Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
“’Night, you two,” Timothy rumbled.
“Good night,” Pax and I returned.
Timothy slipped his arm around Dani and began to lead her down the hall toward her room at the end.
She paused only to slant me a knowing glance before she fully turned and stepped into her bedroom, Timothy right behind her.
The door clicked shut.
Pax and I watched, reverence in the air before our gazes moved toward each other.
That same connection billowed and weaved.
Though ours somehow felt familiar.
The soft smiles that fluttered across our lips.
Pax eased forward, his face cast in the bare light that shone from the sconce that hung on the hallway wall.
Striking, gorgeous angles.
He slipped an arm around my waist.
“It’s good, Aria. It’s fuckin’ good.” His voice was coarse. Grating with sincerity.
My fingers found the steady beat that pounded at the center of his chest.
“I know,” I murmured through the fervency that thudded within mine.
A giggle echoed down the hall, and Pax smirked, though it was adoring, and he pressed a kiss to my temple as he wound an arm around my neck and muttered, “Come on, we should get some rest.”
We stepped into the room, and Pax clicked the door shut behind us. He moved to the end of the bed where his duffel sat on top of the mattress. I’d already changed into sleep pants and a loose shirt, my feet bare.
Pax shucked off his boots and jeans and tee, all the way down to his underwear. He watched me the entire time where I hovered near the door, just as surely as I watched him.
He straightened, his body hewn in all that sinewy, defined muscle. The horrors were so clear where they were written on his scarred, disfigured flesh, though his aura skimmed over the top of them, whispering that things might not be so bleak.
He placed both our bags onto the floor, then moved to the side of the bed nearest me.
I flicked off the light switch, and it sent the room into darkness, though the faintest innuendo of light filtered in through the slats of the white wooden shutters from the porch lamp out front.
It was enough to make out his form, the way his back flexed and bowed as he dragged down the covers, then sat on the edge of the bed.
“Want to hold you.” It sounded like a claiming, and rippled through the energy that tugged between us.
I didn’t hesitate.
I crossed the space separating us and climbed directly onto his lap, wrapping myself around him.
He shifted to lie us down facing each other.
Chest-to-chest and breath-to-breath.
The sheets were cool and crisp, and a shiver rolled through me that Pax erased, his body a furnace that burned into mine.
Still, he pulled the blanket up, covering us as if it were a shield of protection.
“We made it,” I whispered into the darkness, my face pressed up under his chin.
His palm smoothed up my spine and to the nape of my neck before his fingers threaded in my hair. “We made it.”
“Thank you for doing it with me. For trusting me that this needed to happen.”
“I will never doubt you, Aria.”
He shifted onto his back, and I curled into his side and rested my head on his shoulder. “I wish we could stay just like this forever.”
Soothing fingers stroked through the strands of my hair, his voice a low resonance that swept through my being. “You are my forever. Whatever that looks like.”
I barely nodded, and a fog of exhaustion rolled through me in a disorienting haze.
“Sleep, sweet girl. I’ll meet you there,” he rumbled.
I snuggled deeper, sagging into the refuge I found in his arms. Into the steady thrum, thrum, thrum of his heart that soaked me like a balm.
I hovered there in the nothingness.
On that shimmery plane where I danced between asleep and awake.
In that weightless moment before my spirit would detach.
And I was there, in Tearsith, with Pax at my side. Descending into Faydor to fight the battle that I was terrified would never cease to rage.
Hours were spent hunting in the bowels of depravity. Slaying every wicked thing we passed while searching for any indication of Ambrose.
Until I was ripped from that realm.
Jolted awake by an explosion of shattering glass.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aria
A scream tore out of me as shards of glass and fragments of splintered wood blew into the room and rained onto the bed, landing like tiny spikes against my exposed flesh.
The alarm screamed. So loud that I couldn’t make sense of where all the sounds were coming from.
Pelting and piercing.
Chaos and confusion reigned, and I tried to orient myself to what was happening. To what had jerked us from Faydor and to an even more terrifying reality.
Pax scrambled to cover me in an effort to hide me within the darkness that shrouded the room.
“Aria!” he shouted over the disorder. “Are you—” His plea was clipped off when he was suddenly yanked away, taking the covers with him.