The bond between us stretches so tight it hurts.
I step into the circle of his heat.
It should kill me.
It doesn’t.
It feels like standing in the center of the world’s hottest fireplace, like every part of me is being scrubbed clean from the inside out.
My skin prickles, my hair whips around my face, tears evaporate the second they fall.
I lift my hands.
My fingers shake as I reach forward—toward the place fire curls thickest between his ribs.
“Delia!” someone roars. Jules? Phoebe? No. That’s just my memory of them, screaming in my head.
I ignore it.
I ignore everything but him.
“You won’t hurt me,” I say, louder now. “You can’t hurt me. Because I’m yours, Thorne. And you are mine.”
The flames roar higher at my words.
The skull leans down, enormous, and terrifying, fire pouring from the hollows where his eyes should be.
I tuck my chin, take a breath that tastes like ash and lightning—and step closer.
My hands pass through the flames.
They should blister. Turn black. Peel away.
Instead, they tingle.
Heat licks along my skin like an eager animal, wild but… curious.
I keep going.
Up to the wrists. The forearms. Until I’m standing flush against his fiery chest, arms buried up to the elbows in the furnace of his being.
It feels like everything.
Like every calloused hand I’ve ever held on a stretcher, every life I’ve watched slip away, every moment I’ve run toward danger while everyone else ran from it.
Like I’ve been walking toward this exact inferno my whole life.
I grope blindly inside his chest, searching—not with fingers, but with something deeper.
The bond.
There.
I find it.
A heart made of flame and coal and something softer at the center. It thrashes under my spiritual grip, pounding wild and erratic, threatening to burn itself out.
I wrap my arms around it.
