Chapter 28
Sweet Dreams
MAX
E’s breathing evens out behind me, slow and deep, the rhythm of someone who has surrendered to sleep. I envy him for it. My own eyes remain open, fixed on the faint seam of moonlight cutting through the tent.
He’s still wrapped around me, his soft exhales fanning against the back of my ear, maddeningly intimate.
The proof of his desire presses against my lower back, but he’s definitely asleep.
It’s only a body reflex, and I tell myself to relax, to let exhaustion drag me under, but my mind refuses to shut down.
I’m too aware of the weight of his arm around my waist. Of the way his thighs rest along mine.
Of the steady, reassuring press of his chest against my back.
My flames stir beneath my skin, not flaring—just simmering.
There are only two layers of fabric between us as we spoon, and that alone is enough to keep me awake.
I shouldn’t be thinking about sex. Not with Nick sleeping a few feet away. Not with the unresolved mystery of who E was in life still hanging over us. But the fact is, he’s got a body now, and that changes the rules between us in ways I’m not ready to examine too closely.
I imagine turning over slightly, my mouth finding his in the dark without words, and my pulse swirls. Instead, I focus on the steadiness of his breathing and lean back into him, enough to reassure myself he won’t disappear by sunrise.
Sleep takes me despite everything. Shadows aren’t supposed to allow dreamers from Faerie, but I find myself in the Dreaming anyway.
I’m small—eleven, maybe—my bare feet scraping against the wooden boards of my mother’s bedroom closet.
The windows are sealed with rough, prickly planks that let only thin stripes of copper light through. Outside, the eternal autumn bleeds through the dark, leaves the color of rust drifting in a slow, soundless fall under the bright moonlight.
It’s the kind of place that teaches you to move quietly, to hide, to listen before you breathe.
Don’t be seen, don’t make a sound, my instincts tell me.
I can’t move, though. It’s as if I’ve slipped back into a body that doesn’t truly belong to me.
My mother moves to the boarded window above the head of her bed, the one I was told never to touch.
It’s condemned like all the others, but an eerie, silvery gleam slips through the gaps. The light coming from it feels too pale, too clean, and in stark contrast to the deep red glow of the forest I’m accustomed to.
My mother wedges her fingers beneath one of the planks covering the peculiar window and pries it off. The wood gives a low, groaning creak. Then, she reaches to remove another.
And another.
Each board comes loose too easily, like they were never meant to hold for long. By the look of it, they’ve been taken off and put back many, many times. The silver light grows stronger with every strip of wood she pulls away, washing over the walls and eclipsing the red-tainted moonlight.
When the last plank falls, I bite back a gasp.
It’s not a window, but a mirror.
The tall mirror catches my mother’s reflection, and she stands there for a couple of breaths, framed in cold light.
Her long red braid cascades over her shoulder, the loose neckline of her nightgown slipping just enough to reveal the constellation of freckles on her chest. Her bottom lip is caught between her teeth, and her brows are knitted together, as if she’s deeply conflicted.
The surface ripples before he comes through.
He doesn’t climb or step inside, no.
He flies in.
His platinum blonde hair, pale as frost, shines in the night, and white wings unfurl behind him, brushing the low ceiling. An otherworldly glow adorns his skin and grants him an air of religious fantasy.
I can’t see his face, not clearly.
He doesn’t look in my direction. Not once. All of him is fixed on her.
“My sweet Sierra,” he says.
“You shouldn’t have come,” my mother murmurs, but the words are worn smooth, as if they’ve been said in vain before. “It’s not safe.”
“And yet,” he answers, smiling, “you were waiting for me.”
His wings blink out of existence, scattering light across her face as they vanish, and his hand lifts, hovering just shy of her cheek. “Kneel for me, Sierra.”
“What about Maxine?” she asks. “What if she hears?”
“My time is precious.” His voice comes out rough, shaped not only by urgency, but greed. “And you waste it with hesitation.”
My mother shudders. “You know I exist only for your pleasure.”
