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Stark misery stamped his features. As if every word she spoke bore the agony of a hammer blow. He took her by the elbows. Dragged her roughly to her feet so they stood inches apart. His gaze boring a hole through her. “Back from where? What did you see? Tell me everything.”
“You told me I worried over nothing. You promised you’d return.”
His pupils dilated as his grip crushed. Chest heaving. Voice ragged. “I didn’t return. Couldn’t.”
“Why not?” The air felt charged with invisible eavesdroppers. The room’s meager light holding them in a circle of solitude. A time out of time. “Why didn’t you keep your promise?”
His eyes seemed to reflect back at her with a bonfire glow as he struggled to answer. “I tried. But on the road”—he took a deep shaky breath—“there was an ambush. Too many of them.” He shuddered, his face a sickly gray. “I remember blood. And the mud as I fell.”
The long stare shrank to the space separating them as if he suddenly realized he held her. The questions she’d asked. The answers he’d given.
She tipped her head back, heart racing, shivers jolting along her nerves. The fireworks returned. Flares of light and heat arcing between them. Mage energy dancing across the surface of her skin. Raw. Wild. Nothing like the gentle, meditative flow emitted by the priestesses. This held a snarling, rabid rage. Chained, but always hunting. Always seeking escape.
She drowned in the untamed energy. Felt herself swamped within Daigh’s powers.
“You,” he murmured. “I was right. You were there. I remember.”
“No,” she countered, hands splayed against his immovable chest as if to push him away. But pushing him away was the last thing she wanted. She wanted him closer. Like a moth drawn to a flame, she felt an inescapable pull. A deadly attraction.
Crushing his mouth to hers, he backed against the wall, his body solid against hers. Only his heart’s wild beating an indication he felt the same tumult of emotion.
She reached under his shirt. Skimmed the line of his torso. The ridges of scars rough beneath her fingers.
He groaned, his tongue teasing her lips apart. Sliding within. Dropping the bottom out of her world with the way it probed and retreated. A soldier seeking an enemy’s weakness.
She opened to him. Couldn’t help it. Her mind had divorced itself from her body. Thought seemed irrelevant. She was all about the senses. His skin’s blazing heat. The warm wine taste on his tongue. A clean soap and man scent tickling her nose. His harsh, quick inhalations in response to her every caress.
He pulled free her kerchief. Loosed her hair from its confining combs so that it spilled across her shoulders. Threaded his hands through it, sending a shiver racing through her as he backed her toward the bed.
She dropped heavily onto the mattress, and he knelt at her feet like a knight from a tale, his eyes locked with hers, his intentions burning in the darkest reaches of his sin-black gaze. Turning her to jelly.
A door opened at the far end of the room, sending a chilly draft whistling through the room. The candle guttered and went out. The moment broken.
Daigh rose from his knees, scrubbing the heels of his hands against his eyes. Lines bit into the corners of his mouth. The lamplight creating frightening ghostly hollows in his face.
“It was you in my dream. I’m not mistaken,” he hissed accusingly. “Why do you pretend as if you don’t know who I am?”
She glanced toward the door, but whoever had interrupted them had turned left toward the stairs.
“Answer me, Sabrina.” He stepped menacingly forward, his brows drawn into a scowl, his jaw set.
How did one go from blazing hot to arctic cold within a
heartbeat? She hugged her body, drawing her knees up. “I’m not pretending. I swear. I don’t know why you remember me. I don’t know you. I never saw you before two weeks ago. Honestly.”
He flexed his hands. Stiff-legged and shoulders set as if meeting his fate head-on. “But you and I . . . and the promise. That was real. How can I remember something that didn’t happen?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll only figure out the answer together. Of that, I’m sure.”
He seemed to consider this, his face losing some of its horrible ferocity. “Why take such a risk for a man you don’t know?”
“It has as much to do with me as you.” She rubbed a hand over her forehead as if wiping away the heartbreaking image of their final parting. “I’m the one having visions of the two of us that never happened.”
Daigh speared her with a grim stare. “Oh, they’re real, Sabrina. I remember.”
She swallowed back a whimper of panic. Because she knew he told the truth. Because she remembered too.
Daigh opened his eyes on a whisper of breeze through his room. A shift in air pressure. A sound that should be silence. Rising, he dragged a shirt over his head. Pulled his boots on. Lifted the latch on his door, cracking it slowly.
