I could hardly breathe.
Blood soaked their shirts. Their faces had been severely beaten, eyes swollen and blackened, teeth missing. Jax’s eye patch was gone, revealing a crater of old scar tissue and fresh gashes.
Thanks to the hawthorn poisoning his system, Elian wouldn’t be able to heal. I couldn’t even imagine his suffering.
And yet, when he finally turned away from me to look at our captor, it seemed as if he was suddenly gazing upon the face of a god.
Elian’s breath caught, and for a moment, he stopped breathing altogether. Tears streamed down his face, but the pain in his eyes was gone, replaced with relief. With joy.
I glanced at Keradoc.
The glamour was fading again, and now he looked more like Elian than he ever had earlier. Same silver eyes. Same face.
Still on his knees in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood, the real Elian smiled, his lips curving into that sexy, crooked grin I loved so much.
And when he finally spoke through that broken, bloodied smile, he whispered a name I’d only ever heard him say in the throes of his most fearsome nightmares, thrashing so hard he’d torn off the sheets, bolting upright in a cold sweat and clinging to me in the darkness as if the devil himself was on his way to personally drag him to hell.
“Evander?”
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