that beaded at his tip the longer I looked. Growing with each passing, lurid second of eye contact with this weapon that had already dealt me a mortal blow.
“Mila?” he said again, but it was distorted. Tinny, as if from a long way off. The tone all kinds of wrong, for those two syllables on his lips had been laced with something that reeked of concern.
Relief flooded through me, becausethatwas impossible. “Hallucinating,” I slurred, and rolled over. Burrowing deeper into the pillows, I turned my back on the phantom from my darkest musings. And then, matter-of-fact, “‘M dying, aren’t I? Only way I’d beg forthat. ’Sides. You can’t be in two places at once…”
Sleep washed over me in a blanket of frigid numb.
The waves heavy with the dregs of a wry chuckle.
