Page 15 of Pierce

Sweat broke out on my forehead, along the back of my neck. I felt it soaking into my hair along with the tears which ran freely down my face.

“How can I save you?”

I shook my head, unable to think through the haze surrounding me.

The burning was starting to spread from my shoulder down to my elbow.

It would eventually spread throughout my body as the effect of his blood had time to work its way through me. It would rot my flesh and shut down my organs.

The thought of waiting to die while I rotted from the inside out was enough to make me consider asking him to kill me straight out. I would beg him to kill me before I’d let death take its time.

Alina.

Alina could save me.

Only I didn’t know where I was. I would have to go to her.

“Please, help me get home. I have to get home to my kind. We have a healer. She’ll know what to do.”

“That’s not possible.”

I was sure I must’ve heard him wrong.

There was no way he would do what he’d done to me, then deny me the chance to live.

“What do you mean, not possible? They live right outside Roanoke. It’s easy to get there—I think, anyway. I don’t know where we are exactly.”

“And there’s a reason for that,” he replied with a scowl. “You’re not supposed to know where we are, and nobody else can know we’re here.”

Because he was a dragon.

“Look. I understand. You’re who you are, and I’m who I am. Neither of us lives in a safe world. We have to watch out for humans who would put an end to us. I get it.”

I would’ve said anything to get him to let me go. I would’ve promised anything in the world. So long as the pain ended.

“You don’t understand. There’s much more to it than that for me, for my family.”

“Family?”

“Yes. My brothers and cousins. They all live here with me, and none of them will let you go, either.”

It was a nightmare.

I was here, and they wouldn’t let me go, and I was living in a nightmare. It was the only reason. Or I died in the car, and I was in hell. Was there such a place? There had to be, because that’s where I was just then.

Staring up at a gorgeous, but evil, dragon shifter.

“But… I won’t tell!” I whispered.

I felt myself slipping over the edge of sanity into sheer panic as I reached for him with my good hand, the one whose arm didn’t yet feel like it was I flames.

My hand closed around his wrist, clamping down hard when another wave of pain burned through me. “I swear it. When one of us makes a promise, it’s a solemn oath. It means our very lives. I’m bound to my word. You must believe me.”

His eyes were hard, but there was a spark of something behind them.

Sympathy?

That had to be it. He had gone so far as to share his blood with me in the hopes that he’d save my life. There had to be goodness inside him. I had to play on that, plain and simple.

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