He lowers his head and licks it off. Slow. Takes his time. Comes back up and grins.
"Delicious."
He squirts another line down the center of my stomach, his eyes never leaving mine as he follows the trail with his mouth. His tongue traces the line of whipped cream lower, lower, and I know exactly where this is going.
I'm panting. Even after all this time, after everything we've been through, after watching seventeen timelines worth of us together, this man still works me up like no other living creature in any realm has ever managed.
He's between my legs now, his arms hooked underneath my thighs, water lapping around us. He looks up at me with that wicked, devastating grin.
Just as his head dips under the water—
Something tugs sharply at my chest.
Not in the tub. In the space between my ribs. A sharp, insistent pull from somewhere deep inside me.
I look down and frown. What the hell was in that whipped cream?
Another tug, harder this time. More violent. A yank that rattles through my ribs like someone has hooked a chain to my breastbone and is pulling from the other end.
"Kaelren," I say, and the pleasure in my voice has been replaced by something closer to alarm. "Something's wrong."
He comes up out of the water, hair slicked back, confusion on his face. He reaches for me—
And I'm yanked.
Violently, like a fish on a line, ripped out of the warm water. The bathtub dissolves. The house dissolves. Kaelren's face, that beautiful, impossible face, fragments into nothing.
I'm back in the void. The blackness presses in. But something is different now. The threads of timelines that have been floating peacefully around me are whipping and twisting, agitated, tangling together in ways that look wrong.
Another yank. So hard it feels like my chest is going to cave in.
I clutch at my chest, gasping, and reach for whatever's pulling me. Through the chaos of timelines and the roaring darkness, I feel it. Faint but unmistakable.
The bond.
Not the thin, stretched-spider-silk version I've been feeling for however long I've been here. This is stronger. Brighter. Concentrated. Someone is pulling it from the other side with everything they have.
And somewhere, impossibly far away and impossibly close, I feel the warmth of the locket.
He found the locket.
The pull becomes a wrenching, brutal force that tears me out of the void and into something else entirely. I'm being dragged through it at speed, faster than falling, faster than the lightning that brought me to Wynmire in the first place—
I try to scream his name, but the sound is swallowed before it leaves my mouth.
The last thing I feel before everything goes black is the vial in my pocket, burning hot against my thigh. And the flower, pressed flat and dry against my hip.
Both of them humming. Both of them awake.
You'll know when to use them.
Then everything goes dark.
Itry to open my eyes and immediately regret it.
Well…I try to. The light is blinding after spending so long in all that nothing, and my eyelids feel like they’ve been glued shut. I blink hard, once, twice, three times, but it’s like staring directly into a spotlight. Everything is white.
I groan again because there’s a knot on the back of my head the size of a golf ball. Whatever yanked me here was not considerate enough to factor in a soft landing. I reach back and touch it, wincing. Great. Fantastic. A concussion to go with my cosmic dislocation.
