Soft skin. Ronan had never felt such soft skin. And he’d never felt silkier hair flowing between his fingers or looked into bluer, kinder eyes.
Where am I?
It didn’t matter as long as she kept touching him and he could keep touching her.
Her.
He didn’t even know her name, but he knew her face. He knew her heart. And she knew his.
Her body rolled against him as she tasted his lips. God, she was the sweetest female he’d ever laid eyes on. Who was she? Where had she come from? Her fingers locked around his, and she held down his hands as she took her pleasure from him.
She wore flowing pale-blue robes that cascaded all around them, lifted as if on a breeze.
Everything was white. Soft white bedding beneath them, white walls, white sky outside the white-framed window.
“I choose you,” she whispered.
It was an odd thing to say, but here, in this white room with its angelically white walls, it sounded perfect. He knew exactly what those words meant, even though he couldn’t put that meaning into words of his own.
“I choose you, too.” He pulled her mouth to his and kissed her. Deep, thoroughly, feeling the connection all the way to his soul.
She felt it, too. He could feel everything happening inside her just as if it were happening to him.
This was right. As she sighed and rocked her hips more insistently against him, they both knew how right this was.
“I never thought I’d find you,” she whispered, her breath warm and urgent against his skin.
“I didn’t think I wanted to find you.” He’d never seen a more beautiful creature. One who stole his breath, his heart, and his body with only one look.
“Don’t let them take me.”
“No one will take you.”
“I’m scared.” Even as tears formed in her eyes, her body quickened.
“I won’t let them hurt you.” In this place, he had no idea who “they” were, and yet, he did. He just couldn’t see their names. Only their faces.
She gasped, grinding herself against him harder, faster, with a sense of desperation.
He felt her pleasure rise alongside his, but hers was all he cared about.
“Stay with me,” she begged.
“I’m here.”
“Don’t let them take me.”
“I won’t.”
“Pleeeaase!”
A blast of white light exploded from within her as she came in a powerful rush. And then she was gone. Her weight lifted off him as if stolen away.
He could see her, but he could no longer hear her. No longer feel her. Someone was dragging her away from him. She was screaming. A scream without sound. She reached for him, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t go after her. He wasn’t keeping his promise. He’d told her he wouldn’t let them take her, but they were, and he couldn’t stop them.
“No!”
Her mouth opened in a soundless scream as she strained to free herself, but she couldn’t wrench herself out of their grasp. She was being pulled farther and farther away into a black tunnel that spread its impenetrable darkness into the room. The walls, the bed, the space outside the window . . . all of it turned into an inky well of black as it swallowed her like a pool of oily quicksand.
“HELP ME!” Her scream finally broke through the thickness, and it was the most agonizing thing he’d ever heard.
His heart shattered. Outrage rose inside him like a volcanic eruption.
He would find her. He would save her. And when he did, he would kill those who had stolen her from him.
Kill them!
He jolted awake, breathing hard, covered in sweat, eyes darting around the room.
Where was he? Just like in his dream, there was a lot of white here. White and chrome. And monitors. And beeping. He had tubes and wires hooked up to him, and a bag of clear fluid hung from a tall stand beside the bed.
Was he in the hospital?
How the hell had he gotten here?
He tried to sit up and was met with a shit-ton of no-fucking-way-that’s-happening as pain lanced every muscle in his body.
Holy hell! Had he been run over by a pack of Hell’s Angels and couldn’t remember?
That’s when the evening started coming back to him. The cemetery. Rule. No . . . Rysk. His name was Rysk. The werewolves. The bite on his arm. He tried to lift his arm but immediately abandoned the idea as he let out a strangled, anguished grunt at what felt like a thousand needles stabbing up and down from shoulder to wrist and back again. Talk about acupuncture from hell. Satan himself was putting in these needles. All at once. And his limbs were like one-ton sacks of lava. Hot, heavy, and hard to move without a forklift.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
Unable to move much else than his eyes, Ronan looked toward the female voice to find a doctor with short blond hair walking toward him, wearing the kind of smile all doctors wear when they’re about to deliver bad news.
“Where am I?” His voice sounded the way the rest of him felt, coming out in a string of croaks that served as syllables.
“AKM.” The doctor checked his IV and studied what he assumed were monitors behind him.
“What happened to me?”
“You were bitten by a werewolf.” The doctor pulled her stethoscope from around her neck and popped the ear pieces into her ears with the expert swiftness of someone who’d performed the task a million times. “A genetically altered werewolf,” she added as she pressed the scope to his chest.
Her name tag read Dr. Snow.