She falls to her knees in front of him, and he laughs a delighted laugh. The light flickers. His shadow stretches across the wall behind him as my mother slides open his breeches and takes him in her mouth.
I try to move, to call out, but I’m pinned behind my own eyes, forced to watch.
Outside, a wolf howls.
The vision fractures, and I’m standing on the cliffs, naked. The wind plays with my hair as a molten, solid frame walks behind me. Hands—large, certain—slide over my waist.
“Where have you been?” my dream-husband growls in a scolding manner.
The same platinum blonde hair. The same wings.
“I don’t know. The past, I think,” I answer quickly.
Long, expert fingers trace the seam between my thighs.“What good is the past, when I’m your future?”
A warmth pools low in my belly, and my body arches into his touch without shame. Without doubt. He’s my master, and I’m his instrument, and nothing else matters here, among the clouds.
He rubs my hips up and down. “Did you give in to him yet, your ghost?”
A nervous gasp quakes my throat. “No.”
“Why not, when you know it’s inevitable?” He squeezes my waist. “You belong to us, Max.”
“Us?”
His hands travel up and up, sneaking to my front, closing around the greedy, heavy flesh there. My dream-husband kneads my breasts together, then apart, rolling my aching peaks between his index and thumb.
I moan out a curse and a blessing, the pressure between my legs building and building.
“You get to have us both. Him by day, me by night. Aren’t you a lucky little fox?” He moves his hands around to my ass and explores my flesh almost savagely. “Don’t overthink it.”
Again, his words echo those E spoke to me earlier, and I force myself to focus and not be taken in by the way his hands caress my buttocks up and down.
“You’re E, aren’t you? He’s you, and you’re him. You’re the same person.”
He chuckles at that, giving my arse a playful slap. “Oh no. He’s not broken, like me.”
I’m suspended in midair, my toes not touching the ground anymore. My dark angel takes me higher and higher, as we stare into the misty abyss in front of us.
Pleasure explodes at the apex of my thighs, then shudders through my legs, toes, and chest. I tremble from the undertow of it—powerful, dizzying, wickedly timed. I’m falling, falling, and crashing hard, hard, hard.
E’s heated groan pulls me from the dream. “Fuck, Max. You’re making it hard for me to be reasonable here.”
I crack open my eyes. Dawn glows through the zipper of the tent, and the campfire crackles in the distance, the back of the tent empty.
Fuck.
To my horror, my dream bled into real life, where I’ve been unconsciously grinding into E, into his long, hard length. He stifles a groan against my shoulder, and his hand slides right down my stomach toward the place where I need him most.
I suck in a sharp breath, my body still floating at such heights, I can’t see straight. He slips under the lace of my underwear.
“Blessed Flame,” he hisses, his voice rough with sleep. “You’re fucking soaked, little fox.”
“I—I didn’t mean to. I was only dreaming,” I breathe out.
“Dreaming of what?” he asks darkly.
“Of you,” I say, glossing over the truth.
With a low, satisfied groan, he pushes two fingers inside me in an easy, almost humiliating glide. “Fuck, you feel so good.”
“Nick might hear,” I squeak.
He sneaks his free hand around to my front and caresses my breasts through the fabric of my shirt. “We don’t know how long this new body of mine might last. I want to touch all of you.”
His caress reminds me of my dream-husband, holding the same care and cruelty as he pinches my nipples in turn.
I bite back a moan. “And I have no say in it?”
“Absolutely none,” he chuckles against my bare shoulder.
My lids flutter as he ravishes my neck, nibbling, teasing, biting his way up to my earlobe.
When I dare to open my eyes again, the sight of his hand moving under my shirt, of my breasts being used and abused by his invisible fingers, is so intoxicating that I cry out.
His palm presses gently over my mouth in warning. “You have to be quiet, my love, so your brother doesn’t hear you, figures out what we’re doing, and banishes me to the afterlife for good.” He licks a train of fire along my pulse point. “Can you be so, so quiet for me, little vixen?”
I nod.
“Good girl.”
He draws slow circles around my sensitive bundle of nerves before sinking his fingers deep again. The powerful stroke makes my vision spark.
