Maeve.
Broad, warm hands grabbed her shoulders.
But Mal’s hands were cold and slender. Not like these. He had surely sent another to claim her. To break her like he’d broken Zimsy—
“Maeve!”
She bolted up with a scream. Her breathing was too rapid and too strained to see clearly. She gripped at her chest, her heart slamming against her bones. The room spun, shapes and colors twisting in and out of focus. Electric Magic ran down her arm, collecting at her palm and firing out of her fingers in sporadic bursts of lightning.
“Breathe,” said the voice again.
She couldn’t. Her heartbeat hammered out of time. Energy surged through her. She squeezed her eyes shut just as the loud, high-pitched sound of glass shattering boomed.
Those unfamiliar hands moved to her face, warmth spreading through her shaking body.
“Breathe,” he said again, ignoring her destruction.
She sucked in sharply, the warm air sedating the electric force running through her. Another breath and she opened her eyes.
Reeve kneeled in her bed, his hair down, framing his face.
“Good,” he said lowly. “Keep breathing.”
Maeve nodded in his hands.
“You’re not in danger,” he hummed.
Thunder rolled in the distance, and Maeve’s breathing kicked, accelerating quickly. Blue lightning danced at her fingertips. He gripped her face, forcing her eyes back to his. His stunning firelight eyes.
“No,” he growled this time. A primal command that caused every bit of her to still. “You are not in any danger,” he repeated.
She nodded again, her rigid spine relaxing vertebra by vertebra beneath his attention. Her eyes slid down the Vexkari marking the side of his face and neck. The scarred Magic pulsed with power she’d never felt, but it boasted itself as something ancient. Something unlike Reeve.
Her eyes dipped lower to his shirtless chest, and the Vexkari markings that were carved into his skin there, too. Healed in solid-black color, like tattoos. Her eyes trailed lower, to the way his loose-fitting pants hung low on his hips. The dark room shadowed his muscles and darkened his tan skin. It was enough of a distraction that her panic faded.
His fingers moved along the back of her head, spreading in and out. Her eyes fluttered shut immediately at the motion. Her head reeled back, instinctively begging for more.
A satisfied and throaty chuckle hummed in the space between them. “Good, kitten.”
He lowered her back onto her pillows and ran his fingers freely across her hair, massaging into her scalp. Reeve’s Magic gracefully resonated across her entire body like a warm blanket. She took one last deep breath, and the smell of earth and smoke drifted her to a silent and dreamless sleep.
Hazy morning sunlight poured into her room. The light-blue-toned stained-glass shot beams of light across the pale floors. She was fully submerged in layers of fluffy sheets. It was completely silent in her mind.
She waited for Mal’s voice to fill her head.
Nothing.
She waited another moment, swallowing hard in anticipation, but Mal’s voice never called to her.
She sat up quickly, remembering the night. Reeve was gone.
But the feeling of his hands on her face lingered, infuriatingly so, like small, warm beads of Magic.
She was certain she remembered glass shattering. The sound had been so deafening, it must have been all the windows that ran the length of her room. But they were back in place, and they hadn’t been that pale-blue color before.
The new windows drenched her room in soft jewel tones of blue, reminiscent of her room at Sinclair Estates. She held up her hand, examining the blue sapphire stone in the ring her father gave her and twisting her wrist to let it refract the morning light.
The lightning she produced, something she’d always assumed was part of her Dread Magic, had been triggered twice now when she was distressed. She looked back up at the new windows. She’d owe Reeve an apology for that.
