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I close my eyes. It feels like she’s scraping a wound in my chest, yet at the same time, kissing it better. Promises of staying with her. Promises of waking up next to her. Promises of loving her for a lifetime.
I sigh. “I promise.”
My semen drizzles down her back, and I’m hard again. Just like that. I blow out a breath, ripping off a piece of my shirt to clean her with.
“You’re lucky I’ve turned a new leaf and decided to be a gentleman,” I tell her, wiping the shred of cloth over the spill. “I’d like nothing more than to leave you in this mess, stain my scent into your flawless skin.”
She laughs, a feathery sound, like sunshine trapped in her lungs. There is a secret chamber in my heart where I store that beautiful symphony. It could chase away any dark thought. It could kill any nightmare.
But what’s worse is I almost forgot that sound while we’ve been separated.
I lean down, nuzzling my nose into her neck, inhaling her smell of jasmine and rainwater, committing it to memory.
“You’ve never been this affectionate with me,” she whispers, still watching the sunrise.
“I know. I couldn’t be until now.”
The greatest challenge of my life was never surviving Demechnef training or manipulating my enemies. It was resisting the gravity that pulled us together, the magnetic energy that drew me into her atmosphere. Even after we first met in the asylum, I was dying to grab a fistful of her hair and feel her writhe in my lap.
How could I slow down the pace at which I was falling deeply in love with her?
“You wanted it to be less painful for me when you inevitably would—die.”
I answer with a sigh.
“It didn’t work.” Her voice is cold and detached. A new shell of bitterness surrounding her energy that wasn’t there before. I suspect she developed it while I was gone.
“Are you ready to talk about it?”
Skylenna closes her eyes, reliving something sinister, dark, suffocating. My veins pump with a spurt of adrenaline, making me want to physically attack her demons, slay those disturbing memories floating around her head.
“I don’t know where to start,” she says quietly.
I’ll take the lead then, baby.
“Can we talk about the asylum?”
She’s still for a second, muscles in her back taut and hard. “Not yet.”
“Okay.” I think about what she probably wants to know most. “Are you wondering about what happened after I died?”
She nods stiffly.
“I asked Warrose to give me the vial of spring water from the Naiadales colony after my heart stopped beating.” It’s not even worth discussing the way we damn near came to blows when I asked him to do that. I placed a heavy burden on his shoulders that day. “He didn’t think it would work. Didn’t want to give you false hope if I really ended up dying.”
“I don’t understand why you couldn’t just fake your death in an explosion or something less—awful.”
“I wish I could have. It was hell for me to watch your reaction before my heart stopped.” I rub a hand across my face. “But unfortunately, it had to be traumatic. It had to be graphic. It had to be too much for your brain to handle.”
Skylenna’s breath is uneven. I stroke a rough hand over her waist, placing a kiss on her shoulder and lingering there until she smiles.
“The spring water obviously worked. Just not as quickly as I would have preferred. By the time I woke up, my wound was completely healed, and—”
“But where did you go when you died?” Skylenna interrupts, tilting her head to face me.
I know what she wants to hear. But I was just as disappointed as she will be hearing the truth. “It was a darker, mirrored version of our world. Drained of all life. I wandered there until I opened my eyes again in the casket.”
“So you didn’t… see anyone?”
