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My eyes flutter open and he’s there. Looming over me, his fingers digging into my arms with a rough shake. But he’s not hungry for me; he’s seething, his every breath tearing through gritted teeth.
“What’s wrong?”
“You. You’re killing me. Jesus, Pcholka.” He lets me go then, spinning away from me, and I fall back on the bed. Sweat dots my temples, my hair clinging to my damp skin. The ache from the dream, it’s still here, and when I glance down, my hand is buried between my thighs behind my white panties.
Embarrassment is but a flash as I watch him seethe, realizing how something so natural had such a powerful hold on him.
“I can’t control what I do in my sleep, Kostya. If you would just go to sleep, you won’t have to see it.”
He’s pacing now with his hands balled in fists at his sides. His dress shirt hangs open, giving me a peek at his wide, hard chest. “I need darkness to sleep, Pcholka. Light means I’m exposed.”
But it’s not the physical exposure plaguing him now. It’s the inescapable truth in his heart provoking him, pummeling him with a truth that won’t hide one more second.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and stand, the t-shirt I put on to sleep grazing the tops of my thighs. I bite back a whimper at the feel of cotton gliding over my skin. Stepping into his path, I force him to stop. “I’m vulnerable in the darkness and you’re vulnerable in the light.”
“It seems so, yes,” he growls, a sound of pure frustration breaking free.
“What if there’s a solution?” I run my fingers along the buttons of his shirt and peel the fabric over his shoulders, careful of the wound he must have bandaged while I was in the tub.
Violent fingers grip my wrist. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Making different memories of the dark.”
His fingers clutch the back of my hair and he yanks my head back. “Bite your tongue.”
“I’d rather you bite it.”
Lungs heaving with a battle of wills inside him, he lowers his forehead to mine. “Damn you. You must stop this. This road doesn’t end well for either of us. Blood and death. No happy ending. Is that what you want?”
Leaning up on my tiptoes, my mouth hovering over his, I cup his face. “I hate this life I’m cursed with, Kostya. Is it so wrong to want something for just me?”
“No, Pcholka, it’s not. But I can’t give you this.”
“Fuck my virginity—”
His tortured groan takes me in a chokehold where all I want to do is soothe him.
“Sleep with me.”
“Pcho—”
I press my fingertip to his mouth. “Just sleep. I can face the dark if I’m in your arms, Konstantin. Please.”
He doesn’t speak. His eyelids sink shut and his shoulders relax. With his nod of surrender, I take a step back and climb back under the covers while he blows out all but one candle. At the edge of the bed, the flicker of light illuminates the doubts raging through him and every second of looming darkness without him touching me plunges me into all-consuming fear.
“I’m exhausted, Kostya. Please.”
He blows out the last candle and the swift rise of panic grips me by the throat. The complete darkness unlike anything I’ve known being in this crypt squeezes around me.
But then the mattress dips and he’s there, lining his body up with mine. His bare chest a broad warm force keeping me anchored to safety. I lay my palm over his heart, reassured by the rhythmic pounding behind his ribs.
I focus on each one, counting them in my head until the bands tightening around me loosen, and my breathing grows deeper, my breaths longer. Unable to see, my other senses take over. The musky scent of his cologne, faint, but still clinging to his skin. Hair on his forearms brushing over my shoulder as he threads his fingers through my hair tentatively, like he doesn’t know what to do next or how to treat me.
Growing bolder, I trace my fingertips along his chest, the soft hair covering hard muscles hiding a roadmap of scars he’s picked up along the way. Some jagged and raised, others no more than a barely perceptible line.
“So many scars. How did you get them?”
He stills under my palm. “Protecting you.”
