Chapter 17
AY DIOS MíO, SON DOS
ERIKA
His arm tightens around me like a vice, hauling me up higher against his chest until the back of my head knocks against the hard ridge of his collarbone.
His breathing shifts. That slow, steady anchor I’ve been holding on to for the past few hours is absolutely gone. His inhale catches, and I feel his ribs expand sharply right under my cheek.
Against my hip, the entire length of his thigh tenses up. The thick muscle jumps. He’s burning so hot right now it feels like a fever straight through the canvas of my cargo pants.
He drops his head, pressing that blazing forehead hard against mine.
“I cannot stay here.”
The projection hits the inside of my skull. It’s rough. Barely controlled.
Before I can even process an answer, he’s moving. His free arm sweeps under my knees and he stands up in one fluid surge, taking me right up into the air with him. My hands automatically lock around the thick column of his neck.
He turns his back on the small recess in the cavern rock and effectively vanishes up the steep, pitch-black incline leading to the high ledges.
He moves so incredibly fast the rock walls just blur past us.
I bury my face in the curve of his throat.
He smells so good. But his pulse is way too fast. It’s an erratic, terrifying hammering against my lips.
He’s hiding me away like feral treasure even as his body breaks down.
It doesn’t take long before the narrow tunnel opens up into his alcove.
It’s exactly as I remember from the feverish, exhausted night I spent recovering in it. I remember the curved walls, the raised stone shelf, the thick furs. Back then, it was a dark refuge. Now, the intense heat pouring off him is turning the entire space into a literal oven.
He steps up to the large stone shelf and sets me softly onto the furs, breaking my fall as if I am the most fragile thing in the universe.
The second my boots clear his body, the whole alcove erupts with blinding light.
The points of white starlight etched across his blackened skin stop pulsing and start to spin, swirling inward as if something at his center is pulling them down. A grunt tears from his chest. His back hits the far wall of the alcove, a deep vibration going through the stone with the impact.
His chest heaves, the scraping sound of his inhale echoing off the stone.
I slide off the edge of the shelf. The moment my boot hits the floor, his head snaps up.
His eyes lock onto mine, and a low growl rolls out of his chest.
The lingering nausea from the battle vanishes. The exhaustion that’s been hollowing me out for weeks just... snaps. I am suddenly, completely, ferociously awake.
I take a step toward him.
“Kol.”
He flinches. A single syllable tears out of his throat in his own language.
“Kah.” Stop.
I take another step. “No.”
His whole body shudders.
“Eh-ree-kah.” My name breaks apart in his throat. His chest heaves.
“I know,” I tell him. I keep my voice steady. I keep walking. “I know what’s happening.”
I step into his heat, the top of my head barely reaching the center of his chest. If he suddenly shifted his weight, he’d crush me. I don’t care.
I press my palm flat against his bare chest, right over the frantic drumbeat at the center of him.
Light.
It funnels out from under my hand. Blinding white. The starfield beneath my fingers whirls outward, racing up my arm. Heat. It floods my veins. The light crawls up my elbow. Every point where my skin touches his, the constellations write themselves onto me.
A booming pulse hits the center of my skull. At first, my legs almost buckle with the sheer, overwhelming rush of data. It’s like being hit with a battering ram of information. And as I grip him and look up, I realize it isn’t my pulse in my own head.
It’s his.
I get a tidal wave of his absolute exhaustion, his sheer terror for my safety, and an all-consuming, overwhelming obsession pouring straight into my nervous system.
I suddenly feel him.
A sob tears out of my throat.
“I can feel you,” I gasp, my fingers digging into the hard, raised ridges of the status markings on his chest. They burn under my hands, but the connection is absolute. “Kol. I can feel you.”
Before he can move, his entire body locks rigid.
His head snaps back, cracking on the stone behind him as his teeth bare in a nasty snarl.
“Kah.” The word comes out weak as he tries to push me away, but the surge of his biology hitting mine is too much. I couldn’t let go even if I wanted to.
Kol collapses.
His knees hit the stone hard, his hands slamming flat onto the floor.
I don’t let go. I feel the flash of his pain as bones realign. I feel his desperation to get me away from him where I would be safe.
I don’t pull back. I don’t run.
I fist both my hands deep into his thick, sandy hair, leaning my entire body weight against his heaving shoulder.
“I’m here,” I say into his scalp. “I’m right here.”
I feel the agony spike. The wave of it hits me so hard I gasp, my fingers gripping tight into his thick hair.
Before his knees give out, Kol scoops me off my feet, hauling my smaller frame squarely against his chest.
He stumbles blindly across the alcove toward the raised stone shelf.
He hits the edge of it, and the last of his strength shatters. We both go down.
He collapses face-first onto the thick furs, dragging me straight down underneath him. For a solid second, all the breath is knocked out of my lungs. A wall of solid, scorching muscle pins me flat against the bedding.
I try to shift. I try to pull one arm free. “Kol?”
Nothing. His eyes are closed. His chest heaves against mine, but when I call his name again there’s no response.
I’m trapped.
I definitely can’t move my legs. I can barely take a full breath. I am forced to just lie there under three hundred pounds of muscle and wait.
The starlight etched across his dark skin flashes blindingly bright, throwing wild, strobe-light against my face. The heat rolling off his body feels like I am pinned under an actual radiator.
I realize with a jolt that it’s not just his chest that’s moving with every breath.
Other parts of him are moving too. Restructuring.
The bones of his pelvis are pressed so hard against my hips that I can feel them shifting beneath his hot skin.
They are expanding. The snap of cartilage and bone breaking and reforming echoes straight into my own marrow.
It’s terrifying, and deeply, deeply strange. I lock my jaw, forcing my spine flat against the furs so I do not squirm away from the sensation of it.
I manage to wriggle my right hand free from underneath his broad shoulder. I bury my fingers into his thick, sandy hair, gripping the roots hard to ground him through the worst of the frantic convulsions.
“If you break my actual pelvis,” I grit out to his unconscious face, my voice strained under his dead weight, “I’m taking my answer back.”
It takes almost an hour before his entire body shudders one last time. He breathes out a long, ragged exhale, and his sheer dead weight relaxes fully against me.
Okay. We survived. Now I just have to wait for him to wake up so I can get the circulation back in my legs.
Except, he’s apparently not quite finished.
Pressed flush against my thigh, I feel it. It’s the pressure that I notice first. Then the heat of it. It’s thick, ridged, and growing steadily harder against the fabric of my pants.
Okay, wow. That is... substantial.
And then, exactly a second later, I feel another distinct, unyielding pressure right next to it. Slightly thinner, pressing solidly against my other leg.
My brain completely stalls.
I lie perfectly still underneath his sprawling body, staring blankly up at the uneven stone of the cavern ceiling.
I take one slow breath.
Either this man has developed a deeply alarming, perfectly cylindrical tumor in the last five minutes... or I have severely underestimated the ambition of Drakav biology.