My feet refuse to shift, but my heart gallops against my ribs as though it’s desperate to escape his barbed energy.
Still seizing me with his grave stare, he plucks my necklace from the ground, dangling it from his fingers, striding forward.
A hunter closing in on his snared prey.
The awareness inside me has its hand wrapped around my spine, trying to jerk me backward. Screaming for me torun.Fighting the urge, I stand exposed, naked and raw, shame and guilt my only veil as he towers over me.
There’s something just behind his eyes that makes me feel dominated. Like one prolonged stare could have me tilting my neck, pleading for him to clamp onto my flesh, burst my skin, and drink from me in greedy gulps.
He pushes my hair back with a sweep of his hand, and I gasp at the purity of his frosted touch …
“You really are a monster,” I rasp, like I just swallowed a thorny seed that’s stuck in my throat.
Choking me.
He rakes my face with his glacial gaze, settling on the thorned tips of my ears. “Yourmonster,” he whispers, and I draw a staggered breath.
Hold it.
Leaning close, his icy exhale pours over me, fingers threading through my hair, tugging me close, fitting me against him so perfectly—as though we’re bound together by something greater than ourselves. “Justyours.”
A tear escapes, and I let it track its course.
He pulls back, looking down on me, his gaze gentle and brutal as he slips the chain around my neck, slowly, his touch a wintry caress on my fervid skin. I hear the clasp close, but barely feel my mask peel up as I watch my light blink out in the reflection of his sable stare.
“Are you afraid?” he asks, and I catch a glimpse of sharpened canines.
“Should I be?”
“Yes.” He brushes my hair off my shoulder with a look that pilfers my soul. “I’m far worse than anything you’re imagining.”
He shackles my wrist with his hand and drags me deeper into the jungle like a weed freshly torn from soil still crumbling from its exposed roots.
My heart labors. “What are you doing?”
“Something I should’ve done a long time ago.”
“Which is?”
“Letting you see the worst of me,” he growls, a roughness to his voice that sends a gush of icy dread pulsing through my veins. That stabs the shards of that broken mirror through my fleshy heart.
I know the worst of it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
I want to scream it at him, those shards digging deeper,deeper …splintering through the organ. Threatening to drag me under the dirt before I have the chance to do theright thing.
The thing that betrays my heart and him in the worst possible way, but saves those who don’t have the power to save themselves. Those who are flowers to be crushed beneath his booted feet.
Rhordyn lugs me down the slope of a frail path hacked along the edge of a steep ravine. A river barges through the gorge with ferocious force, charging toward a waterfall roaring ahead—an angry swirl of misty spray.
A broken sound splits from my trembling lips as I gather my emotions in the crush of my palm, rip them from my ribs and my heart and my lungs like the weeds they are, their bloody roots coiling up. I stuff them into that cold, dead place deep inside, then trap them there with a crystal shell for them to wither beneath.
I draw a long, unburdened breath, feeling my chest loosen.
My shoulders straighten.
I’m dragged toward that juncture between channeled rage and pouring destruction. Can feel the waterfall’s thundering violence in the pit of my chest, churning with baleful ferocity, alight with the shrill, tortured screams of a slaughtered species …
I look down into the frothy fall, unable to see the bottom past the storm of angry mist battering my face, dousing me in myownneed to spill.
