Birds took wing from burning branches. Insects scurried. And thick, grey smoke coiled toward the stars.
The drunken haze from having the best and only sex of my life vanished.
This...isn’t possible.
Spinning in place, everywhere I looked was alight with blooms of orange and gold. “What...what did youdo?”
“I...” He tensed. Completely naked with wild black hair, red-ringed eyes, and a piece of warped metal over his heart, he looked half man, half somethingelse.“I felt a spike of heat when I released but...I didn’t know I’d unleashedthis.”
Hadit been him?
My mind literally couldn’t accept it.
But...logic said if it wasn’t him, then who?
After all, I’d seen him detonate in the caves. I’d seen him lose control and had the bruises from the powerful shockwave to prove it.
Wait.
My fingers strayed to my chest where the punch of his power had slammed me backward.
Ididn’thave any bruises.
My eyes locked on him—searching where there ought to be a row of black stitches from stabbing him but...they were gone. The small sutures from removing the port cuffs no longer existed. The cuts on his neck from when I’d held a knife to his throat had disappeared, and the numerous silver scars from other injuries when he was younger were no more.
Even the wound on his finger from healing the tear of taking my virginity had vanished...
And his eyes...
God, I lost myself in them.
Scarlet-ringed and alight, he glowered at me with such hunger, such possession, he made my entire soul jump off whatever path it was on and collide firmly with his.
Fear trickled, then flowed, thenoverflowed.
Because what the hellwashe?
What the hell did all of thismean?
My fingers strayed to my empty throat, the habit too ingrained after a lifetime of reaching for my pendant, bracing against an impending migraine.
But the migraine didn’t come.
And my necklace...
“My necklace. W-Where’s my necklace?”
His face turned guarded as he stopped looking at the hell he’d caused and landed on the empty hollow where my pendantused to live. His jaw clenched as his eyes dipped lower, lingering on my bare breasts.
The urge to cover up made me blush but I just stood there, panic growing worse. The sense of loss threatened to make me cry. “H-Have you seen my necklace?”
The emptiness around my neck felt as if someone had stolen my last piece of home—as if I’d lost my mother twice.
Vague memories of the chain breaking—of it vanishing in a gush of bubbles. Perhaps it’d been tossed over the falls with me? It could be in the river—
I have to find it.
I spun toward the water, but Lucien stepped forward and snagged my elbow. He trembled a little as his cock hardened, reacting to me just like I reacted to him. My insides melted, and for a second, it looked as if he’d pin me onto the smouldering ground and take me again.
