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“You didn’t tell me you put a sack over my head, hauled me through the forest into another realm and dumped me in a dark room.” I turn on my bottom, pushing myself with the heels of my boots, giving him my back. “How come you were in Caldera?”

“It’s—I can’t say.” His words come out thick and sluggish.

I flip back around so fast that I swear my rib stabs straight through a nerve. “Not even to someone you were going to fuck?” I heave from the pain. Emotional, physical—I can’t tell which. Both are debilitating.

The man smiles at me. “I am so close to dragging you the rest of the way back.”

I purse my lips and crank my brows up. “Did you bring a sack?”

“I wouldn’t want to keep you from kicking and biting. Or muffle those screams of yours now that they only make me think of—”

“Do not finish that sentence,” I warn.

“—my fingers in you.”

Dammit. He has me wet just like that, remembering the delicious pain of a four-finger fuck.

“This is all your fault.”

“You’re the one who likes it rough. I simply give you what you want,” he says, wiggling four fingers.

“I’ve had better. And rougher.”In my head…thinking of you.“But no, it’s your fault that I’m in this situation and Kelt is locked up, and that I wandered lost in the woods until I passed out. It’s all your fucking fault.”

He’s quiet, slow breaths coming and going as he looks at me. “I wasn’t the one who ran away.”

I punch the ground, my fists landing as solid as a damn tree, but rootless, unanchored, searching for something to take hold of. Why can’t I understand this man? And why do I want to?

My arms wobble. “Of course I ran away. And I don’t know why you insist on keeping me around. You have no idea what you’re doing or what you want, with me or anything else.”

His head ticks to the side, dark eyes angled at me. “I know exactly what I want from you.”

“I’m not talking about fucking me.”

“Me either.” He shrugs, that rogue brow lifting. “But if we were, I’d rathershowyou exactly how I’d hold you down and shove my—”

“Shit, Eli. Stop.”Don’t make me want you.“And if I don’t give it to you? The other thing you want, I mean.”

“You will.”

“What kind of self-serving—”

“You have no idea what it’s like!” He loses his mix of smirks and cold restraint, threads of desperation unraveling around him.

“Thentellme.”

“You don’t know how much I need you.” His hands clench around his bent knees, every muscle and vein as strained as the air between us, yet vulnerable, brittle, as though I could shatter him with one word. “You’ll do what I fucking say. There is no other option.Idon’t have another option.”

Maybe I would if I could, if I had any control over this magic. If you would explain.

But he won’t, and I’m not whole. I don’t know what’s inside of me. And I tell him as little as he tells me…because I can’t trust him again. He could do anything. Worst of all, he could leave me—like everyone else—so I have to run, before he does.

But as much as I came back for Kelter and to stop the Centress, I came back for him, too, if I look past my own lies. Maybe just to understand what lurks behind those tempting brown eyes. Or to punch him. Or kiss him. I don’t know. But I build up my walls. I cement them in place. I hide behind them—and I push him away with words and spite.

“You don’t need me. Nature is all around us, and you aren’t even trying to get me to take the magic again.” Magic that I shouldn’t be able to take, magic that Hollows were never capable of stealing to begin with, that not even Vaile can pull from the plants. So why can I? What am I?

He grabs hold of my shoulders, his voice as lethal as my grass-fisting hands. It’s at total odds with the smirk lifting into place on his cheek. “I’m not trying to get you to take magic right now,because apparently, it takes two guards beating the shit out of me for you to figure it out.”

The glowing plants at the lake…“That wasn’t because of you. I was scared.”