Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Carver
I felt her. Felt.
“Fuck,” I hiss out before kicking the dead corpse and stomping my boot to the ground like a child.
The dirt of this fucking land is so thick in the air that I can’t see. I can only sense things, and right now, I can’t sense her.
“What’s wrong?” Christian growls out and then he does the one thing no one’s done to me in ten years.
He fucking puts his hand on my shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” he asks again with so much contained violence in him, I can see it bleeding across his pretty skin in crawling black lines of dark magic.
“Something’s happened.” I shove past him and keep going, rushing through the heat of the land so fast, it only stirs up more debris.
But he’s still there. Still keeping up with my strides every step of the way.
“She’s hurt, isn’t she?” he asks, and I know he knows. I know he feels her in a way I don’t, and that thought alone should piss me off, but it doesn’t.
The pretty Prince and I are too similar, unfortunately. He knows what’s his is his. And he also knows that Crymson is ours.
Sharing is caring, my dear Prince.
Right now, though . . . there’s a stabbing in my chest where her love should lie. It hurts. It hurts to breathe, and it hurts not knowing.
“Fuck!” I scream again into the darkness.
A tree trunk hits my shoulder hard, and instead of stumbling, I grip it around the center and bring it down hard with one arm.
My frustration rips through the pounding of my heart, attempting to replace the fear and pain there with rage.
The cracking of bark tears through the night. Dust floods up around us in a wave.
I stop and stare for a long moment. The Blood Prince watches me as I watch the void around us.
I’m fucking stuck here in this maze of chaos that we built around ourselves, and I can’t . . .
“I can’t–I can’t feel her,” I whisper.
I swallow hard, and I look to the one person still putting up with my shit through all this. His dark eyes are monstrous. He’s a demented demon of a man.
But he’s unbothered too.
“I can,” he confesses, and those two simple words rip the air from my lungs.
“You can?” I search his gaze, and though the Prince of the Blood Kingdom is said to be a cruel lying bastard, I’ve never trusted a single soul as much as I do him in this moment.
“She’s alive,” he declares, and I believe him more than I believe my own heart right now.
Call it one man’s desperate delusion but . . .
I hope he’s right.