Time stuttered to a full stop. Frozen from one blink to the next, and all it took was a single glance.
Just one instant, and I was utterly,helplesslyenthralled by obsidian eyes reflecting blue. By the titan blazing before me, cloaked in billowing flames of pure, raw power that didn’t lash out at the silence, or fill each passing moment with directionless flailing where the empath was meant to thrive.
Asher.
But not as he’d been.
Standing rigid on my left, swirling flames of gold engulfed him but did not burn. He was power in the flesh, a leviathan unmatched by anything that had ever come before.
And every last drop of his attention was fixed tome.
He stooped.
His smile was predatory.
His fingers cool when they curled around my throat and his thumb notched in the point beneath my jaw. Forcing my head to tilt until my breath wheezed through my kinked throat and he dragged me to my feet. And then, in a low, cultured hiss meant for my ears alone, he said, “You’re going to pay for that.”
I could only stare.
My fingers still clenched about Carly’s dainty wrist, made to watch when he seized my connection to the priestesses and snared their attention.
He let them see.
What he was.
WhatIhad made him.
That in my lonely grief, I had freely given to their captors what I had denied my own people.
The last weapon we had left—and I had used it to make something new of a Caledonian elite.
Not an empath.
Or a berserker.
He was balance.
Because of me.
Their collective alarm whined at the back of my skull as he stood and let us all look. Exposed at long last, and yet, he remained absent any tender scrap of remorse, for this was a private show. Time was bending around his heat, distorted and warped by the perception of the collective as we watched in horrified awe.
A blink for everyone else, whose eyes were captivated by the funeral pyre.
An eternity for those doomed to sense energy they had once been born to use.
Point made—that I had never been with them—he severed my connection to the priestesses with an effortless flick. Reducing me to little more than an untrustworthy whore who gaped at his command.
A pet on a leash.
But even a dog born in captivity could bite the hand that feeds—
“No,” he said, and it rumbled through my bones. Banishing the thought before it began to so much as whisper of rebellion, he tugged on the threads of power he’d layered into my muscles. Called on the commands he’d written inside my marrow, and drew me back with a feast unmatched by any other.
Spine going loose, I melted in his hands. Contained in an ocean of flames. Courted, seduced, and betrothed to the liquid inferno only he might offer me.
In an instant, I was lost. Happy to drift and never be found.
From a far off, watery distance, a commotion pattered against my ears.
