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“The… vial…” I gibbered.
Emily retrieved it and passed it to Marcella. Marcella tossed it onto the bed. “It’s fine. It doesn’t look like it spilled.”
“Did it… get… on me…” I wept, but she couldn’t know.
Marcella pressed her cheek against my forehead. “Demetrius, leave Searle. Help me with her.”
Demetrius tossed Searle at Henri.
“Take her to our room. We have to throw her in an ice bath.”
Demetrius scooped me up off the floor and carried me down the stairs to their second-floor suite. The pups had crawled out of their rooms and asked questions, which Demetrius told them something. I couldn’t make out the words, just thenot now, go to your roomstone. I twitched. Gaia, could I stop twitching?
What did it matter? What did it matter now?
My brain bubbled and boiled.
Demetrius put me on a blissfully cool wood floor. Or it was cool for about half a second, and then it was too hot. Things happened around me. But I was back there, kissing Searle, in his lap, betraying my mate, over and over and over and over…
Then hands moved me again, and the real cold came. And this time, itstayedcold. My entire body, cold. Sweet, sweet cold.
The twitching got worse, and the heat burned at the cold, but the cold stayed cold.
I drifted on a glacier, tormented by what I’d done.
Trapped
Istared at the table.
And stared.
Marcella pushed my iced tea another inch towards me.
Outside, it was a stormy early summer day. The trees bent over, lashed by the rain, and the house creaked with the rush of wind racing down the mountains.
Demetrius and Marcella had kept me in their bedroom, in a plastic kiddie pool filled with ice. I’d wit-wandered at the foot of their bed like a demented pet for eighteen-something-hours, twitching and shivering. They’d poured more ice on top of me and wrapped me in towels.
So I’d been nursemaided by some Elders. Great.
But it was hard to care through the empty, broken misery of my feverish grope-grope with Searle. And then the terror of him trying to erase my bond with Sterling.
Had the second drop hit me?
I felt along my face and throat for the millionth time. My entire body hurt. I was covered in little blue bruises from laying on ice cubes for hours, and my muscles ached from the incessant shivering and twitching as my body had tried to maintain the heat despite the ice.
The princess with the collar of many colors had still loved her original mate, even after the tears had taken him from her.
“You weren’t marked by the tears,” Demetrius told me.
I looked at him. “It erases the bond. But not the love. I can’t be sure the second drop didn’t fall onto me.”
Demetrius gave me a sad, paternal, faint smile. “I don’t think it did, but even if so, I don’t think it would matter. Every illumination showsbothwolves with a wound. That’s why the vial was always shown being held by a skeletal claw. Searle figured out that’s how you open it, but he only paid the price forhimself. Not for you.”
“May also be the tears have to be consumed,” Marcella added. “Or poured into the wound.”
I looked back at the table. “It doesn’t matter. I betrayed him. I… cheated.”
“Sterling?” Marcella asked.
