Page 81 of Guarded By the Nightmare

My tone made him stand straighter. “Whatever you’re planning to do sounds like an incredibly bad idea.”

“I don’t disagree. And Mina will be upset. But she will understand my reasoning shortly.” When her actual period didn’t come... “If you know what love is, you will promise me now.”

Royce was still pissed, but he gave a curt nod. “Fine,” he spat, then looked at Mina. “How will I know when whatever you’ve done is over?”

“She’ll rejoin time properly.”

Royce’s brow furrowed in concern. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but—what will happen to you?”

“If it works...I will be nothing anymore. It is the only way I can save her.” I went to stand in front of her. I’d stopped time for her mid-realization that I was about to do something drastic, so her eyes were wide and her lips were parting. I pressed another kiss against them. “All that I do now, I do out of love,” I told her, before looking at theother man. “Tell her that, too,” I said, beginning to open a portal to a forest behind a cabin I’d only seen once before, inside a boy’s mind.

“Do you want weapons?” Royce shouted at me. I laughed once at hearing him, and then the portal closed.

61

MINA

I feltlike I’d taken the world’s longest sneeze—and I was still in the hallway—only the light coming in through the windows outside said it was dawn.

“What...the fuck,” I said, coming back into myself and looking around.

“You’re up!” a woman squealed—it was the same blonde girl I’d met the night before, she was sitting on a desk and clapping her hands.

“Sylas?” I asked, whipping my head back and forth. “Where’s Sylas?”

“Your mate had to leave you,” said a different voice, this time mechanical, from the room’s ceiling, where the Arachnaea was tucked into a corner. “Royce explained what happened to us, after he left. Your mate froze time for you. He needed to complete a task.”

“Which was?” I asked—but I was afraid I already knew. I ripped up the sleeve of my shirt, and sure enough, the sand inside my hourglass mark had stopped moving. Our fates were no longer intertwined. “Where did he go?” I demanded, storming up to the girl.

She was fearless though, and she held up her hands and shrugged. “We were frozen too. He only talked to my dad.”

I looked around. “Where is he?”

She leaned back and hit a button on the phone behind her. “She’s up now!” she crowed into the intercom.

“I’m coming!” her father announced.

“Here’s your purse,” Sirena said, offering it over to me. “Nice gun.”

The elevator door opened shortly thereafter. “We’ll be starting a twenty-four-seven security detail on you at once,” Royce began the second after spotting me, while gesturing for me to follow him back into the reception room—which was the last place I’d seen Sylas.

What had happened right before I’d been frozen?

I’d had a sense of déjà vu, I’d called him on it, and then?—

“I don’t think she’s listening to you, Daddy,” Sirena said.

“He didn’t want to kill me,” I said out loud.

“And that is surprisingly admirable of him,” Royce said, giving me a tense, all-business smile.

“No—it means he went off and did something stupid. By himself.”

“He’s practically an elemental being. He only does what he wants. So wherever he is now is where he wants to be,” Royce said calmly, trying to pat down my rising emotions.

I put my head in my hands. I never should’ve brought anything up at the restaurant. I would’ve talked about dying a thousand times over, if it hadn’t meant that he’d leave me a second earlier than he had to...to go...where?

To try to make a deal for my life, with the only other people who might know how to help him stop himself.

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