He closed his eyes, wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep and dream about the beautiful blonde some more. But with pain ranging up and down his body like an electric current being woven into a web by radioactive spiders, sleep wasn’t something he could look forward to anytime soon.
“How do you feel?” Dr. Snow grabbed a blood pressure cuff from somewhere to the side.
“Like shit.”
She laughed as she carefully wrapped the cuff around his arm and began pumping air into it. “Can you be a little more specific?”
He sighed, and even that hurt. “There’s pain everywhere. All over my body. Nothing doesn’t hurt.”
She stopped pumping, listened with her scope for a few seconds, and then released the cuff. “I can increase your painkillers for the next twenty-four hours to see if that helps.” She made a note on her iPad.
Painkillers would be awesome. As in, better-than-bacon awesome. And nothing was better than bacon.
“I can’t move, either. Everything feels heavy.” Abstract fear briefly iced his blood. “I’m not paralyzed, am I?” But that didn’t make sense. Why would he be feeling pain if he were paralyzed.
She shook her head. “Your nervous system has been traumatized, but you’re not paralyzed. One of the lycans who saved you had to use his own venom to kill that of the werewolf. What you’re feeling is partly the result of the war that raged throughout your body as the lycan venom neutralized the werewolf venom. You’ll be able to move again in time. We’re going to start you on physical therapy as soon as you’re no longer in so much pain. That should speed things along so you’re back on your feet again in no time.” She glanced to the side and smiled. “Well, look who just woke up.”
Ronan couldn’t see who she was looking at, but as he inhaled again, his whole body went rigid as he identified the other person in the room by scent.
His father.
“I was just checking his vitals,” Dr. Snow said to him.
His father came into view, his dark eyes sleepy but concerned. “Is he okay?”
The doctor smiled and tucked her iPad under her arm. “He’s stable.” She turned to Ronan. “I’ll leave you two to visit.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Ronan said.
She just smiled again and lowered her gaze. Before she could say anything further, a nurse poked her head into the room. “Doctor, we have an emergency.”
Ronan caught the sounds of rushed movement outside his room. Equipment and personnel raced to whatever was happening.
The doctor paid them a hasty farewell and raced out of the room, barking an order to someone to bring him pain medicine before disappearing from view.
As the commotion continued outside, silence stretched like poisonous gas between he and his father. Ronan refused to look at him. He didn’t want to see the disappointment staring back at him. Didn’t want to face the scrutiny and criticism he was sure his dad wanted to unload on him. You shouldn’t have taken the ankh. You shouldn’t have stolen it from Micah and tried to use it. This is all your fault. You wouldn’t be in this condition if you hadn’t acted out like a spoiled ten-year-old. If only you could be more like Micah. He never would have done something so foolish. So destructive.
Ronan closed his eyes, trying to block out the pain that had nothing to do with World War III taking place in his organs. This pain hurt twice as much and cut ten times deeper.
You’d think after all this time, he’d be immune to it, but you never really grew immune to being dismissed and cast aside. You just learned how to channel and twist the pain in a new direction.
“Go ahead and say it,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “Tell me how bad of a fuckup I am and get it over with.”
His dad remained silent.
“Come on, Dad, I know you think I’m a failure. I know you resent that I’ll never live up to Micah’s name and that you wish I’d never been born and—”
“I don’t think that.” His father’s hand wrapped around his, jarring Ronan’s eyes open to find his father standing right beside him, staring down at him with nothing but love and compassion.
Ronan frowned. His father had never looked at him that way.
“You’re the only thing that kept me going all these years, Ronan. I know it didn’t always feel like that, but you’ve given me purpose again, and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”
All the years of criticism and hurtful words rushed back to him, emboldening his anger. “You sure could have fooled me.”
“I was in a bad place, Ro. In a lot of ways, I still am. Without your mother, and still suffering the loss of Isabel, I made a lot of mistakes. I couldn’t be the kind of parent you deserved, and I fumbled my way along, trying to say and do the right things but never quite able to get the words to come out right.” His father frowned and looked away. “You were never the fuckup, Ronan. I was.” Their gazes met again. “I was the fuckup. I failed you, not the other way around. You could never fail me. You honor me just by existing.”
Ronan wasn’t sure what to say. This was a side of his father he’d never seen. A side he’d longed for throughout his childhood. A side he’d needed for so long he’d stopped hoping for its existence long ago.
But he was an adult now. The time for a caring father who was proud of him was over.
“It’s too late for apologies.”
“It’s never too late for apologies,” a voice said from the side.
Ronan followed his father’s gaze to the door as Rysk entered the room. Rysk, a.k.a. Rule—a.k.a. lying sack of shit.
