Page 37 of Incipient

“You look mad,” I noted, my voice strained from all the wailing I had done earlier.

He worked his jaw before answering. “I don’t like to see you hurting like this,” he said lowly, his gaze cutting to the chains that were restraining my arms. “I swear to god, Jemma, I’m going to put his face through a wall.”

I looked up and met his fiercely protective eyes. “That isn’t going to solve anything,” I pointed out quietly.

“No, but it’ll make me feel better,” he said distractedly as his focus skirted back to the chains. Removing his hand from my face, he grasped the thick looped metal and tugged, testing out its solidity.

The more he played with the chains, the more his body inched away from mine.

“Trace?”

His gaze slid back to mine easily. “Yeah?”

“I need you to keep your hands on me,” I said, my cheeks flushing as the pain slowly amplified.

“Right. Sorry.” Grimacing, he immediately pressed his body against mine and wrapped both arms around my waist in what must’ve looked like an intimate lover’s embrace. “Is this too much?” he asked tentatively, his mouth only a mere inch from mine.

I shook my head, breathing in his spicey scent like it was the cure to the bubonic plague. “I’m sorry about all this. This is probably the last thing you wanted to be doing tonight.”

His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth when he answered, “It could be worse.”

“Yeah? How so?” I mean, he was literally stuck in his best friends’ cellar, cuddling the girl who shot him down the night before.

“I could be cuddling Ben instead,” he offered, having heard my thoughts.

I laughed at that, but the smile quickly faded away as I realized it was open season on everything going through my mind just then. “Can I ask you for a favor?” I said timidly, looking up at him under my lashes.

“Anything.”

“Could you try not to listen in…while I’m like this?”

It felt like an invasion of privacy because I didn’t have enough strength to put up my walls when I needed to. Plus, after what he said this morning, I obviously wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping my thoughts under wraps during even the best of circumstances.

He nodded regretfully as he tightened his hold on me. “I’ll try my best.”

I knew he would, and I knew he wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just needed to make sure he’d make the extra effort, especially when I was caught in this kind of pants-down position. It was hard enough to keep Dominic’s compulsion out of my head without trying to filter my thoughts for Trace’s benefit.

“As soon as I get you out of here, I’m going to figure out a way to break this fucking hold he has on you, and then I’m going to breakhim,” he said, and while his voice was soft and tempered, there was nothing gentle about the look in his eyes. He meant the threat right down to his soul.

“It doesn’t work that way, Trace,” I answered, trying not to sound so hopeless and dejected, but failing miserably at it. “We’re bloodbonded.”

“Yeah, well, nothing is unbreakable. Not even a bloodsucker,” he said firmly, his eyes filled with conviction. “You just have to find the right weapon.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” I said, but failed to finish the thought.

My mind drifted back to the last time Trace had said something similar to me. All those months ago, after Taylor’s accident. When we were still together and happy. The way he’d spoken then, it was as though he’d figured out a way to break the bond. Unfortunately, whatever his plan had been, it had long-since disappeared by the wayside right along with all of his other memories.

But all of that was beside the point. Because Dominic didn’t matter to me back then the way he did now. “I don’t want to breakhim,” I admitted quietly, unable to meet his eyes. “Not the way you want to break him.”

His knowing gaze bore into me. “Because you still have feelings for him.”

A terse nod was all I could muster in response.

“We could always wait for you to fall out of love with him,” he suggested dryly, a sinister gleam in his otherwise magnificent blue eyes. “Then we could put the stake in his heart together.”

“Very funny,” I said, even though I knew he probably wasn’t kidding about that. “If it were that simple, I wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, his gaze dropping away from mine briefly as he reexamined the chains. “It might have to come to that if we don’t figure out a way to get him out of your head tonight, though.”

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