Page 63 of Entangled

I’m sweaty and exhausted, and my tired emotions are tugging me in too many directions. I know I’m obsessing. Poisoned men lying dead. Running for my life. Madison’s face as I backed away from her, abandoning her like the coward I am. Madison becoming Heather. Her betrayal, my anger. Dom staring at her. Jaykob’s kiss. Jasper talking me down. They rip through my mind, one after the other. I’m sick, guilty, happy, and so, so bizarrely angry.

It’s all I can do to cling to Jaykob’s hand, even when the path made it horribly awkward and it would have made sense to let go.

Ican’t.

His hand is warm and heavy around mine, and I’ve memorized the feeling of every callus against my skin. Jayk is here—alive and tangible and in my hands—and I’m not sure I can ever let him go again.

He kept glancing down at me as we walked, then away again as soon as I looked at him.

It shouldn’t be possible for someone as big and tatted and bloodstained as he is, but it’s almost... cute.

And so very, very necessary.

Eyeing off the narrow entrance of the tunnel, he reluctantly releases me from his grip, and every bit of cold and numbness and ugly despair threatens to flood back in. Like his hand on mine had been holding it at bay.

And it’s ridiculous. Utterly absurd. But I’m tired, and my overworked brain keeps dancing over my new reality—the one where every one of my brutes is still alive. Because it feels like a hallucination, or some kind of black magic. Surely the colors around me are too vibrant, and those flowers smell too heady. This world is a faerie glen, ready to pull me under.

Because I am not this lucky.

Loved ones don’t return from the dead... and they certainly don’t risk themselves to saveme.

Oblivious to my silent paralysis, Jasper lowers himself to his hands and knees and enters the tunnel. Jaykob nudges me to follow, and I breathe past my silly feelings enough to drop down, wincing as the position puts pressure on my sore wrists.

It takes an age before I finally reach the end of the tunnel, long enough for the gloom to take on specters, but when I crawl out, it’s into an enormous cavern.

Jasper stands by the entrance, and he offers his hand to help me up.

Jasper. I haven’t been able to look at him once the whole journey. What iswrongwith me? I tried toshake his hand, for heaven’s sake. I might as well have asked him to a luncheon and offered my business card.

“Thank you ever so much for coming to rescue me from rape, death, and danger. Oh, you really are a sport for easing me from my meltdown like you’d hold me afloat in the most violent depths of a storm-tossed ocean. See you in November for badminton.”

God, he must think I’m the most foolish woman ever to breathe air.

But even as I suck in a humiliated breath, my fingers tingle in anticipation. I lift my hand, and when my fingers slip over his palm, the tingle becomes asizzle.

He doesn’t help me up.

Despite my resolve to avoid his gaze, I find myself glancing up at him through my lashes.

His jaw is tight, his sharp gaze sliding over my body... and the way I’m kneeling before him. His hand twitches in mine, then firms, until it’s almost cruel, and for a single, breathless moment, I imagine that hand wrapped around my throat, twitching just like that.

A slippery heat spills through me, shivering me awake, turning my breathing shallow and my breasts lush and abruptly oversensitive. I swallow hard... and feel the invisible press of his grip.

And just like it did with Jaykob, the horrible, unreasonable despair vanishes with his touch. With that gaze. It’s as though kneeling for Jasper is another righting in my universe—another part of me slotted into place.

Jasper pulls me up so swiftly that I have to clutch at his shoulders for balance, and my hands flex around the warm muscles there before I steal them back. He crooks the faintest brow at me, but I’m still so close to him. Too close for speaking. Close enough that I can feel his breath fan my hair in the sweetest breeze, and my heart squeezes in my chest.

And God, I wish it would stop.

Jasper doesn’t want me. He made that clear enough. My visceral reaction to him is just cruel at this point. No matter how unexpectedly devilish he looks in Lucky’s kit, disheveled and roughed up in a way that makes me want to add my own marks.

He’s not mine to have.

Then Jasper tenses under my palms.

“Theylivehere?”

I see Jaykob spill out of the tunnel in time to catch Jasper’s shocked question. He glances over at us and scoffs, lips twisting. Shaking his head, he kneels beside the tunnel’s exit and begins rummaging through his pack with a fierce scowl, not seeming to notice the people skittering away from him in startlement as they come out.

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