by Lexi C. Foss
“Grigory,” I breathed, desiring more. If these were my last moments, I wanted to enjoy them thoroughly.
But a bang from the adjoining room had him ripping his mouth away from mine, his body immediately moving to protect mine while I fought to catch my breath on the bed.
It’s just Necros, I wanted to tell him. However, I couldn’t move my mouth. It tingled with astute awareness, his taste still firmly on my tongue.
“What is it?” Grigory asked, his back blocking my view of whoever had entered his rooms.
“Napia is aware that you freed Zaya,” a deep voice said. “She’s gone to your mother, and they’re on their way here. Together.”
Grigory sighed. “Of course they are.”
“There’s more,” the male added.
“Tell me.”
“Byron and Erie are missing, and Alaric is dead.”
“What?” Grigory jumped to his feet, allowing me to see Cyprus standing in the doorway with a contrite expression.
“The rumor is that you killed him, sir.”
“That’s insanity.”
“I agree. However, you were the last one to be seen with him,” Cyprus replied. “And Napia is claiming you did it for Zaya, that she has some sort of mental control over you.”
Grigory snorted. “No one is going to believe that.”
“That’s the problem, sir. Queen Lux does believe Napia, and she’s ordered me to take Zaya into custody. That’s why I’m here.”
Silence.
I swallowed, the sound seeming to echo through the rooms.
“Something isn’t right,” Cyprus continued softly. “I don’t know what it is, but the order felt very unlike the queen I know. My suggestion is that you react accordingly.”
More silence.
Grigory’s shoulders were stiff and unmoving. I wasn’t even sure that he was breathing.
I frowned at him and then at Cyprus. This was beginning to feel very real. None of my dreams had ever ventured in this direction before. And it seemed to be focused on Grigory, not me.
“Because it’s real,” Grigory growled at me over his shoulder, his mind plowing into mine as he forced a series of images to flash behind my eyes.
I gasped at both the intrusion and the horrendous vision of me in that cell, covered in filth. Then I warmed at the thought of him bathing me. And blushed upon realizing I’d kissed him. Really kissed him.
“Sir,” Cyprus interjected, an urgent note in his voice. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“Right.” Grigory pulled out of my head, leaving me shaking on the bed with the realization that this was all happening right now. Not a dream. Not a trick of my imagination. But a true moment in time.
I kissed him.
And his mother believes I’m hypnotizing him.
What. The. Fuck?
“Sorry, Cyprus.” Grigory’s fist flew through the air so fast I barely caught the movement, and then Cyprus crumpled to the ground.
I gaped at the large man on the floor, then up at Grigory. We’d fought a thousand times, and never had he displayed that kind of strength. I knew he was powerful, but not that powerful.
He glanced at me. “I’m a royal Noxia demon, Zaya. Heir to the throne. That was nothing.” He grabbed his phone from the nightstand and started typing rapidly.
“You’re reading my mind,” I said, frowning. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. In any other situation, I’d be furious, but I was too bewildered to feel much at the moment. “Have you always read my mind?” I wondered out loud.
“No.” He didn’t look at me, his focus still on his phone. “Tonight was the first time.”
“But you’ve always been able to?” I asked. It had seemed almost simple to him to do it.
“Yes.”
“That’s how you compelled me,” I realized aloud. Of course, I already knew that. Noxia demons had the ability to compel, but I never imagined it was linked to the mental cognizance of others. That… made him all the more terrifying.
“Yes,” he repeated, not sounding the least bit contrite.
“Yet you’ve stayed out of my mind otherwise.” Not a question, but a statement. Because I believed him when he said tonight was the first time. His intrusion a few moments ago had been unlike anything I’d ever experienced with him. I studied his profile as he read something on the screen of his mobile. “Why haven’t you penetrated my thoughts before?”
“Because I respect your privacy,” he replied, setting down his phone. “But tonight, I needed answers. And the important one I found is that you have no memory of killing Yakariah. Which is odd since you cut his heart out.”
I grimaced, the image of all that gore making me sick to my stomach.
“And that reaction is why I know something isn’t right,” he said, heading for his bathroom. “Come on, Zay. We need to get out of here.”
“What?” My brow furrowed. “And go where?”
“I know a place,” he said before disappearing through the door.
I wasn’t any less confused when he returned in a pair of jeans, boots, and a fitted sweater.
“We don’t have time for you to change,” he continued as he secured a gun to his belt. “But I’ll find you something when we arrive.”
“Why are we running?”
He keyed a code into a cabinet secured to his wall over the nightstand and pulled out a series of knives.
“My mother ordered your execution without even talking to me. She’s done a lot of crazy things in my life, but she’s not completely insane. Something isn’t right, and I intend to get to the bottom of it. However, I can’t do that with you here. Once you’re somewhere safe, I’ll figure it out.” He handed me two blades. “Don’t use those unless you have to.”
I had nowhere to put them, so I just held the daggers in my palms while he guided a necklace over my head. He donned a matching one, both of them equipped with portal pendants. And both of which I recognized as ones I’d stolen previously.