Rysk approached the bed. “Don’t let your resentment prevent you from letting your father in, Ronan. What happened isn’t his fault.”
Liar.
The word rose unbidden inside Ronan’s mind. Rysk had lied to him, too. About his name. About who he was. Where did the lies stop?
“How would you know?” This was just what he needed right now, a tag team of disappointing father figures to irritate the holy living shit out of him while he already felt like someone had taken a meat tenderizer to him.
“Because I was part of it,” Rysk said. “I was part of the reason why you were kept in the dark.”
Ronan scowled at Rysk then at his father. His dad and Rysk knew each other, and not because they’d just met. The unspoken awareness passing between them bespoke a familiarity that extended far beyond only a couple of days. They’d always known each other. Seeing them together proved it.
“Who the fuck are you?” If only he could move, he’d deck the fucker and storm out of there, to never look back.
“I already told you. I’m your grandfather.”
Ronan’s thoughts shot back to the cemetery. You’re my great-great-great grandson. He’d thought Rysk had been joking. That he’d been playing some kind of sick mindfuck on him.
“You were serious?” Where was the doctor with his painkillers? He just wanted to go back to sleep. Or maybe he was asleep now and the dream he’d had about the beautiful blonde had been reality.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t want to hear this. Any of it. And, yet . . . he did. He wanted to belong to something bigger than himself. He wanted to believe he had a family. He just couldn’t accept that this was the family he’d been born into.
“Ronan,” his father said, touching his hand again.
Ronan yanked it away, immediately crying out as pain exploded up and down his arm, rippling out to the rest of his body.
His father and Rysk jumped away from the bed.
“What’s going on in here?” A nurse rushed into the room, carrying a small bag of fluid. Most likely morphine.
Ah, relief. Relief that would not only get rid of the pain, but would also put him back to sleep where he could be with the beautiful blonde.
Every muscle in his body twitched from the overstimulation, which sent even more stabs of agony through him.
The nurse shoved past Rysk, who backed even farther away, and thrust the bag onto one of the hooks on the IV stand. Moving like quicksilver, she hooked the bag up to his IV then started a slow drip.
Within seconds, the drug broke into his system, calming the spasms, dulling the physical torment to a subtle ache. Just as he began to sink into a blissed-out stupor where he didn’t care about anything but the sweet sensation of nothingness, he heard the nurse tell his dad and Rysk that maybe it was time they left. That way he could get some rest.
His dad argued, but the nurse insisted.
Through blurry vision, he watched as his dad gathered his things, gave him one last, sad look, and lumbered out of the room. Rysk followed.
At last, he was alone.
Now he just needed to return to his dreams and find the female. The female who took him away from his shit life and gave him a better one. The female who needed him to save her. The female he vowed to save even if it killed him.
The female he had chosen.
But for what?
He didn’t know. But whatever he’d chosen her for, it felt important.
Like the difference between life and death.
Persephone’s eyes shot open as her body arched violently off the bed. Searing pain ricocheted inside her chest. When she collapsed back on the bed, she didn’t so much gasp for air as she gulped in heaving vacuum-like draws for oxygen. She felt like she’d been underwater?
“We have a heartbeat!” someone shouted.
A heartbeat? Surely, they weren’t talking about her.
Paddles were drawn away from her exposed chest, and hands worked all around her, touching, examining, probing.
“Pulse is erratic. She could still crash again.”
“Hold.”
The paddles remained over her, but didn’t touch her skin.
Within a few seconds, the pain in her chest began to subside, and her breathing evened out, although the room faded from light to dark a couple of times, as if she were on the verge of falling unconscious.
Something cold pressed against her chest.
“Her pulse is stabilizing.”
She blinked through the milky haze clouding her eyes as people blurred in and out of her vision.
“Okay, clear the room. She’s back.” The female voice beside her sounded relieved.
Scratchy cloth covered her exposed breasts, and most of the people hovering nearby began to disappear. A few remained, and as her vision slowly came back into focus, she realized she was in a hospital room. These people were doctors and nurses.
A female with short blond hair leaned over her. Fingers pried her eyelids open, and a bright penlight swung left to right, then right to left, briefly blinding her. Her arms were lifted. Monitors beeped. Nurses scurried in with equipment and bags of fluid. But Persephone got the sense that whatever excitement had just occurred was pretty much over.
“We thought we lost you,” the blond doctor said, wearing a relieved smile as she straightened and stuffed her penlight in the breast pocket of her white coat.
“Hu-what?” Persephone blinked against the too-bright lights shining down on her.
