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I wake to the sound of a door opening and someone stumbling in.
I sit up, looking around. It was completely dark here when I went to sleep—when I passed out, I suppose—but now the walls glow with a dim green light, emanating from the vines crawling over the stone. I blink in confusion, my vision hazy, and I find a huddled heap before the door.
I don’t know how I recognize her; I justknow.
“Frankie,” I breathe.
I scramble toward her and delicately touch her arm, finding it wet with blood. She’s just been in a fight; her wounds are open, slick, raw. She groans and sits up, her hair coming out of its tight bun at the crown of her head.
“Malix,” she says. “You’re alive.”
I grip her by the hands, finding that they, at least, are dry. “You’re bleeding from your shoulder; are you wounded anywhere else?”
“I don’t think so,” she says. She coughs, the sound turning into a groan. “Fuck…they beat the hell out of me, but just enough to get me here. Why are they keeping us alive?”
“Prisoners, I think,” I say. “They can read our minds with the device in the atrium. I don’t know how.”
She nods. “It’s azephtan—or at least, something like it. It talked to me.”
I frown. “What did it say?”
“The same thing the sex wall said,” she mutters. “Survive. It’s like it doesn’t have anything else to say.”
My head spins as I think about our next course of action—as I consider that they’ve thrown us both in here, that we’re alive, that there’s some other force at work. But my nerves fire where we touch, and I can only imagine doing one thing.
I take her into my arms and tuck her head against my shoulder.
“I was certain I had seen you for the last time,” I murmur into her hair. “Never again.”
She curls her body against me and I draw her toward the wall, leaning back so we both can rest. I don’t care about the ghosts in the temple anymore; they can chatter all they want. My mate is with me, and she’s fisting her hands in my bloody, dirty tunic.
We fall asleep like that.
Bloodied and broken—but together.
??
We wake sometime later.
Frankie is already up, having wound herself more tightly around me. My body becomes aware of her before I do, attuned to her scent, the sensation of her hands on me. I search for her shoulder and find the wound has stopped bleeding, though I can sense that she is still sore.
“We really fucked up, didn’t we?” she whispers.
I stroke her hair. “We’re faced with something…enormous,” I murmur. “It is only logical that we would require reinforcements—and that we perhaps bit off more than we could chew.”
She looks up at me. “Awfully human of you to say.”
I smile. “I learned it from a humanmoo-vee.”
She lets out a short laugh, ducking her head against my shoulder again. I stretch out my legs and she hooks one knee over mine, her hand splayed across my chest.
When we’re like this, I could almost lose myself in her. Frankie leans against my shoulder and breathes against my neck, her lips so close to my fringe that the pleasure begins to overwhelm me even now.
“I got a message out,” she whispers, her voice so quiet that I can scarcely hear her.
I look down at her, tipping her chin up with my fingers. “He won’t let us languish here, will he?” I ask—more of a statement than a question.
“He won’t,” she confirms, meeting my eyes.