“So they were in your room,” I mused, finding humor in the most inappropriate revelation of tonight. Because who the hell cared? I was being accused of manipulating his mind. And he’d just given me a token to flee.
“You’d never guess my combination,” he returned, giving me a look.
A commotion in the hallway shifted my attention to the sitting area of his suite. Something hard slammed against the door, followed by Adrik shouting, “What the hell are you doing?!”
“Stand down, King Adrik,” Lux said formally, her voice dulled and emotionless through the door.
“Stand down?” he repeated. “Have you lost your fucking mind, Queen Lux?”
“We need to go,” Grigory said, his hand finding mine as he yanked me off the bed. “Adrik will only be able to stall her for so long.”
That must have been who he was messaging.
Grigory’s arms wove around me in a tight hug. “Hang on, Zay.”
Chicago.
Los Angeles.
Hong Kong.
Reykjavík.
New York City.
London.
By our sixth stop, I was exhausted from portalling us all over the damn human realm. But I had to make sure we weren’t being followed.
Zaya shivered against me. She’d remained alarmingly quiet throughout our journey, her exhaustion a plague on my conscience.
I never should have left her in the hands of others, and I should have initiated this link between us long ago. Her mind was fascinating. Fractured in parts—just as I expected—but so incredibly strong overall. Now that I’d accessed her psyche, I didn’t want to leave.
It wasn’t the same as her dreams, where I visited her on a fantasy strand.
Being in her mind was different, more authentic, as a result of being grounded in reality. Similar to our kiss. That had been the most intense embrace of my life, and we weren’t even naked.
Something about Zaya lit me on fire from within. It’d always been that way. I thought it was
just our blood link, but it went deeper than that.
Her very soul seemed to call to mine on a plane neither of us could see, making me feel more alive than I had in my nearly twenty-five years of existence.
“Where are we?” she asked, her shoulders shaking beneath my arm as I used my opposite hand to key in a code to the building door.
“The outskirts of London,” I told her. “This is one of Adrik’s old flats. He used to escape here to hide from my mother when we were younger.”
“He used to hide from Lux?”
“Not out of fear,” I clarified. “More because he needed his space.”
The door clicked as I entered the final number sequence, and I pulled it open to reveal a side corridor that led to a series of stairs. Zaya followed me, her steps slower than usual. She’d changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket during our first stop in Chicago. Thankfully, it’d been midday in that area of the world. She’d found a pair of boots, too. Then we’d portalled out of the department store before anyone could charge us for it.
I had human cash stashed at various locations—but my mother knew about all of them. And since she seemed to have lost her fucking mind, I couldn’t trust any of those places.
Which was what had led me to Adrik’s flat.
The door to his residence had another keypad rather than a traditional lock. I typed in the proper code and guided Zaya through the threshold into the two-bedroom suite. “My room is the one on the left.”
“I thought you said Adrik owned this place?”
“He does, so it’s technically a guest room, but I’m the only one who ever stays in it.” Not frequently, just when I wanted to avoid my mother as well. “It should be pretty clean, as Adrik has some sort of service that stops by biweekly to clear all the dust.”
I flipped on a few lights, then went to the security panel just beside the door and armed every feature. If anyone tried to come in through the windows or doors, or attempted to arrive via a portal, we’d know.
“This place is like a fortress,” Zaya said, gaping at the screen on the wall.
“Adrik grew up paranoid,” I replied, thinking about our youth. “As the last Shadow demon, he couldn’t take many risks. So he armed himself appropriately.”
“Because of Necros.”
I nodded. “Yeah, largely because of Necros.” The asshole former King of Caluçon had killed Adrik’s entire family. Had my mother not taken Adrik in as an infant, he would have died, too.
Silence fell between us, the darkness outside denoting the late hour. We’d been traveling for a while, yet my exhaustion gave way to my need for answers.
“Can you tell me what you remember?” I asked her. “About Yakariah.”
She cleared her throat and shook her head. “I… I went to change, and the next thing I knew, I was covered in Yakariah’s blood.”
“So when did you take down Cyprus?” I asked her.
She just shook her head again. “I… I don’t remember attacking him at all. He was in the sitting area… and then… I don’t know.”
I studied her for a moment. “The memory scan I did before was crude and quick,” I admitted. “Can I do a deeper dive?” Breaking through the mental barriers of another demon wasn’t exactly something I enjoyed, and I only ever did it out of necessity. Hovering on the periphery of a mind—like I did with her now—was an entirely different situation. It came more naturally to me, yet I’d avoided it with her for the better part of a year. And now I couldn’t seem to release her.
“Aren’t you in my mind right now?”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “I can hear your louder thoughts, and I can sense your general emotions, but I’m not fully immersed. Your memories exist on a deeper layer, one that requires skilled prodding to tap into.”
“That sounds painful.”
“It can be, but only for the one diving into the mind. I’ll experience your memories like they’re my own.” Which was the other reason I never did this to her. The situation with Necros lurked in her mind, and I never wanted to experience that pain. Ever.