It was bound to happen, given our lack of self-control. If sleeping in his arms was a mistake, then this is armageddon. The world beyond the tarp is a shiver of dying leaves—copper, gold, and rust. The past. The future. They don’t matter.
He does it again.
And again.
I see stars behind my eyelids, my legs parting further, my will coming apart far too easily. I bite down on my bottom lip to stifle the sound building in my chest, forcing every gasp inward and swallowing them as I rock against my dead lover’s hand.
I float when he touches me.
Not just in the way people say it, not some pretty exaggeration—but truly, terrifyingly unmoored.
Like my body has forgotten its own weight, and every piece of me suddenly loosens and lifts, carried somewhere higher than I’ve ever been allowed to go.
There’s no rush to it. No frenzy. He takes his time, like he knows exactly how far I can be pushed before I break—and walks me right to the edge.
No one has ever touched me like this, in such a controlled and precise manner.
Every movement is calculated, every pause longer than the last, but he doesn’t tease—he builds.
He layers my pleasure on top of euphoria, brick by brick, until I’m suspended in that strange, fragile place where everything feels too bright and too open.
And then he stops. Eases just enough to keep me up high, dangling, aching for heights I can’t quite reach on my own. This forbidden need to break under his touch in spite of everything, in secret, in shame, boils my blood.
“You’re so fucking good to me, little fox. Tell me how I make you feel,” he commands.
“You make me feel like dying.”
His throat rumbles with approval.
“Next time, I’ll stuff my cock right here, deep in your sweet pussy” —he reaches far, far inside me— “and fuck you hard and slow. Next time…” he grins against my shoulder. “I’ll make you scream.”
He presses his hand hard over my mouth and shoves me over the edge in one hard stroke. The single most wrongful pleasure I’ve ever felt.
Tears flood my cheeks as rapture sweeps through me, hot enough to lick my bones clean, sharp enough to destroy every fear I’ve carried here.
Every part of my soul fractures on impact—only the pain is exquisite, splintering into something brighter, sharper, almost too much to bear.
It breaks and breaks again, each wave giving way to another, until I can’t tell where it ends.
Just a rush of something electric, impossibly sweet, impossible to hold.
And it hurts—coming down from such heights. Crashing back to earth, my body trembling, haunted by the echo of that blissful, aching sweetness.
The worst part is not the intensity or the way my body shatters for him.
It’s knowing that whatever he unlocked in me—this lightness, this impossible, breathless height—I’ll never find it again. Not without him.
Shame and pleasure thud in my blood, indistinguishable from one another. I told myself I wouldn’t do this. That I would wait, that I needed answers, clarity, and distance. Instead, I let my body lead.
E muffles my moans with his hand and licks the tears off my cheeks. “Shhh, it’s over,” he whispers, brushing his mouth near my ear. “But when we’re alone,” he murmurs, his voice low, threaded with satisfaction. “You won’t get off so easily.”
“For a man who said he couldn’t wait because this might be his only chance, you’re awfully set on the future,” I croak.
He rests a hand over my stomach with a small sigh. “You’re mine, now.”
The entire scope of the dream creeps back into my mind uninvited. I was so focused on the latter parts of the vision that I almost forgot about the flying man coming to meet my mother through the mirror.
I should ask E if he remembers anything about her, but the thought brings bile to my mouth.
I can’t bring myself to believe they knew each other. Mabel wouldn’t have taken care of a ghost who had fucked over my mom like that. She would have warned me against him.
Unless she didn’t know…
What if long-buried memories are bleeding through in ways I don’t understand yet?
Regrets pulse in my ribcage. Maybe I’m misremembering the past, maybe an outside force twisted what I saw. Or maybe the man in that bedroom wasn’t E at all, and I’m just so afraid it was him, I can’t see past it.
But the resemblance—the haloed light, the bite of power…
My stomach knots.
I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know. Because if it’s true, then what we just did is unforgivable. I lie there in the growing light, my doubts multiplying in the silence, and tell myself there must be another explanation. There has to be.