Page 110 of Visions of Darkness

“Let me.” It was issued like a plea to his back. Wanting to do something. To change it. To somehow make it better.

“You don’t have to take care of me.” With the way he grated it toward the brick wall, I wondered if anyone ever had.

“No, I don’t, Pax—just like you didn’t have to come for me, but you did it anyway.”

Air heaved from his nose, and he planted his hands on the sides of the sink and dropped his head between his shoulders. “I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t think I could have ignored your call. Don’t think I could have ignored the lure of you.”

Trembles raced through me, and I doubted it had a thing to do with the cold. Because I felt hot. Itchy with the need to act. With the need to touch. It was close to consuming when he finally turned to face me.

Everything about him was overwhelming.

Potent and extreme.

The sharply hewn edge of his cheeks and the inflexibility of his stony jaw.

The slash of his powerful brows and the plush of his lips.

But it was the icy flames of his eyes that were completely captivating. That would swallow me down and take me under. The promise that haunted me in my dreams.

I took a step forward.

Energy thrashed.

His breaths turned hard and shallow, panted in the bare space that separated us. He watched me as if I might not be real, either. Like he was terrified I might disappear. Like he wanted to hang on but had already made an oath to himself that he had to let me go.

Unable to look away from his face, I took the cloth from his hand, and I began to gently dab it on his wounds.

Carefully.

Tenderly.

Needing him to understand through my touch what he meant to me. What he always had. Only that feeling had changed and shifted and taken new shape once he’d come to me in the flesh.

Because he was here.

Whole and real.

Flesh and blood and spirit.

The one person I’d ever truly wanted.

The one I’d needed.

The air thickened, and I thought I could hear the hands of time slow as the connection that had forever bound us crackled in the room.

A foreign blaze ignited.

One that warmed my insides. One that was stoked with every rough caress of his eyes.

I hoped in it he could feel my appreciation for what he had done.

That he could feel that piece of me that had come alive.

The piece I wanted him to keep.

My lungs constricted as I stepped even closer so I could apply the bandages: one to a small cut above his eye and a butterfly stitch, which I used on a deeper gash on his cheek.

The entire time, Pax remained silent, though the thoughts that swirled in his mind were so thick and loud I was sure I could hear them.

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