“All you, treasure,” I chuckle, breathing hard. “That was all fucking you.”
Thomas throws his arms around me. I pull him close, filling my lungs—my body—with his thrumming scent. We’re safe,he’ssafe. I pull back a hair’s breadth to stare into the shining eyes of this amazing man that Fate, for some reason, thought I was worthy of.
“You are just…” I breathe, shaking my head like I’m waking from a dream. How could he be real and mine? And I’m his, and will be for so much longer than twenty-eight fucking minutes. “Wonderful. You are just so wonderful.”
“Ketill…” His excited heart pounds against my chest, his fingers dig into the collar of my jacket. His lips parting, inviting. Thomas did promise me a kiss, after all.
Then my soulmate is jerked away from me, dragged to the now wide-open door leading to the outside, the bruised and battered shifter with the claw tattoo on his cheek hanging from it.
“You won’t get away this time, Ketill,” the tattooed shifter snarls.
A bolt of blinding white panic slices through my entire body as the shifter hurls a shocked Thomas out of the window, to plunge towards the frozen lake.
Chapter Six - Thomas
I’m screaming as I plummet through the sky.
Something iron-strong wraps around me.
I hadn’t even realised my eyes were closed until they open to find I’m buried in Ketill’s chest.
He spins us, and when weSMASHthrough a sheet of solid ice and plunge into freezing waters, it’s his back that takes the full unforgiving force of the impact.
The shock of cold steals my breath. Ice pierces through my senses.
I try to suck in air. Only for my nose and throat and lungs to burn in this place of dark confusion and masses of bubbles, where I’m falling or floating. Or dying.
Am I dying?
It’s a shock when I’m somehow thrown onto a frozen surface. I cough up water, coughing harder when I instinctively try to fill my straining lungs.
Someone is speaking—yelling. The sound is fuzzy. My body won’t move—or can’t move; I’m not sure yet and terrified to find out.
I’m losing feeling. But everything hurts.
I’m scared.
I want my big brother Kai.
I want Ketill.
“Get the fuck off the lake!”
Ketill. I’d know his voice anywhere.Anywhere.
“Thomas,you will move!” his voice is harsher than I thought possible, turned into a command I have no other choice but to follow.
I stand on shaky, rigid legs, choking out puffs of clouds, struggling over the slippery and creaking ice towards land.
“Don’t you fucking stop, Thomas! Move!”
My gaze unfocused, I shamble until my shoessquelchwhen meeting hard mud, and I fall to my knees, crushing crystallised grass.
I look back for Ketill.
He’s close, on his belly and dragging himself across the ice with his forearms, face pale, hair wet. Soon, he reaches me, grunting as he struggles to sit up. The ice behind uscrackingandsnapping.
Ketill reaches for me, and I let out a pained cry as he rips my clothes off. I don’t have the energy or brain cells to ask what he’s doing, just let him get me naked before he shoves the warming dragon egg into my arms.
