Anythingbut that.
Instead, my lip trembled.
Energy seeped through my skin. Waves of soothing, relentless calm that stopped my panicked ranting and forced my bewildered gaze down, to where his fingers were wrapped around my wrists, only to see a gentle pulsing gold lapping at my veins. With a touch, he fed me…euphoria. A drugging, relentless current that bled through the network of energy he’d built inside me while I’d been lost in the dark.
“One day at a time,” he murmured, and with deft fingers, let go of my wrists and pulled the sheets away from my thighs. Freeing me from the cloying, sticky wrappings that had been my tomb for eight days.
My every muscle trembling with an emotion I couldn’t quite name, I was still as he unwrapped me. Unnaturally calm, and struck by the horror of what this level of influence might mean. That with a touch, he could rearrange my emotions to suit his needs.
Fighting the urge to hide my breasts when they were exposed to the chill outside of my cocoon, my fists balled up. Nails biting my palms as I fought to look anywhere but those penetrating onyx eyes and share in a moment of rare camaraderie with the man who’d made this most recent horror possible in the first place.
Because it wasn’t real.
And the real horror was forgetting justwhowas my enemy.
Twin bands of gold caught my eye, offering welcome distraction. Glowing with a dim, warm light, I traced the left one with the tip of my forefinger. “Eight days?” I whispered.
He hummed as he worked, but that was all.
Tracing the glow that illuminated the manacles, it was my turn to laugh, but it was breathless and thin. The gold no longer filled my veins, as if his influence was muted, despite obviously being active. As if, in his bid to leash the empath, he’d gone deeper than the surface. Where I’d eventually grow… numb to his constant vigilance.
“It hardly even feels like pain anymore,” I mused, voice trailing off as I wondered how long it would be until I didn’t notice his influence inside me at all.
And it was then, as I shivered beneath his scrutiny, that I turned away and was shocked by the state of his quarters. Stacks of plates and uneaten food teetered by the door. A pile of dirty laundry, three empty bottles of wine, an entire platter of untouched fruit. Papers and documents scattered across the surface of his desk without so much as a hint of organization
“Confinement doesn’t suit you,” I snipped in a voice barely recognizable as mine, for it was reedy with disuse. Shivering with each forced syllable.
Warm fingers landed on the corner of my jaw, and he turned my face back, so he might drown me in a gaze of the inkiest pitch. “Do you remember the demonstration?” he murmured, and to his credit, his gaze didn’t dip to everything he’d exposed. And why bother? It was nothing he hadn’t been staring at for eight days anyway. The shine of a new toy well and truly worn away.
My lip curled, and I didn’t dignify the question with anything more than that.
“Harper’s funeral is tomorrow morning,” he said, fingers tracing the edge of my jaw back toward my ear. He tucked a lock of tangled silver-blonde hair away from my face.
A funeral meant a crowd.
A crowd full of emotional Caledonians. Peppered with the elites and their enslaved priestesses, each of them with a different reason for tears and theatrics.
All that energy… ripe…readily available…
The blood drained from my face in a dizzying rush, and I turned away from his touch. “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”
“Don’t you?”
I swallowed the hard lump clogging my throat, but couldn’t stop the screams from echoing up from the back of my mind. And with them, the scent and flavor of their former owners. Their unique energies, each signature one I could remember with painful, blinding clarity, if I dug deep enough. Remembered just how…incredibleit had been to be a conduit for that type of power. With the seething masses unleashed, the very air had been charged with exactly the sort of energy I now desperately wanted to taste again.
The electric tingle of life giving over to death…
I remembered.
Of course I did.
Tears gathered at the edge of my lashes, but I forced them back, and said, “You think I’m responsible for the riot.”
He said nothing, and the weight of that silence threatened to crack each and every one of my ribs.
“Do you blame me for Sasha’s death, too, then?” I asked, and mustered the courage to glance at him from the corner of my eye.
Taking a tiny, insignificant pause in his perusal of my face, he blinked. And then, “No. Sasha’s choices were her own, at the end.”
