Chapter 19
I think it’s the next day. I’m not entirely sure.
The uncertainty feels weirdly familiar, like a distant friend I wish I’d never met.
Last time I was intimate with it, I used to count everything. Drips from a leaky pipe. The number of footsteps it would take to cross that small room. My own heartbeats between Reese opening the door and deciding whether or not to talk to me.
Now I just lie on the floor and wait.
At some point during what I assume was the night, I dragged myself into the corner of the room and made something resembling a nest. Not intentionally. My body just kind of folded in on itself there because it hurt less than the middle of the floor.
Everything hurts.
My ribs ache every time I breathe, like my lungs are still remembering what it felt like to be full of shadows instead of air. My throat is raw. My muscles feel like they’ve been wrung out and left to dry.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
I’ve survived worse.
Probably.
I miss my cat.
Felix is most likely sitting by the apartment door right now, judging my absence with the quiet moral superiority only cats can achieve. He’ll eventually decide I’ve died and eat the houseplants in protest.
I also want to call my mom.
The thought sneaks up on me out of nowhere, sharp and sudden. I hope she’s blissfully unaware of my current predicament and tending to her garden in North Carolina, sending me pictures of tomatoes like nothing in the world could ever touch her son.
I wonder what she’d say if she knew I’d been kidnapped twice by the same man.
Actually, that’s not fair.
Reese isn’t the same man anymore. That Reese died.
I curl in on myself a little tighter, wincing as a fresh spike of pain shoots through my chest.
He might actually kill me this time.
I think the only reason I hope he doesn’t is because I kind of want to commit murder first. And, no, I don’t think I’d regret killing my own uncle, not after everything he did.
My kidnapping. Reese’s death and Ascension. Setting me up so fucking perfectly…
Footsteps echo somewhere beyond the door, and my mind goes quiet. A moment later, the lock turns, and the door opens. Reese steps inside. Even from across the room, I can feel the air change when he enters, like the shadows in the corners of the room suddenly remember who they belong to.
I don’t bother getting up. Instead, I stay huddled on the floor, my cheek pressed against the cold concrete.
“Please, Reese,” I rasp, my voice absolutely wrecked. When was the last time I had a drink of water? “I can’t take any more.”
The words hang in the space between us for a second. Then…
I start laughing.
I don’t mean to. It just slips out of me, rough and slightly hysterical, like my brain finally snapped one too many tension wires.
Reese’s jaw clenches. “Why are you laughing?”
I roll onto my back, staring up at him to see the overhead light casting a dim halo around his shoulders, obscuring his face in darkness.
“In an alternate timeline,” I say between struggling breaths, “I’m saying those exact words for a very different reason.”
He frowns. “What?”
“You know. Different context.” I grin weakly. I try to change my voice up a bit, but it’s not like it can get any more husky or breathless. “Please, Reese. I can’t take any more. Your cock’s too big. Please stop.”
His stare goes flat. “Cason.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you never imagined it.”
His jaw ticks. “Stop.”
But the thing about torture and almost dying is that it really lowers your social inhibition. Also, I might actually be losing my mind.
“So what’s the safe word in this scenario?” I continue conversationally. “Because I feel like we skipped that step in the negotiation process.”
“Cason.” My name comes out as a growl this time, a warning.
But I’m already committed to the bit.
“You always did have a thing for control,” I say as I push myself up onto my elbows, grimacing from the pain that flares hot through my entire body. “And I have to admit the whole shadow daddy thing is intriguing. Very intimidating. In another life, this could’ve been a really weird kink.”
“I said stop it.”
The shadows at his feet stir as anger flashes across his face. But there’s something else there too, something I swear I’ve seen before.
Then, because apparently I’ve completely abandoned the concept of self-preservation, I push myself to my hands and knees and start crawling toward him. Every movement sends pain rippling through my ribs, but the absurdity of the moment keeps me going.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice hard and tense as he speaks with a clenched jaw.
“Testing a theory.”
“What theory?”
“That if I keep talking long enough you might actually snap and—”
The shadows move.
Cold, dark shapes form out of the shadows swirling around Reese’s feet, stretching across the floor before curling around my arms. This time, they don’t just wrap around me.
