Her ice flooded me, but the fire just grew worse—doing to me what it’d done to the board members. It felt as if my organs were boiling. My left femur snapped with a sickening crack, the pain so blinding I screamed against her shoulder.
The sprinkler system finally kicked in, spraying useless arcs of water.
Rook wrapped her arms around my head as chunks of steel rained down.
The crack of another rib made me groan. “W-What’s going—” My right forearm shattered into fragments.
Holy fuck—
Thepain.
“Lucien!”
I collapsed on my side as more bones shattered, leaving me crippled and useless. The lobby spun as pain made me delirious. The burning ceiling groaned—dropping massive blocks of concrete.
“Watch out!” Rook tensed over me, protecting my broken body with hers.
“Don’t.” I choked on blood. “Get out...go.”
“I won’t leave you!”
“Leave.” I howled as something else broke.
“Fuck you!” Rook yelled at the howling hellfire. “I didn’t let you have him the first time and I won’t allow you to take him now!” Rising to her knees, she spread her palms and tipped her head back. A shockwave of winter blasted in all directions. White and ice and glacial beauty.
Frost raced up the walls, across the floor, and webbed over the ceiling.
The flames hissed with rage as arctic power swallowed them whole. The temperature plummeted so fast that the falling debris shattered into dust, falling over us like snow.
The windows blew out.
Her ice sank into my skin.
And for one blissful second, the pain calmed—
But then a blinding pulse of frequencyslammedinto us—a savage corkscrew driving right through my skull and butchering my brain. My vision went white. Every nerve in my body seized.
Rook cried out, her body jerking against mine before going terrifyingly limp.
I tried to reach for her, tried to summon even a single spark of heat that wouldn’t murder me.
Another bolt of frequency struck.
The last thing I registered was the sound of heavy boots crunching over rubble and glass, coming straight for us—
Chapter Seventeen
MY HEAD THROBBED AS IF IT’D BEEN split open by a tuning fork.
The low, bone-deep thrum of the frequency weapon still echoed somewhere behind my eyes. Bruises ached all over my body, and the need to switch positions had me moaning as I went to move and...couldn’t.
Panic ripped through me, forcing my achy eyes open and blinking back haze. My arms wouldn’t rise; my legs refused to shift.
“Where the fuck did you find that?” a man cursed.
I froze as the world slowly came into focus. Six men had their backs to me where they crowded together on the threshold of an ornate wooden door.
“It was knotted around her ankle. I only found it when I buckled the straps.”
