I froze as he nuzzled me. “Your closeness helps my pain. So...help.”
I shivered as his fingers sifted through my hair, claiming me and controlling me at the same time. Cool, quivery pleasure welled from my chest, spreading everywhere—filling me with chilled champagne bubbles. Relief kept building and building, cresting like a wave, glittering with frost and crystals.
The coldness felt distantly familiar.
Friendly...
I reached for it—
Lucien’s touch turned possessive and all those quivery feelings morphed into something cold and sharp andvicious.I gasped as the bubbles spun into a blizzard—surging upward, outward—an icy blast exploding so fast my vision flashed white.
Lucien sucked in a breath as if someone had punched him.
His fingers clenched in my hair.
And then...pain.
The worst I’d ever felt.
Pain, pain,PAIN.
“What—?” His voice broke. “What did you just—” He groaned as the metal disc over his heart flickered red, then...stopped.
The heat in his body flared, chasing the grey pallor from his skin as it warmed his blood and brought him back to the world of the living. I sucked in a breath as his warmth soaked into me, thawing the frigid agony around my heart, yanking me from the blizzard and halting the pain.
Relief rendered me useless.
I surrendered entirely to him, flopping over his chest.
He went rigid, even as his hand skated from my hair, to my nape, to my shoulders. Exquisitely gentle, his fingers settled on the small of my back, drawing barely-there circles in the damp fabric of my dress. “Are you okay?”
Sucking in a deep breath, I pushed away.
He let me go, his eyes searching mine as I sat upright.
And I fell all over again. Not physically...but in a way I couldn’t explain. I felt something deep,deepinside me, tugging me, warning me never to be apart from him.
The longer we stared, the more the compulsion grew.
A quiet, bone-deep certainty as if the universe whispered in my ear,‘This one. He’s the one. The one you were made for.’
Lucien’s jaw tightened, his gaze darkening as he tracked every emotion flickering across my face. “Rook?” His gruff voice landed somewhere aching in my chest—
A warm, raspy tongue yanked me out of the spell.
Doctors. Surgery. Blood—
God, what am I doing?
We had to leave.
Right now.
“We have to go.” I wiped my cheek from Whisper’s lick. “Marcus will be back soon, and our chances of escaping are rapidly running out.”
Lucien never looked away from me as I scrambled off the bed. With a grimace, he shifted and propped himself up on his elbows, his bare chest roped with muscles and gauze. “You’re seriously going to act as if nothing just happened?” His eyebrows knitted together. “Whatwasthat?”
Throwing a glance at the doctors behind me—who kindly acted as if they weren’t eavesdropping—I shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
