Rain patted gently on the roof, and Lyrik pulled me deeper into his hold. My back was to his chest and his breath was all around me. The pound of our hearts had finally begun to settle like the waning storm.

He pressed a kiss to the back of my head. “How do you feel?”

On a heavy exhale, I let myself be drawn closer. My mind and body drifted on the comfort. Light and free.

I braided my fingers through his where he had his hand pressed over the tattoo centered on my chest.

“Amazing.” It was a reverent whisper as I lifted our entwined hands and pressed my mouth to the back of his.

“You are what is amazing,” he murmured back, his nose nuzzled in my hair and his words slithering across my skin. Slipping in and over and working all the way through.

I rolled over so I could look at his face. Inky eyes stared back at me in the darkness. His hair was a sexy mess and those red lips were swollen.

A shiver rolled through me.

I chewed at my bottom lip.

I’d just had sex with Lyrik West.

Holy shit.

And it’d been exactly that.

Amazing.

Undeniably, extraordinarily amazing.

I hadn’t felt lost to fear or panic. I didn’t feel a prisoner to the memories.

I felt…liberated.

Beautiful.

Wanted and desired.

He smirked as if he’d just latched onto my thoughts. “You’re looking a little…satisfied.”

I giggled. Yeah. I giggled.

Then it just got worse and I was giving into this rippling sense of euphoria as I grinned and brushed my fingertips across his chin and thought back to the day when he’d openly challenged me out in the market, provoking me by saying the only thing I needed was to be satisfied.

And God, had this man challenged me. Challenged every belief and fear and hope I’d harbored. Chased me down until I faced them.

“Don’t go and get too proud of yourself, rock star.” I went for a tease, but there was no keeping the thick emotion from my words.

God. I’d gone and gotten myself in deep.

That smirk. “Oh, I’m feeling pretty proud right about now.”

A smile tugged at my mouth. “Oh, you are, huh?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

That was the thing. I could see it.

Pride.

But he wasn’t proud of himself.

He was proud of me.

“Thank you.” My words were hoarse and came from that place within me I’d never thought I’d see again. The place he’d exposed.

He gentled his fingers through my hair, this hard, cryptic man who was so utterly soft. “No…thank you. Thank you for trusting me. For letting me get to see a side of you that nobody else knows. For allowing me to help her shine.”

He hooked his finger under my chin and lifted my face to him. “She’s incredibly beautiful and I feel honored I was the one who got to meet her.”

A million nerves fluttered.

That was the crazy thing. He knew me better than anyone. Maybe it was even crazier I felt as if I knew him best, too. As if only I held the power to understand the veiled truth within him. As if I was so close yet still watching from afar.

My fingertips trailed over his shoulder and ran down to the musical bars winding up his arm. An unsung song crying out to be played.

Feather light, I tapped my fingertips along it. As if playing the chords.

Lyrik winced.

My gaze flitted between the pain written so clearly on his face and the notes engraved on his arm. For a few seconds, I studied his expression, trying to make sense of it. To make sense of him. This menacing, intimidating man who at times seemed shackled and oppressed. I wanted to free him. Maybe return to him a little of what he’d given me.

When I turned to look at my fingers trailing the bars, my voice was quiet and subdued as I spoke my confession. “Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep and I’m all alone, I hear you play.”

I risked peeking at him.

His eyes were squeezed closed and his body was rigid. Bracing himself.

I turned my attention back to his song. “I’m almost embarrassed to admit this to you…because I would never want you to think I could look at you as anything but the boy next door…the boy who changed me.”

I swallowed hard. “It was three years ago when I heard my first Sunder song. It was late…I’d come home from work and had been alone in my apartment, lost in the same excruciating loneliness I’ve lived in for the last four years. This song came on…”

Soft laughter rolled from my tongue. “You’d think it would be forgettable, nothing that would ever be ingrained in my memory, but I remember the tingly feeling I got when the first few chords came through the speakers. I remember sitting propped up in my bed, entranced. I had to find out who it was. I had to know who was singing. To put a face to the voice that was so haunting and comforting at the same time.”

Energy rolled across my skin at the memory. “They say music touches us in a way nothing else can, and I swore in that moment it felt as if the person singing it was singing directly to me. That they’d found the words for my loneliness. That they’d tapped into it and for a few minutes I didn’t feel so alone.”

“Blue,” he whispered in effort to shut me down, but I kept speaking. “I found out that song…that song wasn’t sung by the lead who normally sings the majority of their songs. It was sung by a gorgeous, black-haired boy. He was singing Sunday Gone, a song I learned he wrote. I’d sit for hours in front of my computer and watch him with his black guitar braced on his lap and his mouth pressed to the mic. I’d just hit replay over and over because that was the only time I felt truly understood.”

I pulled air into my lungs. “And it turned out it was you, Lyrik.”

It was the song I had tortured myself with when I refused to give in to Lyrik’s advances. When he’d terrified me simply from the way he’d made me feel. Back when I’d been certain he would use me up and throw me away.

And I knew he would.

Throw me away.

He’d made that much clear. My heart clenched with the promise that this was going to end. That this was all he had to give.

But I also knew he wasn’t using me up.

He was filling me up.

Would he give me the opportunity to fill him up a little bit, too?

I pressed a hand over his pounding heart. “I hear you, Lyrik.”

He trembled.

“I hear your words and I hear your pain. Let me share some of it. The way you’re sharing mine. Sing me your song.”

In a flash, he had his face buried in my neck. “Goddamn it, Blue. Why do you have to keep doin’ this to me? You keep trying and trying to get to the place where I can’t let you go.”

“What if I’m already there?”

I had to be.

Not all of this could be one-sided and I refused to believe this beautiful boy could be immune.

Not when I’d been touched so wholly.

Not after what we’d just shared.

Not after we’d come so far.

He clutched me tightly. His breaths came harsh and hard and his hands burned into my back as he pulled me tighter.

God, I hurt for him. For me. For us.

“You aren’t supposed to make me feel this way,” he whispered as if in confession—shamed and ridden with guilt yet still refusing to let go. “This was a terrible idea.”

Those five words. If anything, they just reinforced the reasons for my reserve, my need to keep my distance from this devastated man.

He held me, safe and secure, but I could feel part of his spirit detaching and floating away. Just as strongly as he struggled to stay attached.

His voice shook when he finally released it at the sensitive skin of my neck in a torrent of heartbroken passion.

Lyrik sang like he did in the night.

It was only two lines. That was all he gave me of his unsung song.

Two lines from his mystery.

The words coated in uncertainty and obscurity.

Both of us seemed suspended in it, in the echoing silence that followed behind and held fast to the energy clinging to the air.

“I should go,” I forced out when I wasn’t sure I could remain beneath the crushing weight any longer.

He gathered me closer and tucked my head under his chin, his words just as intense as the song he’d let tumble from his mouth. “No, Blue. No. You definitely should stay.”