His face, briefly.

His lips on mine, briefly.

Then a breath like breathing charcoal.

Burn.

Breath again.

Cough.

Burn.

Darkness.

Cold.

Heave.

I got on my hands and knees, gulping air. Rolled to sitting. Shook out my bad wrist. No pain.

The lamp was still on, but the light in the sky was completely out. His clothes were all over the room—shirt on the coffee table, jacket over the fireplace grate—as if he’d stripped on fire.

If anything between Caden and I had ever been bad or dangerous, it didn’t come close to what had just happened on the couch.

Was it the Blackthorne treatments? Were they stretching the time between episodes but making them more severe?

I got my coat on and clutched it closed against a coldness it couldn’t protect me from. A chill from inside me. My feet were frigid against the wood. The front door was still locked. Between my legs, soreness and overuse hung like a weight. That had been the most intense sex I’d ever had. I didn’t know if I’d live through it again.

“Caden?”

I flicked on the kitchen light. Empty.

Up the stairs. Lights still out. No sound.

“Caden!”

Office empty. Spare bedroom empty. Our room. Nothing.

I went back downstairs, continuing to the hall between my office and the back door.

Locked from the inside.

My eye caught the basement door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I opened it, and a waft of cold air hit me. I thought of running for shoes but decided to bear the cold, creaky steps.

Halfway down, shrouded in blackness, feeling the stone walls for the conduit to the light switch, I knew he was there. I couldn’t see or hear him, but I knew.

“Caden?”

No answer, but I found the switch and clacked on the light. It flickered and steadied to a flat blue with a constant buzz.

Down to the dirt floor I crept, moving the false wall to the speakeasy and turning on the lights to illuminate the crumbling boxes and mosaic floor. I didn’t waste time calling his name or looking in the corners. I knew where he was. The wall with the false vase was already half open. I made my way to the safe and opened it, turning on lights as I went.

The light right outside the safe was off. I flipped it on and opened the false wall in the back, crouching to get into the concrete room.

Caden was in the bottle room, huddled in the corner, naked and shivering. His beautiful body was rendered sexless in distress.

I rushed to him, dropping to my knees.

He didn’t look at me.

Putting my hand on his cold skin, I squeezed his arm. “Hey.”

His eyes were open and he was breathing evenly, but he didn’t reply.

“Captain,” I whispered, “it’s cold.”

He turned to face me. His eyes were the clear blue sky, his lips were full and soft, and his jaw was strong and square.

I knew that face, but I didn’t.

But I did.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I knew that face in the moments before his release, in the sorrow of the man who’d wept in my arms after holding death and pain in his hands for eight straight days. This was the face I’d loved on my wedding day and in the broken hours of night.

I put my hands on that face and said his name.

“Damon.”

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