Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
I snatched her into my arms.
She folded into my lap, wrapping her arms around me as I clutched her painfully close. Breathing her in, my heart steadied as I felt her, smelled her, touched her.
Real.
She’s real.
“Sorry. I’m fine. I didn’t mean to...”
What?
Hear voices?
Feel no pain?
Give in to the worries that something about this place wasn’t right?
“You can’t ever leave me...okay?” Her question wrenched my head up.
“Why would you say such a thing?” My heart fisted with agony. “I will never leave you. I love you. Where you go, I go, remember?”
“Wake up. Before it’s too late!”
Launching to my feet, I swiped the bowl, food, and chopsticks off the table. They landed in the pond, scaring the fish.
“Whoa.” She grinned, ridiculously happy that I’d abandoned the idea of eating lunch in favour of eating her.
Tossing the wine jar over her shoulder, she arched her chin and bent over the table.
My clothes disappeared into the ether as I folded over her.
Unease and dread slithered through my blood as I bent my knees and took her.
Shadows oozed around the courtyard, watching.
Darkness crept closer, blotting out the sun.
The flowers wilted, the pillars rotted, and I ignored it all.
I ignored the dread, the fear, the voices.
I was happy.
We were happy.
And nothing could take that away from me.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
THE FIREPROOF ROOM WAS SUPPOSED TO contain him.
It didn’t.
Lucien was a living inferno.
Golden flames roared across his body as if he’d trapped himself in a blazing hurricane.
The reinforced door glowed a cherry-red even on this side, and the glacier kept melting—groaning and creaking as centuries of ice gave way beneath his onslaught.
“We have to go.” Frank tugged on my arm. “I’ve evacuated everyone else. We have to leave. Before it’s too late.”
Another earth-rumbling crack made us flinch as another chunk of glacier fell into the room meant to contain fire, explosions, and other lab mishaps.
Lucien had burned for two days.
He’d beaten me to Rook as she’d raced to the surface.
He’d caught her as she fell from the sky and erupted in a cloud of snow.
He’d collapsed on the ice the moment she vanished, and it’d taken all my training to lock down my heart-wrenching grief of losing Rook and do my best to protect him...all because that was what she would’ve asked me to do.
I’d carried him back into the lab and begged Frank to save him.
I’d slapped the elderly CEO when he gave in to his sobs that Rook was gone. We didn’t have time to grieve. Not yet. Rook died because she refused to live without Lucien. I’d told him she would never put herself first. I blamed him for her death, and it took strength I didn’t have not to beat him to a pulp for pushing her to die.
The only thing keeping me sane was the knowledge that Rook had been dying anyway. She’d been dying her entire life and no matter what I did as her bodyguard, I would never have been able to change that fact because her parents signed her death warrant the day they created her in a test tube.
But if I could save the man she’d fallen in love with.
If there was a way to bring him back—
Lucien snarled in his sleep as another blast of fire attacked the ice walls.
The lab creaked as the heat became too much.
Steam hissed beneath the door, clouding the corridor.
Whisper paced like a wild thing, claws out, fangs dripping, snarls ringing in my ears. He hadn’t calmed since Lucien had been brought back and began burning.
Nothing woke him.
Before the flames completely engulfed him, we’d tried physical force, adrenaline injections, and even resorted to defibrillation. Whisper had bitten him, licked him, jumped on the table and roared right in his face.
And nothing.
He just kept burning.
He’d kept burning and burning until we’d had to retreat from the room, then close the door, and now...evacuate the entire lab.
Something crashed in the distance, the entire glacier threatening to transform into a flood.
“Dillon!” Frank tugged my arm again. “We have to go!”
“We can’t fucking leave him. Rook would kill me.”
“He’s past the point of help.” Frank sniffed, guilty tears wet in his eyes. “The ascension has him. It’s only a matter of minutes before he burns out. And we can’t be here when that happens.”
I knew he was right.
I’d seen what happened to Rook when she reached the point of death.
How she’d shattered the sky and rumbled the earth. How giant crevasses opened and the entire universe seemed to flex as if something new had been created.
If that happened to Lucien when he died, then...the entire lab would be burned and buried.
Frank clenched his fingers so tight on my arm that his knuckles turned white. “We can’t help him, Dillon! We can’t even get to him anymore. The hinges on the door have melted. The temperature inside is over two thousand degrees. If we force entry, the whole lab will go up—not to mention we’ll be incinerated.”