Page 31 of Inflamed By an Incubus

Mark sighed softly. “I need to speak with Annette… but… I would like to speak with you too when you have a moment. I want to hear from you what happened.”

She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off Fenix, not even when Mark walked away, leaving her alone in the corridor between the cells.

Fenix lifted his head, his eyebrows furrowing as he gazed across the cell to her, a hell of a lot of worry in his eyes that made her feel he could sense how she was spiralling, her thoughts dragging her down, and how the questions rolling through her mind, multiplying rapidly, were shaking her to her soul, leaving her feeling off-balance and as if everything she had believed in was a lie.

The line of swirls, dots and slashes that tracked up his arms changed colours again, shimmering with deep pink, gold and sapphire.

“What do those colours mean?” She couldn’t get her voice above a whisper as she asked that, as a need to know flooded her and made her lean towards him, desperate to make him answer her because she knew that whatever feeling caused those colours, it was about her.

And only her.

He looked away and covered his arms as best he could, concealing the markings, as if he didn’t want her to see them.

“Fenix,” she said.

And his eyes locked with hers.

That fire she kept seeing filled her mind and she could almost feel the heat of it as she stared into his eyes, could feel the flames licking her skin and making her burn.

It was him.

He was the fire.

He made her burn like no other.

And one touch from him was all it would take to burn her will to resist to ashes.

Chapter 9

Fenix was slowly wasting away. He knew it, could feel it as a sort of gnawing sensation inside him, as if his body was eating itself. He pressed a hand to his bare stomach above the waist of his black cotton trousers and stared at the glass front of his cell, his thoughts far away.

Wherever Evelyn was.

Where was she?

Since the white-coat had attacked her, provoking him into revealing that he cared about her, and she had confronted the other male who had reeked of a leader, she hadn’t come to see him.

In fact, no one had come to his cell.

Whenever someone approached it, he expected them to stop before him, but they moved past without paying him any heed, without slowing in the slightest. Every hour that trickled by was torture, had his mind conjuring vile images of Evelyn with that—whatever Archer was. Not human, that was for sure.

He needed to see her again.

He needed to know she was all right.

But more than that, he needed to see that look in her golden eyes again, the one that had left him feeling sure that he was getting through to her, and had made him feel as if he was treading a dangerously thin line. There had been warmth in her gaze and her actions, and it unsettled him.

He couldn’t let her fall for him. Not this time.

It had been a mistake to get caught by Archer and brought here by her. It had been a mistake to lower his guard and be gentle towards her, revealing that he cared about her. He should have remained hard and cold towards her, keeping her at arm’s length and giving her reason to not hate him, but not begin to like him either.

Gods, he didn’t want her to hate him.

That was always the crux of his failings with her.

He could never bring himself to be cruel and callous enough towards her to stop her from falling for him.

One time, he had felt sure they had been close to unravelling the curse and finding a way to break it. The belief that they were going to succeed had made him lower his guard and he had screwed everything up.

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