LI
For one suspended second, he stayed exactly where he was—hands on my thighs, mouth hovering at my throat, eyes shut as if he could hold the last thread of himself together by force.
Then he inhaled once and sat straighter beneath me.
His knee pressed between mine.
One hand stayed at the base of my throat, thumb resting just beneath my jaw as if measuring where my pulse ran strongest. The other flattened at my hip, holding me still.
“You can still stop this,” he said.
I caught the front of his jacket and pulled him down.
“Take it.”
He looked at me for one raw, punishing second, as if he were still waiting for me to come to my senses.
Then his eyes closed, and his mouth found the line of my pulse.
The first touch was colder than I had expected.
Cold enough to shock the breath out of me.
But the pull that followed wasn’t pain.
It was relief.
A strange, deep, impossible relief, as if something hidden beneath my ribs had finally found the direction it had been straining toward all night. Heat consumed me. Every nerve woke. The bond flared wide open.
I gasped.
His grip tightened instantly, and the siphon deepened.
I felt it then—not on my skin, but in the center of my chest. A draw that made my whole body arch. Warmth streamed out of me in waves, something stranger and brighter than blood. It rushed through the tether and slammed into him so fast I felt the exact second it hit.
He shuddered, and under my hands, his body changed by degrees—less smoke, more weight.
My fingers locked onto his shoulders.
“Heaton—”
His whole body tensed.
For one second, I felt him try to narrow the pull, to drag the hunger back into one clean line, but he was too depleted, too desperate, and I was too close.
Energy didn’t just leave me anymore.
It poured.
My body lit around the path of it—chest to throat to spine—every inch of me suddenly too alive to bear. His mouth was at my pulse. His hand slid up my back, beneath my sweater. My knees braced against his hips.
The bond burned gold and white between us, turning the dark cab of the Nova into a small, private catastrophe.
“Heat,” I tried again.
He should have slowed.
He didn’t. His hand slid from my back to my waist and dragged me harder against him, as if closeness made the draw cleaner. Easier.
His mouth shifted once against my throat—not a bite, not even a bruise, just a helpless adjustment that sent another brutal rush of heat through me and another answering sound out of him.
This time, it hurt.
It was a sharp, searing cold, like an ice shard being dragged through my veins. I felt it in my heartbeat. My breathing. The backs of my eyes. My fingertips.
My body kept trying to decide whether this was ecstasy or extinction and gave up on the difference.
My hands slid from his shoulders into his hair.
I think I meant to hold on. I think I meant to steady him.
I wasn’t sure anymore.
My head tipped back, and the ceiling of the Nova blurred.
The pain dissolved into something stranger—weightless and glittering, like being half-drowned in sunlight. The inside of my body felt full of bells, all ringing farther and farther away.
He was warm now.
God, he was warm.
Solid in a way he hadn’t been since the mines. I could feel it where he pinned me to the seat, where his mouth stayed at my throat, where his body pressed into mine and kept taking slow, desperate pulls.
For one delirious second, I understood the danger he posed in a way I never had before.
Only he could make annihilation feel this holy.
A strange, sweet ache bloomed beneath my skin. My thoughts drifted apart like dandelion seeds.
Then the connection snapped.
It was a brutal, wrenching separation.
The world slid sideways into a soft gray blur, and my head rolled back against the seat.
“Shit.”
The word broke out of him, low and horrified.
He tore away from my throat and hauled me upright against his chest, one hand cupping the back of my neck, the other rubbing hard over my arms as if friction alone could call the heat back.
“Stay with me.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as a shiver.
“Didn’t . . . go far.”
“Don’t.”
Keeping me pinned against him with one arm, he shrugged out of his jacket in a series of rough, frustrated movements, nearly tangling us both. Then he dragged the heavy fabric around my shoulders and down over my arms, wrapping it tight until I disappeared inside the warmth of it.
When my teeth knocked together once, he pulled it tighter.
His thumb pressed hard against my pulse beneath my jaw, counting.
Still too slow for his liking, apparently.
His eyes were terrifying now—bright, steady, alive with the power he’d taken and sick with what it had cost me.
“I told you,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “I told you I wouldn’t know when enough was enough.”
I tucked my face weakly against his chest because it was the only warm thing left.
“I can spend my light . . . however I choose.”
His attention dropped to my throat.
To the flushed, sensitized marks his hunger had left behind. The skin there burned vivid pink, traced with fractal patterns that branched down the column of my neck.
His arms tightened around me so hard that it almost hurt.
“Listen to me.”
He pulled back just far enough to make me look at him.
“You do not ever give me that much again.”
I tried to focus on his face.
It kept slipping.
“I just wanted—”
“No.”
His hand came up to frame my jaw, careful now.
“You want to spend something on me?” he asked softly. “Spend your temper. Spend your mouth. Spend all those smart little comments you can’t seem to stop making.”
He swallowed hard, looking down at the mark on my throat again like he wanted to tear time open and put those missing seconds back where they belonged.
“But don’t you ever hand me your light like that again.”
I lifted my head just enough to glare at him through the blur.
“You don’t get to—”
“I do.”
The words cracked like ice.
“On this, I do.”
He gathered me tighter, one arm sliding under my knees, the other firm around my back, as if he had decided letting me sit alone was no longer acceptable.
“Let me be clear,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, terrifying tone.
“I know exactly what lives in me when I’m starving.
I have spent decades surviving the dark.
What I am not good at is watching the only light in this godforsaken town flicker because she’s too damn stubborn to realize I’m not worth the cost.”
“Heaton—”
“Do you understand me?”
“Cold,” I whispered, the word a thread of sound as I tucked my face into his chest.
His jaw tightened.
Then his mouth lowered to my hair.
“You don’t sacrifice the sun to save a shadow.”
That cut through the fog more than anything else he’d said. His thumb brushed the mark once, and he flinched harder than I did.
“I’ll go back to the mines,” he said quietly. “I’ll choke on the dust. I’ll tear myself apart down there every night before I let this happen again.”
I managed a weak, sleepy smile.
“Promise?”
He pressed one lingering kiss to my temple.
His mouth was impossibly warm now.
“Only if I get to take the sun with me.”