Page 201 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

‘We were kissing,’ Kade whispers. ‘Under a tree. It was raining. I was twenty years old.’ He draws back enough to see Lachlan. ‘Is it a memory?’

‘Were you up against the tree?’

Kade doesn’t even blush. ‘Yeah.’

‘That’s a memory.’

‘You have all of them. I don’t have any.’

‘They’re inside you, Kade. Just buried deep.’ Chest to chest, it only aches a little now. He can feel Lachlan’s heart against his own. The steady beat.

‘Call me by his name,’ he whispers, pleading softly as the walls beg to fall and all that holds him up is this man who loved him for years, who broke in here to take his revenge and essentially sold his soul to make it possible, and the revenge he wants, he’ll never get because everyone involved in what happened is dead. ‘Call me Julian.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to feel how it feels to be the man you love.’

‘Sweetheart, this probably isn’t the right—’

Kade steals the rest of the sentence from his mouth.

Lachlan goes rigid beneath him.

For one awful second, Kade thinks he’s made a mistake, prepared to let go and apologise, but then Lachlan kisses him back with a need so immediate Kade can taste it.

Nothing cautious.

Nothing clean.

His mouth knows Kade’s too well, opening beneath it with years of hunger and mourning held behind his teeth. Kade chases that knowledge. Tilts closer, kisses him deeper, desperate to find some lost part of himself waiting in the water of Lachlan’s mouth.

A memory. A spark. Julian Penhalyx reaching through the dark to say, there, that’s how I loved him and how he loved me, see?

Nothing comes.

No rain. No tree.

No twenty-year-old version of himself surging awake beneath his skin.

Only Lachlan, warm and alive in the present moment, only the broken sound he makes when Kade touches his face.

Only now.

It’s all they have.

Something inside Kade threatens to break under the unbearable tenderness of how Lachlan kisses him, holds him, waited outside for him. He gives everything, asks for nothing, not even his long-lost Jules.

Kade kisses him harder, no longer searching for memory.

He kisses him because Luca may never speak again.

Because Riley nearly died.

Because Kade did too.

Because grief hollows you out and only love can fill it.

Lachlan breaks away first, just far enough to drag in a ruined breath, their foreheads pressed together, his hand still locked in Kade’s hair.