Page 8 of Incoronate
“I know,” I said and didn’t bother to elaborate. “But it’s still ano.”
Dominic tracked me as I crossed to my bed. “Very well. Suffer if you must, then, angel.”
I shot him a flat look over my shoulder, but he only smirked in response.
Fluffing up my pillow, I climbed into bed alone and pulled the covers up around myself like a poor man’s fortress. Regrettably, I made it all of five seconds before my breath caught.
The sheets still smelled like them.
Spice and chocolate and forests and leather, worked so deep into the fabric it felt like they were lying right next to me in the bed. I pulled the covers higher and glared up at the ceiling.
Fucking traitor sheets.
“Goodnight, Jem.” Trace’s baritone rolled through the dark and my chest instantly squeezed at the gentleness in it. “Get some sleep, okay? We got you. Nothing’s getting past us tonight.”
For a moment, I let myself believe him. Let the warmth and comfort of his words sink into me for as long as I could hold onto them before my brain started poking holes in everything. Before William’s voice was right back there again, needling its way into my thoughts and putting doubt into all of it.
It took everything in me not to move, not to give into it, because lord knew the only thing I wanted to do was close the distance and crawl into their arms and stay there until the very end of days.
But wanting it was exactly the problem.
I closed my eyes and told myself this was what I needed. Space. Distance. A few feet of darkness to remember where I ended and they began.
Unfortunately, the soulmate bond had other plans. It buzzed under my skin like a live wire, a constant low thrum that refused to leave me alone, pushing and pulling at me until every cell in my body was screaming for me to move closer to Trace. To feel his hands on my skin. His body pressed up against mine.
It didn’t matter what was happening, or what we were facing, or how hard I tried to ignore it. The bond was always there, always calling me, always coaxing me to give into it, but tonight it felt stronger somehow. Hungrier. Like it knew exactly what I was trying to deny myself and had no intention of letting me get away with it.
Gritting my teeth, I turned onto my side, putting my back to where Trace lay on the floor, desperate to put whatever distance I could between myself and the relentless tug of the bond.
Only to find Dominic’s eyes on me in the darkness, watching.
Always watching.
His gaze burned straight through me, and I understood too late that there was no neutral ground in this room. No escape from the torture of having Trace on one side, pulling at my soul, and Dominic on the other, seeing straight through to it. I was trapped between them even now.
I tore my gaze away from his and closed my eyes again, doing my best to block everything out. The bond. The heated looks. The wanting. The weight of everything I was trying so hard to untangle. I told myself I’d done the right thing. That space and distance was what we needed.
I repeated it like a mantra until the edges of the room began to blur and my grip on all of it started to loosen. The last thing I was aware of before everything softened and gave way was the quiet, unsettling certainty that whatever was waiting for me on the other side of sleep wasn’t going to care about the distance I’d tried to create.
It would find me anyway.
3. NO REST FOR THE WICKED
Sleep came easier than I expected, pulling me under in languid waves until my worry and fear and all of the bad that had happened faded away into obscurity. For a while, there was nothing. Only a peaceful quiet that wrapped around me like a balm. The kind of stillness that made me think, just for a moment, that maybe I’d been wrong. That maybe whatever had been done to me at Temple had already burned itself out, leaving me exhausted but intact.
It felt like the deepest sleep I’d had in months, and I let myself sink into it, clinging onto the fragile hope that morning would come and everything would be okay.
And then the whispers came.
They were soft at first, distant enough to mistake for a dream. Voices that carried in on a current I couldn’t quite place, brushing the edges of my awareness without any sort of urgency. I drifted along with them, still half-asleep, content to let them pass me by. But the sounds didn’t fade. They grew stronger, threading themselves through the quiet with each breath I took. Drawing nearer with every passing second.
The darkness around me thinned, the edges of it pulling apart like wet paper as the whispers pressed in closer, no longer willing to remain in the background. They circled me like vultures, layering in one over the other, invasive and intimate and yet achingly familiar.
…Sister…
The word slithered through my mind, making my breath seize.
…Join us…
