Chapter 3 #3
And yet, here they were, and she was looking at him through those long lashes, eyes dark and endless and full of something dangerous.
A promise, a need, something deeper than lust and mightier than longing.
Those full lips parted, soft and ready, inviting him in.
No words spoken, but the command was clear: Take. Take. Take.
His breath stuttered in his throat, his brain lagged behind while his mind buffered, frozen between the rules he lived by and the gravity of her pulling him deeper into a place he was never meant to enter.
Because he couldn’t be here. This couldn’t be happening, but it was as real as the night before, when she’d sat beside him in her car, exhausted and guarded.
This was another part of her, one she’d managed to hide from him so completely. In here, she was unfiltered, unaware of the lines she was destroying with every step.
She reached for his hand.
He should’ve pulled back.
Instead, her fingers laced through his, anchoring him inside a space that shouldn’t hold him, and she stepped backward. One slow, deliberate step. Then another. Her gaze never left his until her knees hit a bed that hadn’t been there a breath ago.
The dream was building itself around her desire.
Around him.
And then, for the love of everything that was wrong, she stepped up to him. Her palm skimmed his chest, slow and open, up to his shoulder, then higher, fingertips brushing the back of his neck. And when she pulled him down and her mouth claimed his, he let it happen.
Sweet. She was so sweet. Warm. And the taste of her on his tongue was something he hadn’t known he’d craved.
Something impossible that rewired the very concept of want.
He was dizzy, maybe a little drunk on her, on this.
On the scent of her skin and the sheer wrongness of it all that somehow felt right.
He plunged his hands into her hair, tilting her head to deepen the kiss, to have more.
Her lips parted with a moan, and her body pressed into his like she couldn’t bear even an inch of space between them.
Her breasts crushed against his chest, full and heavy and begging for his touch.
He reached without thinking, filled his hand with one, feeling the heat of her through the lace, the weight of it in his palm.
The sound she made hit him like a weapon, fired straight from her throat to his cock, lighting him up like some fucked-up string of Christmas lights.
He growled, low and wrecked, grabbed her hips and ground her against him, lost himself in the pressure, the heat, the devastating realness of her when nothing at all was real.
She rocked into him, then reached between them with steady fingers and unbuttoned his jeans to slide a hand inside.
His hiss and her hum of pleasure came at the same time.
When she guided his hand into her underwear, when his fingers slid against soaked silk and the wet heat of her, he nearly lost it right there.
She was so wet, so ready, it hurt him. It stripped him of every line, every law, every rule he had ever followed and left him with only one possible way to exist: buried inside her until he couldn’t tell where he ended, and she began.
He pushed her gently back onto the mattress that was absolutely a lie like everything else in this goddamn place and followed her down, stretching beside her, mouth never leaving hers, fingers soaked with her arousal.
She arched into him, one leg sliding between his, her fingers digging into his arm like she needed to anchor herself.
He was gone, too far gone to care.
The voice came out of nowhere, out of the nothingness that surrounded the bed, thick and menacing and wrong.
Why do you have to be so fucking difficult?
Hunter froze as the air around him shifted, jagged, and in that breath, the dream cracked.
What moments ago had been warm and golden was now cold, shuddering, and warped.
He felt the snap as the dream unraveled, a pulse of wrongness that dragged him from her warmth and flung him out of the scene and into nothing.
Her mind was shifting. Hard.
Confused, scrambling, Hunter tried to move with it, to flow with the change the way he was made to do. To fasten himself, regroup, and guide the sequence.
But... Something.
Something was off.
Fucking wrong.
A lot had gone to shit tonight, and he needed to understand it all, but this? This wasn’t a nightmare.
He wasn’t steering anything, and neither was Daphne.
He would know if she was.
No, this wasn’t a dream anymore.
This was something else–something older, with teeth and claws. The shadows felt closer now, hungrier. It felt like they were both pushed to the sidelines as mere observers, unwelcome guests in her own goddamn mind.
There was no precedent to this.
The origin point was clear, to some extent. Hunter was the best Dream Devil in the fucking department, but anyone would recognize where this damn thing came from.
Her trauma was playing, uncontrolled.
Which should have been impossible.
Trauma couldn’t just run on its own.
And then, with one gut-wrenching twist, Hunter was ripped from the dream like a puppet yanked off-stage. He stayed in his natural form in the cold, real world, fluttering around, confused.
