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My bracelet is gone.

The bare skin where it should be is smooth and wrong, and its absence lands in my chest harder than anything else in this room has managed. Because they took the thing that makes me human, and the girl lying on this bed with her wrists pinned above her head isn’t Jade Harrington anymore. She’s a weapon wearing my body, and she doesn’t miss the bracelet, because missing it would require caring about who she used to be.

Logan’s teeth graze the spot where he’s fed from me, and without warning he’s biting down, his fangs sinking deep.

Pleasure detonates from the twin points of pressure. It crashes through me in waves timed to every pull of his mouth, tugging a thread that runs straight from my throat to the place he’s buried inside me, and the heat between my hips is climbing again, and I don’t want him to stop.

The horror is still there—Ruby’s arrows, Amber’s gray skin, and Sapphire’s eyes on the bed—but it’s drifting now, every swallow pushing it further away. My shoulders sink into the mattress, my fists unclenching from the sheets as my thighs go soft around Logan’s hips. The fear in my chest that’s been screaming since I saw Logan’s Revenant eyes goes quiet, and the quiet feels like mercy.

Draw after draw, the pleasure thickens. The pull of his fangs and the drag of him inside me merge into a slow, devouring tide, and I’m sinking into it, my fingers curling into the silk while my body thrums with something that feels dangerously like peace.

I’m warm and wanted, and for the first time in a long time, nothing hurts.

He retracts his fangs and pulls back to see my face, and whatever he finds there makes his eyes burn brighter.

“There she is.” His hips drive into me again before I can respond, and I chase the friction until a new hunger rises inside me, sharp and consuming, aimed at the pulse thrumming in his throat.

Before I know what’s happening, my canines push forward, elongating as they slide into place with a pressure that’s half pain and half hunger. The ache in my teeth matches the ache between my hips, both of them building toward the same destination, and my electricity rises with them, crackling under my skin, hungrier than ever.

“That’s it.” His fingers tighten in my hair, guiding my mouth to his neck. “Show me what those pretty new fangs can do.”

His pulse beats against my mouth, and the hunger is so consuming that my vision narrows to the vein and nothing else. My fangs rest on his skin, one breath from breaking through, and his pulse quickens, and gods, I want it. I want him in every way a body can have another body.

“Stop fighting it.” His voice drops low against my ear. “Bite down and push your lightning into me so I can feel both at once.”

My teeth break his skin, my body lighting up from the inside when his blood hits my tongue. Every nerve wakes up at once, because his blood is feeding my magic, and my magic feeds the pleasure, and it’s coiling tighter in my core until my whole body is vibrating with it.

“That’s it,” he groans against my ear, his breaths quickening with every pull of my mouth. “Take everything you need.”

His pulse hammers against my tongue, my current pouring into him and his blood pouring into me, the two of us running one circuit through two bodies at a voltage that should kill us both. And then I’m right there, every spark in me drawing tight until the two hungers slam together, wave after wave of it crashing through my core as every spark in my body fires at once. The climax goes on and on, feeding itself—his blood in my mouth, his body driving into mine, my current pouring into him and rebounding back as pleasure—a closed loop of the only two sensations left in the world.

When I finally pull my lips from his throat, Logan cries out against my ear, his hips driving deep as my electricity pours into him through everywhere our skin is sealed together. He finishes with a shattered groan, his fingers flexing against my hips in time with each pulse he empties into me, his red-gold eyes locked on mine as he fills me completely.

I haven’t fully come down before black fire erupts around the bed, reality folds, and we’re back thirty seconds ago—my fangs breaking his skin, the first hot rush of his blood hitting my tongue, the climax detonating through me from its first wave. The pleasure doubles through me so violently that my scream comes out silent while he drives into my convulsing body and breaks a second time, flooding me while his hips stutter and slam, a release stacked on one the world erased but his body remembers.

“Again,” I beg against his throat, his blood on my lips, my body pushing up for more.

Black fire answers, and we break again, and again, and again. Every fold of reality ends the same way—him emptying himself into me with a sound more wrecked than the last. Time is just the space between one climax and the same climax, until the thing we’re doing has no name in any language because no two people with souls could survive it.

My current swells under my skin until my sparks burn white instead of silver. The silk is smoking beneath us, and I’m a live wire wrapped around him, holding voltage no one was ever built to hold as he drives into me again and roars against my throat.

My body clamps around him in waves that have waves, and every ounce of electricity I own erupts in a single blast, silver-white light exploding from my skin in a dome that swallows the bed, the chandeliers, the thrones, and the dead star touched seated in them.

The chandeliers shatter. The velvet ignites. Logan’s red-gold eyes blaze down at me through the blinding surge, his release hot inside me, his hands gripping me for the next black vortex that will fold reality⁠—

And the white takes everything before it can.

36

JADE

I’m back on the lakebed, pulling at the sword, and it tears free with a force that slams through my arms and throws me backward. I hit the ground hard, and both visions slam through me at the same time.

Logan’s cold face in my hands and his warm body inside me. His corpse’s red-gold eyes and his living red-gold eyes, one on top of the other, the field and the bed and the field and the bed, and I can’t tell which one I’m lying in. My hands are shaking so hard the sword rattles against the stone, and I scramble backward on my elbows, because there’s a throne to my right, then there’s no throne, there’s a lakebed, there’s Ruby’s dead eyes, there’s nothing, there’s⁠—

“Jade!” Logan’s on his knees beside me, grabbing my shoulders, and when I look into his eyes, they’re gray.

Relief hits me so hard that the scream comes out as a sob.