Page 126 of A Bond with the Dark

My lungs forget how to draw air.

“I know you,” he says, his dark voice shattering any calm I’d just found.

I don’t say anything; I don’t know what to say. I let my gaze sweep over him.

If he’s here, that means that he’s my death. I know death. I’ve stood on the narrow edge of it before, and it doesn’t scare me now.

Though every fiber in me tells me that it should.

Without even so much as a sound, he’s next to me. I try to fight looking at him, knowing that with him standing so close, I’ll fall into those eyes again, and this time, with him in person, I may never recover.

I remember all the times we’d let go of consciousness together, sharing fits and starts of each other’s slumbering worlds.

“You know me, too,” he says, his voice drawing shivers from my spine.

The smell of him is dangerous, like cologne and midnight. There’s a hurricane in his eyes and a fire in his bones that tempts me, and I know if I get caught up in his allurement, I’ll burn in those flames and drown in that storm.

There’s no fire this time, but he hasn’t bitten me.

At least, not yet.

“Why do I know you?” I ask, fighting the urge I feel surging inside my every limb. The only choice I have is to accept the madness.

“You’ve been in my dreams for months.” There it is. His peerless gaze ensconces me, slowly sweeping up my body, his eyes drinking up every feature of my face.

Does he feel this passion that I feel? The passion that feels like I would go to the ends of the Earth for him? That I would burn in his fire no matter how bad it hurts because I like how he burns me? That every lingering moment in his life has put him on this path that led up to this moment on this balcony right now?

“You are the one that has been in mine,” I state when I finally find my voice, not moving an inch toward him because I don’t trust him.

Or myself.

“I think you have that backward.”

“Regardless, what the hell does this mean? Why have we been dreaming of each other?” The tremble in my voice gives him conviction, and even though this is the first word we’re speaking awake to each other, it isn’t. It’s as though we have spoken to each other millions of times in thousands of different lives. This is not the first time we have spoken.

“I don’t know,” he says, and the coolness of his voice trudges through my existence one cadence at a time. I get the feeling he knows this part. He knows it well.

He inches closer, and I feel like I’m being pulled, like his lips are magnets that need mine to feel alive, pressed against them to feel his own existence.

Somehow, I pull my gaze away.

“Sayah,” Bash says, and when he says my name, it feels like a warm summer venom has glided through my skin. “Dom can’t know.”

Dom.

I’d forgotten of Dom.

But why can’t he know? And why does Bash care?

“What is it that he isn’t supposed to know about?” My thoughts are splintering.

He’s too beautiful to not look at.

“The dreams. We’ve been dream-walking to one another.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know what it means,” he says, inching closer to me once again. He’s so close I can count each one of his glorious dark eyelashes.

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