Breath caught in my lungs, I blink back to the now, heart pounding hard and fast …
It’s never chased something I’ve discarded before. At least not that I’ve noticed.
A shiver scurries up my spine, and I shake my head, centering myself, ignoring whatever just happened.
Do the job.
Get out.
Hunt Rekk Zharos.
Cradling a stark indifference toward my sleeping target, I creep closer to the seater, Rygun’s scale clutched in my steady hand. In one swift motion, I straddle the King, scoring the sharp weapon to his throat—
Kaan’s eyes pop open, glowing like pots of crackling embers as my internal lake erupts—the complex bundle of discarded emotions spat back at me, splatting against my heart where it sinks between the gaps, leaching toward my fleshy core.
I gasp, speared through by the fire in Kaan’s eyes. By the pierce of feeling that just infected me like a disease—ten times more potent than it was when I threw it away.
A whimper wrangles free as I repress the urge to delve my hand between my ribs, goring a hole in my chest cavity. To scratch the thumping organ like it’s an insect bite, or maybe wedge my fingers deep and scoop out this … sensation.
Heavy. Swollen.
Alive.
His nostrils flare, gaze flicking to my injured arm, back to my eyes while breaths saw in and out of me. While I poke at my crippled resolve, trying to work out why my desire to kill him just melted into a puddle of desperation to be closer.
Not just closer …
As close as we can be.
This strangest need to kiss him surges through my veins. For us to clash against each other until we fuse in intangible ways. To taste him and feel him move inside me …
A luscious, hungry shudder crawls up my spine.
Another flash of lightning ignites the fierceness in his stare, and his chest deflates, like all the breath just shoved from his lungs.
Slower than a rising aurora, he pulls his arms from beneath the pillow, one strong hand settling on my hip. Gripping hard. The other settles around the side of my face, cupping it in a way that feels so jarringly familiar. So right it makes me want to crack my aching heart into shards because it’s obviously confused.
“I see you, Raeve …”
My breath hitches, the scale still indenting Kaan’s throat. “I don’t … I don’t know what—”
“You,” he growls, tightening his hand around the side of my face with a tender jerk, eyes lit with a soul-crushing blaze. “I fucking see you.”
His voice is a jagged wound—raw and grisly. Painful in a way that makes that sensation in my chest ache with a deeper, more destructive throb I’m so desperate to dislodge. Or at the very least, distract myself from.
It’s too real. Too piercing.
And this …
Why does this feel so right?
The room ignites again, illuminating him in devastating detail. Strong, proud body slashed in too many scars to count, hair mussed, lips a perfect pillowy shape I imagine pressed against mine, moving with mine, claiming mine—
Fuck.
“What do you need, Moonbeam?”
To scratch this primal itch in the hopes it’ll assuage the emotional blade now lodged in my chest.
With fumbled motions, I reach for my waistband, untethering the bind and loosening the cinched material before grabbing his hand that’s sitting on my hip and urging it down the front of me.
A rumbling sound spawns in his chest, vibrating up my spread legs where it meets my tender core now pulsing with a hungry beat. A sensation I intend to fall into—headfirst with a blindfold on.
“You want me to touch you?”
The words are a flint scored down my spine.
Lower.
My muscles loosen, making my flesh heat as I nod—the motion fast and desperate. “Yes,” I plead, grinding my hips, trying to rock myself against his fingers that aren’t quite where I want them. “Please.”
He growls, his thick manhood swelling beneath my ass, growing impossibly hard. Another grind of my hips ignites every nerve in that sensitive spot between my legs, and I groan, this deep, heady sound that’s like a wanton fracture in the room.
Kaan pushes his hand closer toward my aching center, making my flesh pebble, my nipples pinching into hard, sensitive peaks from the coarse feel of his skin against my needy softness.
I throb with anticipation, knowing he’s close.
So close.
Another hitch of my breath as his finger sweeps across my wet flesh, the tender tease zapping me with a ravenous bolt of pleasure.
“Cut me if you want me to stop,” he rasps, his thumb sliding across my cheekbone. “I’ll gladly bleed beneath you, so don’t be shy.”