I’d traded it on a whim, reduced the power of Tritan’s greatest secret to nothing more than a weapon. Placed it in empire hands. Cocked. Loaded. Primed and begging for the fight. A commodity traded. Assigned value.
If he wanted the empath, he could have it.
All of it.
A cage of hard muscle flexed around me, and without a word, he pressed my cheek to his chest. Cupping the opposite side of my jaw, he filled my lungs with a breath that wasn’t poisoned with the smoking husk of a woman who might have been a friend, before she was nothing.
It was… peace.
Stability in the crush.
An anchor in hands that squeezed hard enough to leave marks of ownership… that held all the pieces together and refused to let them crumble, despite the cracks gaping wider with every passing, soggy breath.
But it was only a moment.
Brittle, as delicate things most often were.
And he couldn’t hold me forever. He was too tired. Too drained from all that had come before.
Foreign, cruel hands found my nape. The touch bit deep, and I felt it all the way through the muscle and into bone an instant before ragged fingernails scored me from collarbone to shoulder blade. Before I was torn from Asher’s embrace in a rush of invasive violence.
A glimpse of burly shoulders. Dark, frenzied eyes rimmed in blood-flecked white. And hands. Hands caked to the elbow in silver soot. Eyes glassy with murder. A face I didn’t know, energy I couldn’t bring myself to taste, despite the hollow spot where the empath starved.
Because I knew.
Knew what was there, lurking in that sharp, narrow glare, for I’d seen it before.
It was vengeance.
And italwaystasted likemore.
“You,” he spat, this soldier I didn’t know. A man whose every errant molecule trembled with fury. Whose spittle misted my face, thick with malice and bitter, sick hatred. All of it directed at me. “Vilewhore.”
I blinked. Taken off guard by the aggression that shattered the hush, and saw an elite who reeked of feral madness. Whose every crinkle was caked with a thin film of fine grey ash—who looked at me and knew without asking who was to blame for the carnage smoking all around us. I could see it in the veins pulsing around dark eyes, tiny lines blackened by the death of an empath.
Infected by what Sasha had done.
As if the ashes of his fallen comrades had soaked through his skin and left him tainted.
“Reese,” he snarled, and shoved me back, posturing when I landed with a thump on the raised dias. Palms crammed full of splinters, I skidded to a halt. “Aiden. Khal. Eidic.Youkilled them—”
Uttering a wordless snarl, the captain surged between us. His shoulders bunched. High and tight. His feet braced shoulder width apart.
But it was a bluff.
There was precious little left between us. No whisper of the true potential the captain now wielded with the empath at his disposal, nor a hint of the living embodiment of both sides of the spectrum.
We were drained.
Utterly ravenous for more energy than what was strictly required to keep our hearts beating.
Unless…
The thought was fleeting. Hardly more than a second.
But I felt the sentiment pass from me to him. The urge to indulge. To take a sip of the vibrant, seething pot of rage threatening to boil over and taste what this mad elite might offer. Drink deep of his energy, and replenish what I’d burned in trying to save her…
Tosurviveso that Sasha’s sacrifice would not be wasted.