They grab me. With…hands.
Actual fucking hands.
“Holy fucking shit,” I whisper.
The shadow hands yank me backward. Hard. My back slams into the wall, the air ripping from my lungs as the darkness pins my arms to either side of me. My heart starts racing for an entirely new reason.
“You have hands now?” I say, staring at them in horrified fascination. “That feels like a serious fucking upgrade.”
Reese takes a few calm steps forward until he stands over me, breathing slower than he should be. His shadows hold me there, firm and unyielding as I stare up at him, my chest heaving.
He tilts his head. “You want something, Cason?”
I swallow hard. “You.”
Always fucking you.
I shouldn’t, of course. Not after everything.
Reese Morgan is hardwired into my brain, and extracting him would mean cutting me open and hoping I don’t bleed out. Like ripping out nerves and arteries and trying to survive.
My hands are pinned to the wall on either side of my head. The shadows curl around my wrists, not crushing, not gentle, just firm enough that I can’t move unless Reese allows it.
Which is a sentence that really should not be getting my dick hard right now.
He exhales slowly through his nose like he’s losing an argument with himself. Then he reaches for me.
But not with his hands.
With the ones that belong to the shadows.
There are more hands now. With two still binding my wrists, pulling them up higher over my head, others slide up my arms and shoulders like they’re mapping the shape of me, forming steadier fingers, stronger grips.
An extension of him, unmistakably. Every movement precise and deliberate.
They slide down my chest, and I can fucking feel them over my nipples through my shirt.
My pulse spikes.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Giving you what you want,” he says, his voice low and controlled.
Those shadow hands slide lower, fingers forming and reforming out of darkness as they trace down my ribs. I can feel the pressure of them—cool, weightless and heavy at the same time, like a ghost deciding where my body begins.
“Wait. I—”
They continue their slow exploration, dragging across my front like they’ve got all the time in the world. One of them pauses over my sternum, fingers splaying as if testing the beat of my heart.
That’s when I realize it’s still there. The dread. That awful, creeping weight that comes with his shadows. It presses into my chest the same way it did yesterday when he was torturing me. Cold and suffocating, like my body suddenly remembers every terrible thing that’s ever happened to it.
Except now it’s tangled up with something else.
My dick is still fucking hard.
Dread coils through my ribs at the same time that heat sparks under my skin, and the two sensations twist together into something deeply confusing and profoundly unfair.
I shake my head, my breath coming faster.
“No,” I mutter, realizing my chin is trembling. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
They don’t stop. Reese doesn’t move either. He just stands over me, watching as his shadows slide lower and lower and lower. My breath hitches when dark hands grip each of my thighs, and I look up at him with pleading eyes.
“I said I wanted you.” My voice trembles, but there’s no fixing it. “I want you, Reese. Not…not this.”
“You think I’m going to let you distract me?”
I flinch.
How can he not know what he does to me? What he did to me even when he was dead.
I really did try to convince myself that whatever it was between us had been a side effect of trauma. Proximity. Adrenaline. The weird psychological cocktail that forms when someone kidnaps you and then refuses to be the monster you expect.
I did believe that’s what it was for a long time. I told Reese I knew that’s what it was, but that I didn’t care.
But…it never went away.
I dated other people. I forced myself out into the world, sat across from strangers at coffee shops and bars and tried to feel the things you’re supposed to feel when someone looks at you like they want you. Sometimes I even liked them.
But every single time, eventually, my brain would betray me.
Someone would lean too close, and I’d think about the way Reese used to stand in the doorway of my cell, watching me like I was both a problem and a curiosity.
Someone would touch my arm, and I’d remember those moments when Reese had gotten close enough that the air between us felt charged, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
Seven years of too many reminders, of trying to move on from a man I thought was dead. And then he walked back into my life like he’d never left, shadows curling at his feet, accusing me of burning his world to the ground like he hadn’t done that exact thing to me.
How can he not know what he does to me?
How can he not see it?
That I hate that it’s not his hands on me, that it’s his shadows touching me instead of him.
Because the worst part of all of this, the part I never managed to fix no matter how many years passed, is that it was always him. Even when he was gone. Even when I thought I’d watched him bleed out on a concrete floor.
It was still him.