“I can feel your hesitation,” she said softly, her own mind brushing mine. “You left the doorway open for me to enter your thoughts.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because if you’d been able to contact me before, I never would have found you half-dead in the dungeon, I told her, pushing the words into her mind.
She frowned at me. “You left me there for weeks.”
“Three days,” I corrected. “But that doesn’t make it any less forgivable.”
“I thought you hated me,” she whispered. “I thought that you… that you had given up on me. Especially after Napia told me about the wedding being brought forward.”
“What?” Napia? “When the hell did she say that?”
“While I was in the cell…” She trailed off, her hazel eyes taking on a faraway gleam. “She said you didn’t want to see me and that Valora was the only reason you hadn’t killed me yet.”
I grunted. “Bullshit. I spent the last three fucking days watching the footage of you on repeat. It didn’t make any sense. Why the hell would you rip out his heart?”
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “That’s… that’s barbaric.”
“Yet you did it,” I replied. “And it doesn’t make any sense.” I just kept going back through the loop of how she murdered Yakariah. Over and over and over again. When I tapped into her recollection earlier, it jumped in time, just as she said. However… “I only skimmed your memories before. I want to dive deeper to see if I can find the lost time somewhere in your mind.”
She swallowed. “Okay,” she said slowly. “But I want to see it, too. Is that possible?”
Yet another indication that she had no idea what happened or how. Which just added to the mystery. Had she been so distraught by the event that she’d blocked it?
I supposed that was possible, but it didn’t feel right.
However, it did give me an idea.
“I can inherit the memory and feed it back to you.” It would be tricky, but it should work. “It’ll be sort of like a looping feed in our minds.”
“That sounds surreal.”
“I imagine it’ll feel that way, too,” I admitted. “But it’s the only way to let you see the memory since it appears to be locked away.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. Do it.”
Yeah, I wasn’t going to do this in the foyer of Adrik’s flat. “Go lie down on the bed in the other room, and I’ll be right in.”
Zaya frowned at me. “Why?”
“Because I’m about to royally fuck your mind, Zay. You don’t want to be standing. Trust me.” With that, I left her in the foyer and headed to the kitchen to fetch us both some glasses of water. We were going to need it.
I lay on the bed and closed my eyes, dizzy from the several hours of traveling all over the human world to escape Noxia Kingdom.
How did this happen? I wondered, overwhelmed by the bizarre shift in reality. I went from being locked in a cell to here. All in the span of what felt like a blink.
And now Grigory was about to penetrate my mind.
I felt him enter the room, our connection deeper than ever before with him hovering on the precipice of my mind. I sensed him there, reading me, waiting for my true consent, and measuring my emotions.
Such a bizarre awareness because I could feel him, too. His concern for me. His frustration over our situation. His shame at having turned his back on his kingdom. The latter lurked in the back of his conscious, a thought he seemed to refuse every time it rose, but I heard it loud and clear.
He’d chosen me over his kingdom.
“Don’t,” he whispered, lying down beside me. “I need to focus on you right now, not my burdens.”
“I thought I was one of those burdens,” I replied without opening my eyes.
“You’re not.” The mattress shifted as he moved closer, the heat of his body
warming mine as he positioned himself right beside me. “I never should have called you that.”
“You were just speaking your mind.” I couldn’t fault him for that. Not entirely. “I’ve not exactly been very easy to deal with.”
He cupped my cheek, pulling my face toward his. I opened my eyes to find him only a few inches away from me. “You’re not a burden, Zaya. If anything, you’ve provided me with a needed escape from reality. And I’m not talking about our literal escape, but the mental one.”
I frowned at him. “Mental one?”
His gaze fell to my lips. “Yes, Zay.” He leaned forward and brushed his mouth over mine.
My heart leapt in response. “The dreams?” It was a whisper of sound, one that escaped me before I could take it back.
He smiled. “Among other things,” he murmured, his lips touching mine again. “Mmm, but kissing you in reality is so much better than the fantasies.”
“Because you know about the dreams.” It came out as a statement. He’d already implied he knew about our midnight affairs before, but I hadn’t been given the opportunity to question him about it.
“Yeah, Zay. I know about the dreams.” He slid his fingers into my hair and tugged on the strands to pull me into a new angle. This time he led with his tongue, parting my lips and kissing me so deeply it resembled a brand against my very soul.
I moaned against his mouth, enthralled by the taste of him. Spicy, hot, dominant male. Heat erupted between my thighs as he slid his leg between mine, tying us together in a passionate knot of promise.
The dreams were real, I marveled.
Yes, he replied, his voice warm and sexy in my mind. I could feel your pain while you slept… I had to do something. I just never expected it to become what it did.
You kept coming back, I whispered to him as my tongue tangled with his.
I couldn’t bear your suffering, Zay. At least, that was my excuse at first. Then it became more. So much more.
His thumb stroked the pulse at my neck, his palm shifting to my nape. I need to see into your mind, Zay.
I know.
Consuming some of your blood will help, he added, his kiss slowing to a dangerously sensual pace. I need to bite you. He punctuated his words by drawing a heated circle around the sensitive spot on my neck, causing goose bumps to pebble up and down my arms.
