Page 30 of Bright Blinding Ruin

“Youbrought me here. You calledmeinto your mind while you slept—”

I talk over him, “And, unless I’m mistaken—which I don’t think I am since it literally happened moments ago—you’re the one who brought us back to the zoo. You’re the one who reached into my mind or however you do it and pulled out the memories from me.”

In another flash, we’re suddenly downstairs, in my apartment. I’m trapped between a wall and his strong body, his hand still firm and snug around my neck, and it doesn’t feel as though he’s going to let go anytime soon.

“You.” He forces my chin up, and the expression on his handsome face is one of quiet rage. A quiet rage with an undertone of something else, something sneakily lacing itself through the current of his emotions.

He blinks, and the blueness in his gaze transforms into molten gold. “What are you doing to me?” Invictis whispers the question so vehemently it makes me shiver, and the handaround my neck drops an inch or so to my collarbone, where his large hand then rests.

“I’m not doing anything.” And I’m not. I’m just… what am I doing? What are we doing here? Did I really call out to him and bring him here without meaning to? And why the hell is it so easy to lose myself in the moving golden color of his eyes?

“Again, you lie,” he accuses me. “You… you lie.”

Whatever’s happening is thick, and it fills the air between us so much it becomes hard for me to breathe. Or maybe it’s due to his hand resting on my collarbone. That hand is big enough that it swallows me, and I swear I can feel him even through the fabric of my shirt.

“You lie,” he says again. Don’t know if he has a heart, but if he does, it’s not in it anymore. His normally strong voice comes out soft and faint, whispered in a way that makes me fight for breath.

No words want to come out of my mouth, so I struggle to say, “You’re the liar here. You lied to me from the moment we met. You lied about everything, to get me to do what you wanted me to.”

His head is bent, his tall frame slumping over mine. His eyes still glow like they’re made of liquid gold, and a pair of more entrancing eyes simply don’t exist. “I would not be whole if I did not push you from every direction.”

Gladus’s attack on Laconia. The fake Emperor. Getting me all riled up to do his bidding because he couldn’t do it himself. Oh, yes, he got me good.

“And now you’re whole,” I say, “and I’m supposed to lose my mind like the others, but I’m not. You know what I think?” A half smirk tugs on my lips as I feel the hand on my collarbone sneaking its way up to my neck once more—only this time he doesn’t grip my neck like he’s debating on choking me.

This time it’s nothing more than possession, but you know what they say: possession’s nine-tenths of the law.

“I think, maybe, the one losing their mind this time… is you.”

The words are barely out of my mouth before he frowns at me and growls out, “You cannot change madness. You cannot.”

“Can’t I?” I see his nostrils flare. “Is this the part where you list off a few threats? Make ‘em count this time, Rune. Give me some imaginative ones, ones that’ll keep me awake at night, wondering how you’ll pull them off.”

When he doesn’t say a word, I whisper, “Come on. Give it to me. Give me your worst.”

Maybe it’s my silly human sensibilities, but based on the look he gives me after that, I can’t tell if he wants to kill me or kiss me—and that ignores the existential question of whether or not a weapon can want something like that in the first place.

All I know is it’s a deeply angry, insanely troubled and conflicted, sexy as hell look, so when he pulls away from me and lets me go, I can finally breathe easy.

His golden eyes burn with a searing intensity, and the last thing I hear before the vision of my apartment fades around us is “You.” Just one word. A word that doesn’t even mean much, considering, and yet it echoes through the air, stifling, as if that lone word took everything out of him.

And who am I to judge? Maybe it did.

The world around us fades away, bit by bit until blackness is all that envelops me. Rune disappears during the change, and the last thing I see are his golden eyes.

I’m alone in a sea of blackness, nothing but the tendrils of darkness to keep me company. Angling my head back, I shout into the void, “Pouting now, are you? Figures.” I pause for effect before asking the darkness, “Say, are you sure you’re not human? Because with the way you’re acting—”

Invictis must not like the insinuation. Before I can finish, black smoke coils around my legs, my arms, all the way up to myneck. “Rey.” His monstrous voice fills my head, so low he sounds like an alien, a voice that shouldn’t exist.

The black stuff squeezes my body enough to make me gasp, but no harder. Not hard enough to hurt. The one around my neck curls just beneath my chin, thick enough that I can feel it when I try to swallow.

“What do you hope to gain by returning to Pylos and Acadia? Do you think any vestiges of those fallen empresses can help you?” His voice is eerie enough that it creeps along your skin and gives you goosebumps; I’d shiver if I wasn’t surrounded by snakelike tendrils.

“Sounds like you’re trying to convince me to give up,” I say, grinning even though I shouldn’t.

In a blinding flash of white, Invictis appears before me, hovering in the blackness, not in his human form but in his ascended, humanlike one. Just him and his golden, faceless body, no wings. Eight feet tall, he appears even larger than that above me, his form part human and all armored, shimmering and unreal even with no light to reflect. What light surrounds him comes from inside of him, from where his face should be—where there is just an outline of a head, like a halo.

That’s when it hits me: even without the wings, he looks like an angel.

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