The phone made a last desperate plea for attention and went silent.
Crap. Now what?
Every bit of tension from where Lucen’s fingers played with my hair slid from my scalp down into my groin. Each muscle tensed with anticipation.
“I want you to trust me, little siren, but you won’t. You came to me on Monday because you felt you had no choice. You didn’t come to me because you trusted me, or because you thought I’d help you.”
“That’s not—” Well, it was a little true.
“Please, Jess. I can read you better than you read yourself, because you hide things from yourself and you can’t hide them from me. But it’s not a good idea. Don’t you see? You were right when you said nothing can be the same again. And that means you’re going to need to trust someone, and you don’t.”
“So you’re trying to earn my trust by breaking it?” But my body didn’t care how warped Lucen’s logic was. My will was cracking.
Once the future Segestriidae maven, Kaidi lived a privileged life. Now she spends her nights haunting cities ravaged by the plague. Spade in hand, she stalks rows of freshly dug graves for corpses…and then she takes their heads.
Her new life is caked in blood and spattered with gore, but it’s hers. At least until—to her fury—she’s caught napping.
A plague survivor by the skin of his teeth, Murdoch risks his neck to solve the mysteries left in its wake. Bodies have gone missing. Guards have left their posts and never returned home.
When he rouses a female dozing among the dead, he’s unprepared for the violence of her response. Or his. Beneath the grime, she’s lovely. Too bad the blood under her fingernails belongs to his clansmen.
He has no choice but to follow this alluring creature deeper into her world of winged beasts and flesh-eating monsters. She holds the knowledge he craves, but the price is high—and they may both pay for it with their lives.
Better females than I had made the journey from Cathis to Titania inside of seven days. Late into our first morning, after a night of no sleep, I began dragging. Murdoch forged ahead, and he set a grueling pace. Though I had done my fair share of walking these past few months, and I did possess enviable endurance, those applied to my own slower gait and not to his long-legged one.
A stitch caught my side, and I put a hand to it, frustrated by pain that hobbled me further.
Murdoch chose that moment to check on me. “We’ll stop here and catch our breath.”
“Are you tired?” Though he stood waiting, I kept walking and finally passed him.
It was a short-lived lead.
“Yes.” He wrapped his arm around my waist and lifted me off my feet. “I am.”
After kicking a pile of loose pine straw into a mound at the base of a tree, he dropped onto it with a grunt and sat me across his lap. His head fell back against the trunk, and his eyes closed. I watched him breathing easily and knew we had stopped for my benefit. I thumbed his eyelid and pushed it open. His other remained resolutely closed. His lips, though, curved at their edges.
“Well?” He stared at me unblinking, which was no doubt due to my grip on his lid.
“Nothing.” The steadiness of his gaze unnerved me. “Rest while you can.”
Crooking an arm around my shoulders, he drew me close, and I nestled my face into his neck. “Only if you will.”
I shoved him. “Must everything be a negotiation with you?”
He rested his chin atop my head. “Must everything be a battle with you?”
“I have learned to fight for what I want.” It was how I had survived on my own.
“Even if what you desire would be freely given?”
“Especially then. Being offered things of value at no cost is when you should be wariest.”
“So rather than accept an offer, you think it best to force others into making the same deal?”
I huffed. “I was bargaining in terms you understood.”
“Huh.” He rubbed his bite marks. “So that’s what you were doing.”
“Yes.” I pulled at his hand. “The bite was incidental.”
“Was it?” He traced my lips with his fingertip.
I resisted the urge to nip him. He might like it too much. “It got your attention, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” His voice went husky. “It did.”
“You liked it.” My eyes widened. “You actually want me to do it again.”
His grin was at once roguish and shy. I’m not sure how he managed the combination.
“You did say if I hurried you would bite me again.” He paused. “I hurried.”
I thumped his chin. “You are incorrigible.”
“Where you’re concerned, yes.” He cupped my neck in his palm. “I possessed some sense of self- preservation before we met. After…” His thumb stroked my pulse. “I’ve been more reckless this week than I have in all of my life. I haven’t been the same since the night you stabbed me.”
“You had to remind me.” I groaned and put my face in my hands. “See a physician for it.”
Peeling aside one of my hands, he set it on his chest. “I fear my condition is untreatable.”
My heart melted. His quiet ways had won me. Why had we not met when our lives were our own? Why find one another now, when the future loomed so uncertain? Why torment both of us?
Never would I have imagined he was capable of such tenderness. The way he poked fun at a situation he had to find as strange as I did endeared him to me. Once, he said that I understood force. Perhaps that explained why these tender moods confused me.
“I’m no healer, but I have often observed Mana at her work.” I straddled his lap. Let him tug me flush against him. His heart thumped hard beneath my hand. “Let me see if I can’t cure you.”
Breathing him in, I feathered my lips over his jaw, down his neck, where I scraped my teeth.
Murdoch inhaled harshly and held his breath. I delighted in swirling my tongue across his skin while smoothing my hands over his broad shoulders and lower, past his thick arms, to link hands.
“I don’t mean to question your credentials…” he hissed when I nipped his ear, “…but is the cure supposed to hurt worse than the condition it treats?” He gripped my wrist and held it steady.
“Your heart does seem overtaxed.” I feigned regret. “Perhaps I should try curing you later.”
“I want it now.” He turned his mouth against the inside of my wrist and pressed a kiss there.
Chills swept down my arms. “You want what, exactly?”
He didn’t hesitate. “You.”
Sliding his hands through my hair, he bent me to him. Impatient for the arrival of my mouth, his met mine halfway. His lips were firm, his tongue demanding as he coaxed my mouth open to him. Murdoch’s taste was as complex as the rest of him. He filled my senses, and I moaned at it.
Too soon he turned his face aside, allowing me to taste my mark upon him.
“We can’t do this.” He was breathless. “Not while you belong to someone else.”
Part of me knew he was wrong. I no longer belonged to Hishima in heart or in body. The other part felt Murdoch hard between my thighs and didn’t care who was right.
