Page 84 of Realm of Dreams & Shadows

I cross my arms as if shielding the pure charisma that rolls off this man. “Maybe,” I admit. “But at what cost? I’ve seen the hideous things that live in your realm. You can’t possibly think that’s what I want?”

His smile grows warmer, more intimate. “No? Then all you need do is create something else. With me, my love, you will revel in the power to shape existence itself.”

I can see flecks of black in his silver eyes, close enough to feel the strange energy that radiates from him like heat from a fire. And despite every warning Chase has given me, despite knowing exactly how dangerous this man is, I don’t step away. I don’t trust him, but neither can I leave him. Not yet. I saw his grief in the throne room, and if I know nothing else, I know that the brother Chase thinks is as cold as stone really does have a heart.

“It calls to you,” he murmurs, as if in answer to my unspoken thought. “The connection between us. The recognition. You feel it burn throughout your blood.”

His touch sends a flare of heat through me, different from the sizzle I feel with Chase but no less intense. And definitely as appealing. Maybe even more so. There’s a reason bad boy romances sell so well…

But this isn’t a novel. This is my life, and right now, it feels as if this man has been a part of my life forever. Like there’s something old and deep between us. Something written into the very fabric of my soul.

“We’re meant to be together,” he says, as if reading my thoughts. “Bound by prophecy, by destiny, by forces greater than either of us.” He lifts our joined hands, then gently kisses my knuckles. “Stop fighting what you feel. What you know to be true.”

“I don’t know anything,” I whisper, but even as I say it, I can feel my resolve wavering.

“You feel this.” He leans closer, his lips barely an inch from mine. “You know me.”

I sigh. Because, damn me, I do.

The garden around us seems to pulse with energy, responding to the intensity of the moment. Flowers bloom larger and brighter, the fountain’s water sparkles like liquid diamonds, and the air shimmers with possibility.

An overwhelming desire to give in washes over me. A desperate need to lose myself in his silver eyes and the promise of unlimited power. But another part—the part that remembers Chase’s kiss and trusts in his protection—holds me back.

“No,” I say, stumbling away from Adric’s touch. “I don’t want what you’re offering.”

It’s a lie. But it’s the truth too.

His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts in the air around us. The garden begins to wither at the edges, flowers browning and falling, the fountain’s water turning black.

“You will,” he says with quiet certainty. “When you understand the full scope of what you are and what you could become, you’ll choose me, just as so many have before you.”

I tremble, remembering Chase telling me he’d kept Brides away from the Nightmare King to keep the barriers from falling. What he didn’t tell me was how.

I’m about to throw that question in Adric’s face when the garden explodes into chaos. The ground cracks and splits, releasing the nightmarish creatures that haunt my dreams—as well as some new ones with very large teeth who chitter as they stalk toward me.

“Chase!” I scream, reaching desperately for the connection between us, but not finding it, and a cold terror races through me as the sky darkens to deep crimson, and the air fills with the sound of hunting cries.

“Chase! Please!”

My voice sounds hollow, and I know he can’t hear me. Adric can, though, and he moves slowly toward me, his hand outstretched.

“The Hunter is no help to you here. Take my hand if you want to survive.”

I shake my head. I’m desperate to be pulled free from the approaching scorpion creatures and the sand monsters now popping up in the flower garden, but I can’t let him save me. I don’t know how, but I’m certain that if I take his hand, all hell will break loose. Very, very literally.

“Jump.”

The word echoes in my mind. Chase. And as I recognize it, I see part of the garden fall away, leaving a gaping maw at my feet. A black pit with no discernible end.

A dark hole that’s somehow so, so familiar.

“You’re wrong to trust him,” Adric says. “He is not the one to whom you are bound.”

“Screw your prophecy. I’m not bound to anyone.” And then, before I can talk myself out of it—and before the first chittering scorpion reaches me—I leap into the abyss, Adric’s cry of frustration ringing out all around me.

I’m falling fast, unable to even see the bottom. I could hit it in one second, or I could never land. And never’s starting to feel more likely as I fall and fall and fall through this pitch-black hole.

Then I cry out, my entire body jolting as something like a rope hits my shoulders. The anchor line.