His hands slide down my back, rough palms tracing the curve of my spine. “I never stopped looking.”
“Youdied.”
“No,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead to mine. “I survived. I always survive.”
I want to hate him. I want to scream and pound my fists against his chest and demand to know why he stayed gone. But I can’t. Because in this dream, his body is heat and gravity and everything I’ve denied myself for three long, empty years.
His mouth moves down my neck. “You still mine, little flame?”
I hate how fast I say, “Yes.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, hands spreading fire over my skin, lips trailing promises down my throat. My body arches to meet him, heat blooming low and dangerous. Every place he touches feels like waking up after a decade in the cold.
“I missed your fire,” he says, voice gone rough.
I claw at him like a starving thing, desperate and half-feral. I don’t care if it’s not real. If it’s just my wrecked brain giving me what I want for once. I don’t care. Because in this moment, I feelalive. Not surviving. Not pretending. Just alive.
He carries me to the edge of something—somewhere between stars and stone—and lays me down, covers me with his body, his heat, his fury, hisneed.
“You’re not real,” I whisper.
He bites my shoulder, just enough to sting. “Then wake up.”
I do.
Hard.
Bolt upright on the couch, the blanket twisted around my legs, my skin flushed and damp, my pulse drumming in every inch of me.
The trailer’s dark. The lot outside is quiet. My comm says it’s 3:42 AM.
I press a hand to my chest and feel the thrum of something I thought I’d buried.
I haven’t dreamed of him like that since the first year. Not in color. Not intouch.
I slide off the couch, legs unsteady, and splash cold water on my face in the trailer’s tiny sink. The mirror shows a flushed, wide-eyed version of me I barely recognize.
I whisper, “Get it together, Rin.”
But I don’t.
Because even now, even after three years, even after surviving without him and learning how to breathe through the emptiness, I still need him.
Like air.
CHAPTER 23
GYON
Iwake to the sound of soft voices.
“Gyon…” someone murmurs.
“A lost wolf,” another adds.
I open my eyes to two suns hanging low in the sky—one amber-and-lemon, the other pale jade. The grass around me is tall and whispering, each blade trembling in the breeze like a thousand tiny fingers. The air tastes of ozone and wild sweetness, like rain after a dust storm on a dying world. My body aches in familiar ways—and unfamiliar ones. My ribs crack if I inhale too deeply. My skin burns under the light, still pulsing with residual energy I remember from the Maze’s fail-safe trigger. I try to pull myself up. My hands hit rough bark instead of cold concrete.
“Easy, warrior,” a soft voice says.
