Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 140780 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 469(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140780 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 469(@300wpm)
She twitched as my blood took over.
She groaned as it started to work—little plumes of smoke rising from the puncture between her ribs. She tried to get away but with a broken back, she didn’t have a choice as I grabbed her soul with both hands and yanked her back from the netherworld.
Only once enough blood had filled her damaged lung did I move to other areas.
I fed golden-red into the slashes on her chest, her arms, her cheek. Shifting closer, I brought my arm to my mouth and sucked.
Hot, scalding copper drowned my tongue, my life-force pumping out far too fast. I turned lightheaded and weak, but I’d give it all to her if it worked.
I folded over her and hesitated.
She coughed again, in the final stages of drowning. Blood sprayed over her chin, painting her lips a glossy red. For a second, I swore it glittered silver—shimmering with a sterling hue as if tiny snowflakes swirled in her life-force.
I shook my woozy head, leaned down, and sealed my lips over hers.
I let go of the mouthful I held.
She coughed and fed me a mouthful of hers.
And—
Fate detonated.
Blood to blood.
Soul to soul.
Power roared through me, through us, fire and ice crashing together in a blinding supernova that tore a scream from my throat.
She tasted like heaven and winter and ruin, flooding every sense at once, shattering me, breaking me, remaking me. Lightning ripped across my tongue, silver and sharp and the best fucking thing I’d ever tasted.
The pain I’d suffered.
The fire I burned with.
The decades of misery and years of torture.
All gone.
Power howled.
No longer restrained or contained, it broke every bone in my body and rebuilt me.
Rebuilt her.
The bond we shared unravelled into full force, and everything prior to this felt so weak and tame and mortal. This new shivery awareness felt elemental and unstoppable as her energy bulldozed through me.
I trembled as my sanity blew apart.
I gasped as my body started to heal.
I itched and ached and throbbed and burned, but it was nothing to the awe of feeling her.
I felt her heartbeat stutter before slamming back into furious rhythm.
Felt her lung knitting together.
Felt her spine—bone grinding against bone, realigning, reforming, restoring everything that’d been broken.
I wasn’t prepared.
Wasn’t equipped.
Desire cleaved me in two. Savage desperation to keep her, make her mine, finish what we’d started.
I needed her.
I needed to be inside her, just like my blood was. I needed her to accept the joining, the binding, the lock.
Because I’d surrendered the second I’d felt it and from this day, to my last day, she was mine.
Rook suddenly flung her newly healed arms around my neck, feeling the same rapture of want. Her hands landed in my hair, yanking me down as her icy power sundered through me, tearing through every blockage, every scar, every limit my body had ever known.
It freed me.
Released me.
I groaned and plunged my tongue into her mouth as my cracked and charred skin sealed and healed.
I tasted everything she was.
I drowned on snowfalls and starlight.
Her energy flooded me, intoxicating and inevitable, sinking into every hollow place, rewriting everything I was and making sure I was nothing but hers.
My self-control snapped.
The blood-laced kiss we’d shared turned into a breathless war of teeth and tongues.
Power spiralled between us, battling each other, clashing with fire and frost.
It grew stronger and stronger as we kissed faster and faster.
The hunger was unbearable.
The need absolutely maddening.
We were both driven to a disastrous edge.
An edge that promised total destruction if we didn’t stop.
But we couldn’t stop.
Wouldn’t stop.
I tore at her soaking clothes and let go.
Chapter Forty-Two
HEAT AND COLD, FIRE AND FROST.
That was all I was and all I’d ever be.
Every element braided tightly in my chest, humming and mending, erasing my pain and every piece that had been broken.
I twitched as the wound in my side knitted over, sealing my inner workings as if I’d never been punctured. The numbness in my lower body vanished with a gush of searing sensitivity and I almost sobbed with gratitude as I wriggled my toes and they answered.
Everything happened so fast, so miraculously, it couldn’t have been real. My bones and muscles defied logic and law, reversing death itself to become whole and strong and powerful.
How?
How had Lucien brought me back to life?
What had he become that his blood—his incredible healing blood—could do something that defied nature itself?
I should be dead.
Yet I was being kissed within an inch of my life and suddenly, nothing else mattered.
Clutching him closer, I gasped as whatever self-restraint he had left snapped.
His tongue delved into my mouth, kissing me desperately. He held onto me as if he was terrified I would vanish. His hands were everywhere—my hair, my neck, my breasts—touching everything as if he needed constant proof I was real.
The more he touched, the more my body responded.
Wicked, dangerous power flooded me with every heartbeat. That odd coldness that’d started answering to Lucien’s heat no longer just tiptoed through me but gushed. It turned wild and hungry, sending frost rippling through my veins and freezing my heartbeats...but I wasn’t cold.