The doctor adjusted the sheets and blankets over her. “Your heart stopped. We had to shock you. I’m Dr. Snow. You’re at AKM.”
Her heart had stopped? The haze in her mind was gradually clearing. “Are you saying . . .? Did I die?” She lazily rubbed her palm up and down her arm. God, she itched all over.
“For about two minutes.” The doctor checked the monitors as more nurses left the room, taking the crash cart with them.
Persephone watched them leave, taking her freedom with them. They’d stolen the only reprieve available to her. She wanted to scream at them. To flail her way out of the tubes taped to her arms and dripping lifesaving medicine into her so she could attack them for doing this to her. She’d been so close, and they’d screwed it all up.
Instead, she swallowed her tears and stared down at her too-pale hands. Her vision was still blurry, and the mother of all headaches was setting up shop behind her eyes, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she’d been within arm’s length of true freedom and had lost it. Again.
Now she was back where her life was nothing more than a stage show. Where she was nothing more than a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. Where she had to endure her father’s obsession with pairing her up with a “suitable mate” instead of letting biology take its course.
Yes, she was lonely. Yes, she wanted a mate. Yes, she desired to have what Miriam had found with Io.
There’s nothing like it, Seph! All those times we sat and fantasized about what it would feel like to find a true mate don’t even begin to describe how it really feels. You have to convince your father to let your biological mate find you. You just have to!
But there had been no convincing her father. He refused to listen to her pleas and told her she would be paired with a suitable male by the end of summer, end of story. It was now the end of May, and he’d already found the male he intended to sell her off to. No money would change hands, but as far as Persephone was concerned, her heart was the commodity being bartered, and her body would be sold into sexual slavery.
She didn’t want a male who hadn’t biologically mated her. She wanted what Miriam had. She wanted the supernatural sex, the intimate bond, the magical dynamic that had taken Miriam’s and Io’s hearts and melded them into one. One biologically mated, inseparable, no-one-will-ever-come-between-us heart.
She had no interest in Cecil, the male her father had chosen for her. In fact, Cecil disgusted her. He was too thin, with oily hair, and his hands were clammy. And all he ever talked about was money. How much money he had, how much money he invested, how much money he spent, how much money he expected to make this year. He was such a bore. There was no way she could endure a lifetime of him touching her with his cold, damp hands, let alone sticking his penis inside her.
Death would be a better option.
And she’d almost had it. Forever sleep had been within her grasp twice tonight, and both times she’d been saved. Once by the good doctor, and once by . . .
Him.
The male in the mask.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She’d seen his face. Only for a moment, but it had been long enough for her to know she’d never seen a more glorious male. He’d had the most beautiful eyes, the color of a storm breaking apart to reveal a dusky blue sky. And his features! Strong, dark, intense.
She’d dreamed about him, too. When she’d been dead. She’d been with him. He had touched her. They had kissed, and it had felt so real, as if he’d really been there.
She lightly touched her lips, remembering how his had felt on hers.
But he hadn’t really been there, had he. It had all been a dream. A fantasy she had been taking with her into the afterlife, before the doctor and her team of nurses had brought her back from both the fantasy and the pearly gates.
She was doomed to the reality that she had to live another day, another week, another month in this hell. It didn’t matter how many days she had left. She would find freedom another way. Somehow, someday soon, she would manage to succeed. No one could save her. She’d already decided to die, and nothing would change her mind.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dr. Snow stepped up to the bedside, her head tilted curiously.
Persephone realized she was crying. She smeared the tears from under her eyes. “Why didn’t you just let me die?”
The doctor recoiled as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. “It’s my job to save people, not let them die.”
Persephone sniffled and swallowed past the lump in her throat. “You should have. Let me die, I mean.” She swiped tears off her cheeks again.
The doctor drew nearer and took her hand. “Persephone . . .?”
She couldn’t look at the older female.
“Persephone, look at me.”
She finally brought her gaze up to the doctor’s.
Dr. Snow squeezed her hand. “You have so much to live for, Persephone.”
“No, I don’t.”
The doctor’s eyebrows pinched together. “Sure you do. Your family. Your dreams.”
Persephone let out a caustic laugh that could have corroded copper. “I have no dreams.” Her father had stolen them all.
“Everyone has dreams, Persephone. Even you. You just have to find them.”
“Why? What’s the point? He’ll just take them all away from me again.”
“Who will?”
Before Persephone could answer, her father’s booming voice ruptured the tender mood settling between her and the doctor.
“Where is my daughter! Why haven’t I heard anything, yet?”
Persephone cringed, and heaviness settled over her as she met Dr. Snow’s gaze again. “Him.”