Rory rolled his eyes. “You’re wasting your time,” he called impatiently after him. “I can see the history of whatever I want. I could just touch your stuff till I find it.”
“But you’re not going to,” came the echo from somewhere else in the apartment, “because you’re not a complete brat.”
Rory snorted. “You’re real sure about that,” he said, loud enough for Arthur to hear.
Arthur appeared in the doorframe a moment later, illumined by the soft light; broad shoulders showcased by the vest buttoned tight down to his belted trim waist, the close cut of his trousers, hints of the shape of his chest and arm muscles through the white fitted dress shirt. Geez, what a view.
Arthur folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “This is the part where you say,Of course, Ace, I’d never use magic to find something you hid from me.”
“Come here, already.”
“Theodore,” Arthur said pointedly, and Rory’s stomach did an excited flip. “Are you going to keep your psychometry to yourself?”
Rory met his gaze and deliberately leaned back against the pillows, hoping he looked even half as tempting as Arthur did in a bed. “Come on, daddy.”
Arthur’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you even.”
“Come do something bad to me.”
Arthur was on him a heartbeat later, pressing Rory down on his back. “You’re incorrigible.”
Rory arched up into him, sparks of pleasure dancing everywhere their bodies touched. “Got you to come back to bed, didn’t I?”
Arthur took Rory’s wrists in his hands and deliberately pinned them to the pillow next to his head. “Maybe I came back to extract my promise.”
Rory shivered, and tilted his head up to brush his lips against Arthur’s. “Then come and get it.”
Chapter Sixteen
The metal table beneath his skin is like ice, the manacles biting into his wrists. Arthur stares at the ceiling of the tiny cell and tries to remember warm spring in New York, the laughter of his newest niece, the smile of the handsome soldier he’d spent one night with in Dijon. Anything to keep his mind off the here and now.
But the scrape of the door opening pulls him back to the present.
“Lieutenant Kenzie.”
The words are in English, not German, a man with a British accent. Arthur tracks the newcomer as he strides up to the table. He has closely cropped blond hair and bright blue eyes, and he’s even bigger and broader than Arthur himself.
“They tell me you will not talk.”
The dream. Distantly, Arthur knows he’s in the dream. He knows what’s coming, knows he’s about to relive the horror that still haunts the darkest corners of his mind, but he can’t make it stop as his dream-self looks back at the ceiling.
The man leans over the table so his face fills Arthur’s vision. “You will talk to me,” he says lowly.
Arthur opens his mouth, his name and rank on his tongue.
But the man’s face is changing, his teeth elongating and sharpening, his jaw distending into a beastly shape, his body growing larger as his eyes burn red—
There’s a burst of light.
The monster and the room are gone.
Arthur’s eyes flew open as he sat instantly upright. His skin was covered in goose bumps, every hair standing on end, all his nerve endings dancing like he’d just passed through a lightning storm. He ran his hands over his bare arms as his gaze darted around the room, seeing the faint yellow light on the dresser, feeling the soft blankets around him and mattress under him.
Dream. The old dream. He was in his apartment, in America, plagued by the same dream he’d had countless times, except—
Except the nightmare had never ended like that before.
The skin on his arms was clammy with cold sweat. But the scars on his chest didn’t burn with phantom pain; nerves all over his body instead prickled with the echo of the miniature lightning bolts. And already he could feel his heartbeat slowing, his breath evening, like the dream was being siphoned away before it was allowed to truly take hold.
