“For now,” she teased, those green eyes flashing with a wicked gleam.
“Excuse me!” I rolled on top of her, pinning her wrists over her head, stealing another kiss that left her breathless. “If you’ve got any other monsters on your list, I’m gonna need names. Right now. Addresses too.”
“Why, so you can hunt them down and kick their asses? So chivalrous, sinner.”
“No, angel. So I can hunt them down, kick their asses, light them on fire, and watch them burn, if you want to get technical about it, which—”
“Jax!” she gasped, her face suddenly falling, eyes wide with shock. “Oh my god! I just realized… Keradoc!”
I groaned. “Pleasetell me the warlord presently holding us hostage is not on your fuck list. I thought we agreed not to talk about him while naked.”
“The scars!” she exclaimed, as if this made any fucking sense at all.
“What scars? Haley, what are you talking about?”
“Keradoc’s scars. I can’t believe I didn’t… Fuck.” She wriggled out from under me and stumbled out of bed, hunting down her bathrobe. She was still wobbly on her feet—either from her ordeal in the moat, or from what we’d done to bring her back. Either way, I didn’t want her storming off into the castle in search of the fucking warlord on her own. Or atall, for that matter, but if there was one thing I’d learned about Haley Barnes—well, other than how to make her come—it was that when she set her mind to something, nothing would stop her from seeing it through.
“Mind telling me where we’re going?” I asked, following her out of bed and hastily pulling my pants on. “You haven’t even started singing again yet, and now you’re—”
“Where’s Elian?”
“If I had to guess? Probably giving Keradoc a fewmorescars, considering what he did to you tonight.”
“Hedidn’t do anything.”
“His hired lackeys tried to…” I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Seriously, angel. Why are you so worked up about fucking Keradoc all of a sudden?”
She knotted her bathrobe tight, her face suddenly pale. “Because fucking Keradocisn’tfucking Keradoc at all. And I need to find Elian before he does something that’ll fuck him up worse than all the Devil’s Dream in the realm.”
23
ELIAN
Istayed, just like she’d asked me to.
Watched with a desperate agony bleeding through my soul as Jax and Hudson gave her everything I no longer could. It was a torture worse than any withdrawals, worse than any hawthorn stakes I’d ever taken to the gut.
Yet I wasn’t able to look away. Not once. Because mygod, seeing her like that? Watching my brothers take care of her, put that blush in her cheeks, make her sing her sweet little off-key songs?
Haley had never been so happy. So alive. And witnessing that was like witnessing a goddamn miracle. It was incredible. Breathtaking. And yeah, so fucking hot I’m surprised we all didn’t burst into flames.
But it broke my heart nevertheless. Because as much as I wanted them to make her happy,Iwanted to make her happy, too. And I fucking couldn’t.
Ever again.
Fuck. I had to get out of there. Right fucking now.
Not because my heart was smashed—that was a small price to pay for all the things I’d put her through, and I was willing to endure it for as long and as often as she granted me the privilege of watching her.
No, I had to get out of there right fucking now because I had business to attend to.
Haley had been hurt tonight.
Someone had put her life at risk.
Which meant someone needed todie.
Didn’t matter that I still wore the evidence of her effect on me, a cold dampness spreading across my pants. Didn’t matter that I was hard for her all over again, a sharp ache in my balls to match the one in my heart, twin pains that would never ease.Noneof that mattered. Lust mingled with pain mingled with rage into a fierce determination that propelled me out of that room and down the dark hallway in search of the only man who—in the absence of the guards Hudson and Jax hadn’t been able to locate—could pay tonight’s hefty price.