He didn’t go back to HQ.
Didn’t report.
Didn’t speak.
He just went to his cabin, the little one tucked in the middle of the Norwegian wilderness, far beyond any town’s borders.
He shifted again, skin and bones and nerves, and simply dropped down right on the frozen earth, legs folded, elbows on his knees, breath clouding in front of him.
The snow bit at his skin, numbed his fingers, and tried to calm the fire crawling through his chest.
It didn’t work.
His heart was still racing, his body still shaking, and that impossible, soul-deep feeling that something had come alive wouldn’t leave.
And he had no clue how to stop it.
Hunter didn’t know how long it took before he could make the decision, but when he did, he didn’t lose any time.
One minute, he was sitting in the snow, trying to piece himself back together. The next, he was standing in front of Dorian’s cabin like some half-frozen idiot who’d made a habit of fumbling assignments and showing up uninvited.
No one–not a single soul–went uninvited to Dorian’s as a general rule. Unannounced and after hours meant looking for pain.
Fine.
Hunter sighed. Clearly, he had lost all self-preservation instinct along with his professional boundaries.
He reformed inside, making sure he had remembered to reform with clothes on.
Quietly, carefully, he padded through the dark cabin like the trespasser he was, nerves scraped raw.
He walked to the bedroom door and found it open.
He looked at his feet as he knocked lightly on the doorframe.
Dorian was going to end him for this, but if he got a whiff that he saw something inappropriate about Amelia, that would mean a lot of suffering on top of being ended, and he didn’t need any of it.
He knocked again.
And again, this time just to be petty, because Dorian was in bed with his woman, and Hunter still had blue balls from his.
Damn it.
Daphne was far from his.
He heard movement from the bed, so he went back to the living room and dropped onto the couch.
Dorian appeared in a silk black robe and absolutely no chill on his face. “This had better be of the utmost importance,” he said, his British accent making shards of each over-spelled word. Hunter rolled his eyes.
“What if I felt lonely and needed the company?”
Dorian sighed like the weight of the universe was his alone to carry.
“Gods preserve me from dramatics.” He walked around the couch, robe swaying, and sat on the armchair.
He didn’t offer tea, which, for him, equated to war.
He tilted his head as he looked at Hunter.
“You’ve chosen the deranged vagrant’s aesthetic tonight. Charming.”
Hunter scrubbed a hand down his face. “I was taken into her dream. Unwillingly.” Hunter stopped one second before correcting himself. He’d been so willing... “Unknowingly.”
Dorian went very still. “Excuse me?”
“I was hovering. Monitoring. Next thing I knew, I was inside it. Real as I am right now, but in her dream.” Dorian’s expression didn’t change, so Hunter kept going.
“And it was a, um, a normal dream. The one I was in. A good one at that. Then it flipped. Just turned into a nightmare. Of a sort. But I wasn’t the one guiding it. She wasn’t either.”
“She was in a lucid dream, dragged you in it, then it switched, and neither of you was guiding it.” Dorian sighed. “I would have said it’s not possible. Apparently, it is.”
“Exactly.”
Hunter leaned forward, elbows on his knees, every word scraping out like it hurt to say.
“There was something there, Dorian. Something other than her and me. And I know–I know–it’s something she buried.
There’s a blind spot in her nightmares, something she can’t uncover because she doesn’t even know it’s there. ”
Dorian’s brow furrowed, but he didn’t speak.
“This entire mess?” Hunter said. “It’s tied to her remembering. I can help her. Somehow. I can guide her toward it in her sleep. Lure her. But tonight was... I don’t know what it was.”
Dorian studied him, eyes like frost. “Why were you in the dream again?”
Hunter blinked. “I told you. I was hovering. Monitoring. You know, the usual.”
“Yes, yes. What I’m asking is, what triggered the pull?”
Hunter shifted on the couch. “I wouldn’t know.”
Dorian sighed again. “If you’re going to lie to me, Hunter, at least make it artful. I didn’t basically invent the practice just to endure such an amateur attempt at it.”
“I’m guessing,” he said tightly. “There’s a difference.”
“Semantics are for lawyers, not demons.” Dorian leaned back, lacing his fingers. “You were pulled into the dream. She wanted you there badly enough that you became embodied. What did you do in there?”