"You need to settle down. What about Kiton? What is it?"
She couldn’t settle.
Lucien seemed to understand there was no calming her down. His expression turned resolute, and he reached up in a flash to grip the side of her neck. It made her slightly dazed as he pinched a pressure point. She gasped and went boneless. He tilted her head at an angle, holding a long, thin needle of a syringe to the side of her neck. He whispered gentle reassurances to her as he inserted it and pressed the plunger.
Immediately, a coolness swept through her body. She settled into the mattress, shoulder pressing into the hard wall at her side. She sighed, blinking up at Lucien. She found herself lying down.
Lucien’s throat worked as he arranged a pillow behind her head, smoothing the tangled sheets over her chest. His hands shook.
Lucien gently held her hand and reinserted the IV. She didn’t feel the pain at all. His thumb smoothed medical tape over the inside of her wrist, then he placed her hand on the blanket, fingers tangling with hers. "Vesperin, can you tell me what happened?"
Rin’s lips tingled from whatever he’d injected her with. "He hurt me," she mumbled.
Lucien froze. The air crackled with tension.
"Who hurt you?" Lucien’s words sounded forced. "Is this about Sabine and Talor?"
Her panic was muted, words quiet. "No, not them. Kit."
"Are you saying Kiton did this to you?"
Rin’s vision went out of focus as sleepiness pervaded her body. Slowly, she drifted into sleep, and the last thing she whispered was:
"Kit—he’s alive. He tortured me."
3
DECALCOMANIA
When Rin woke up again, it was to a drifting sense of peace filling her body, four men watching her, and a surreal note to the air—as if this were all a dream.
"Vesperin." Lucien sat on the edge of the bed, shadows under his eyes.
Rin smiled dazedly. "I missed you." Her words were achingly quiet.
She felt like there was something she was supposed to know, somewhere she was supposed to be. She started to get up, but there were hands on her again, stilling her. She let herself sink back down.
"Don’t move." Lucien’s thumb soothed over her forearm. She felt a tug and glanced down, finding tape over her wrist, a wire filled with a soft blue liquid, flowing from a bag attached to the wall, streaming straight into her veins. She knew she should be worried, but she didn’t care.
"I feel nice… like a cloud. I wish I could feel this way forever." It was so much easier to feel this way. Rin’s eyes slipped shut. Peaceful darkness.
In that darkness, she remembered flashes of light, brown eyes,pain.
"I think I need to go somewhere—do something. There’s something…" she trailed off as she started to stand once more.
Lucien shushed her. "You’re okay. There’s nothing you need to do right now but rest."
A throat was cleared. Rin looked up with blurry, dazed vision to find Rhyden standing near the kitchen counter. As she met his eyes, a surge of memories made her brain throb.
Hands on her skin, diamonds draped around her neck.
Rope on his wrist, punishing, teasing thrusts.
Rhyden held her stare as he said, "I thought you said the drug would make her complacent enough for us to have a conversation with her. She doesn’t look calm to me."
"I won’t up the dosage," Lucien said firmly. "It can be addictive. She needs to process enough to talk, but I’m not going to drug her into incoherence or vulnerability. She is vulnerable enough as is—she needs us right now. If you cared about her, you would agree, Rhyden." Lucien said his name with a firmness Rin had never heard from him before.
Rin tapped Lucien’s hand, drawing his attention back to her—but she wondered if it had ever left. "You drugged me?" she blurted.
