Page 55 of Hush

Aestrata herself could place the image in his sleeping mind, but his waking mouth must still give the final yes. That is the law I make for myself because Lucas taught me thresholds.

His den. His mind. His body. All sacred if he says so, and sacred even before he does.

The dream settles eventually. His scent softens, though the need remains under his skin, waiting. He turns onto his side, facing me now, one hand slipping over the edge of the mattress as if searching for something in sleep.

His fingers hang inches from my face, and I lower my head, stopping just before touching. The need to press my cheek into his palm is almost painful. Instead, I breathe him in and send one quiet thing through the bond, soft enough not to wake him unless some deeper part of him wishes to hear.

When you ask awake, Little Ember, I will answer.

His fingers twitch, and his heartbeat stays steady.

I remain on the floor until dawn, too full of happiness, hunger, and fear to sleep again. The den is still the annoying den that takes him from me, but tonight it gave me something too. It let me know the bond is moving even when I hold still. It let me understand that the next step waits somewhere close, breathing beneath his skin, gathering courage.

By morning, he will open his eyes and not yet know what he asked of me. Or maybe he will. Humans often pretend not to know what their bodies have already written clearly.

I can wait for his waking words.

I have waited millennia for him.

I can wait one more dawn.

20

Lucas

I know something is wrong with me, and it has nothing to do with ordinary sickness.

Yesterday afternoon, I was so wired, hot, and distracted that I could barely finish a conversation with Parker without zoning out halfway through. By last night, I couldn’t make myself walk into the woods.

I stood on the porch in my boots, hand on the rail, the whole trail yawning open in front of me, and my body simply refused. Not because I didn’t want to go. God, I wanted to go so badly it made my teeth ache. But wanting him had gotten tangled up with something deeper and more intense, something that had me gripping the porch post hard enough to leave my knuckles white while nausea rolled through me in waves.

I sent nothing through the bond except a vague, miserable pulse of not tonight and then stumbled back inside before I could feel his reaction too clearly.

This morning I called in sick. I lied to both Tom and Parker with my face pressed into the pillow because lifting my head felt like too much work. I said stomach bug. I said I probably picked something up from Norton’s place because God knows those cows have no respect for personal space. Tom told me to rest and drink fluids. Parker told me if I’m dying, I still owe him twenty bucks. I managed something that sounded enough like a laugh to pass.

Then I hung up and curled in on myself while heat poured through me so hard it felt like I was coming apart at the seams.

I keep telling myself I’m fine—just a lingering fever, nothing worse than the flu—but the lie burns colder than the sweat sliding down the arch of my spine.

My skin feels too tight for my body, every inch of me oversensitive, overheated, the sheets twisted around my legs like they’ve been trying and failing to hold me in place all night.

My room smells wrong too—too full of sweat and sleep. Underneath it is the thick, maddening scent of Onyx, soaked so deeply into everything that I can’t tell where my body ends and the bond begins.

I drag in a breath, and it only makes everything worse.

Heat beats behind my eyes in a slow, relentless pulse that softens the world at the edges, and every breath drags through my lungs as if I’m inhaling steam straight from a kettle.

The dreams have been the worst of it because they aren’t dreams anymore—they’re whole worlds.

Vivid, heat-soaked scenes that follow me even after I wake up. Onyx’s body over mine. Onyx’s hands on me, careful and enormous, but no longer only careful by the end. His mouth at my throat. His true shape wrapped around me in moonlit moss while I hold on and beg for things I wake up too ashamed and too hungry to name.

Sometimes he’s in the human shape. Sometimes he’s antlered and massive, skull-faced, all power and old forest and breaking restraint because I ask him to break it.

No, worse, I want him. I pull him down. I arch into him. I bare my throat. I say his name until it doesn’t sound like a name anymore, and then I wake up tangled in blankets, cock hard and leaking, with the smell of Labrador tea in the room.

It started after I invited him into the cabin. Now, I’m lying in bed at noon, shirt damp, skin hot, mind slipping in and out of fragments I can’t hold together. My body aches in places that make my face burn, even when no one is here to see it. My lower back feels loose and strange. My hips keep twitching with restless discomfort. There’s a deep, empty throb low in me that I refuse to examine for longer than two seconds at a time because every time I do, a dream memory answers it with Onyx’s hands and voice in my head.

I press the heel of my palm against my forehead and breathe through my teeth. “Get it together,” I whisper.