Unbuttoning my shorts and shucking them off, I step into the navy, pleated skirt. “Do I want to be the hero?” As I draw up the zipper on my side, I snort. “Fuuuuuuck, no. But the only thing that would piss me off more than people expecting me to solve their problems for them would be if they took credit for my hard work.”
Damian rises up on his elbows. “Not that I’m opposed or anything, but what are you doing?”
Sitting down beside him, I tug on a sock, rolling it up my leg until it ends mid-thigh. “Distracting you. Is it working?”
An appreciative rumble vibrates his chest. “Very much so, but can I ask why when we're having a pretty important conversation?”
Moving to the other foot, I explain, "Because I'd like to keep contributing to it, and it's getting harder and harder to hold onto my train of thought where Ash is concerned, so I shifted to a parallel track where I’m not directly thinking about him." Rolling onto my knees, I straddle his lap.
Stretched out on his side of the bed, Hunter lifts his head, resting his cheek on his fist. “And that required you to change clothes, why?”
Damian slides his hands up from my waist, over my ribcage, and teasingly brushes his thumbs across my nipples before retracing his path down. While slowly raking my nails from his shoulder down to his chest, I face Hunter with a raised eyebrow. “Are you complaining?”
The tension that I thought had permanent residence in his eyes has lessened a fraction, softening some of the hostility that he wears like armor. “That someone might have been fucking with my head my entire life? Yeah, I’m complaining about that a little. But honestly, I’m used to having someone in my head that likes to torture me, so I’m not as pissed as I probably should be.”
To punctuate his statement, his pupils expand as he shifts closer to us on the bed, never once taking his eyes of me. “That you’re looking like that while sitting on another man’s lap?” The small, amused smirk that lights up his face as he lightly runs his knuckles down my cheek has a shiver snaking down my spine. “Complaining about that a bit, too, actually.”
Swallowing, I roll my hips, eliciting a tortured groan from Damian. “Well, since you’d be unhappy no matter what I did, there’s no point in trying. See you later, I’m busy.” Dipping my head before he can respond, I kiss Damian.
Damian’s breathy laugh against my lips is followed by him running a hand down my thigh to the hem of my skirt before working an agonizingly slow path upward beneath it. “I’m certainly not complaining, but how does getting laid help any of us think straight? Because there’s far less blood going to the head we actually need in the game than there was five minutes ago.” Nipping at his lip, he hisses in a sharp breath.
“I'm experimenting. Expanding on Kaige’s theory, what if when I claimed you, my wolf slipped you some of the power she was capable of, but I wasn’t strong enough to handle if it flooded back all at once? There was a block keeping her suppressed my entire life, and if Annika’s claims are true, then being around shifters would gradually strengthen her. You destroyed the block, and I was suddenly surrounded by shifters constantly; it would’ve been a massive onslaught when I was already struggling with the small amount of images and thoughts I was taking in from you guys on top of my own issues. If I’d had to handle everything at once without an adjustment period, my brain likely would’ve melted.”
The red rings framing his silver irises practically pulse before they’re gradually consumed as his other half rises to the surface. Voice taking on a dangerous edge, he decrees, “She’d never let that happen, and neither would we. If she had wanted complete control of your body, she’d have taken it by now.”
My stomach flips at the conviction in those words, and not for the first time, I wonder how much the creatures lurking inside of us really know. Yet even though they can speak to us, they spend the majority of their lives as silent shadows, watching the world pass by through the eyes of others.
Hunter catches onto the direction of my thoughts. “If that’s the case, then maybe if you take some of it back from us, it’ll help you fight off whatever ability Ash is using.”
The mention of his name already has my mind wanting to wander off down a different path. “Bingo.” Damian’s hands have stilled throughout the conversation, and I push him onto his back in silent prompting. “Because even after going all out the night of the lycan slaughter, you guys didn’t completely burn through your reserves like I did. Slade thought it was because you'd taken on more baggage throughout your lives and had more practice, but I don’t think that’s it.”
Reaching between us to flick open the button on Damian’s jeans, I lean in to whisper in his ear, “Power is a heavy burden to bear, and even you couldn’t lift it to throw it into the burn pile as fuel.”
Sitting upright, I hold Hunter’s heated stare. “You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t have given everything you had to escape the fire; especially when you saw that I wasn’t leaving until I got you out.”
In a blink, Damian rolls us so that I’m pinned beneath him. “So you want us to distract you while you take it back from us?”
My reply is breathless as he kisses a path down the side of my neck to my collar, sliding down my body. “If I'm going to be assaulted by tortured thoughts, you two keeping me distracted and out of my head might make the process easier. And if not, I'll accidentally Pavlov myself into getting horny when watching horror movies, or something. It could either be exactly what we need to survive this hellhole, or a delightfully epic failure. Really, what do we have to lose?"
Damian hooks a finger in the neckline of my tank top, grinning against my heated flesh. “Well, if it’s for science, how can we say no?”
Closing my eyes, I concentrate on every point of contact between us. While he sets my nerve endings on fire, ensuring I can find my way back to him, I latch onto the restless energy in his chest, clearing my mind. Then I breathe him in, everything that makes him who he is. Every bit of agony that he’s taken from his pack’s shoulders throughout his life, every horrible thing he’s done that haunts him down to his very core.
A wolf’s foundation is constructed from enough suffering that it would bring a lesser person to their knees, and when we meet our inevitable end, we do it with our heads held high, and a sigh of relief.
I shouldn’t know that.
But I don’t get a chance to dwell on it due to the crushing weight of guilt pressing down on my chest until it physically hurts to breathe. When I can finally manage to draw in air, it’s thick with the cloying taste of the coppery tang of blood. Images flit through my mind, haltingly at first before building up enough momentum that I’m thrust into a four-dimensional movie.
Bodies lay strewn around me, the scent of death surrounding me until it’s inescapable and suffocating. The land is familiar enough to recognize as somewhere on the mountain, even if it’s a section I’ve yet to see firsthand. My ears pop, a dull roar filling them that keeps the majority of the sound at bay. People’s faces move in the small crowd, but their shouts can barely be heard over the low ringing and heavy thunder of my heart beat.
Staring at an older version of Kaige, I watch as Acheron Wilder rips his throat out with a clawed hand, unable to move, a prisoner in the body I’m watching events play out from. Droplets of blood splatter across my face, each warmer than I anticipated. It makes the ice in my lungs ten times worse; frozen in horror, helpless, the only source of warmth coming from a dead man I’ve looked up to my entire life.
A teenage Kaige drops to his knees, a muted scream accompanying his anguished features. In my peripherals, I watch a younger version of Hunter bucking against the men restraining him, and a split second later, Ash’s fist punches a hole through the chest of a man that’s clearly one of Hunter’s fathers. When he removes his hand, it’s clutching a bloodied heart, and he lets the organ tumble from his fingers to the dirt before stomping on it.
The sound of ripping fabric jolts me back to the present. Damian is hovering above me, his movements stiffer than before, but when he sees me blinking up at him, some of the rigidity dissipates from his shoulders. “There you are, love.”
His relieved sigh is followed by him kissing a path down my bare skin, my shirt laying in tatters around me. Damian kisses a path down my stomach, licking the sensitive skin at my waistband, making my hips arch reflexively into his touch. Teeth rake over my skin and I shudder, breath hitching in my chest, but with it comes the bitter taste of disdain and grief.
