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I tear myself open with the images my mind conjures, then slowly, so slowly, rebuild my sanity, like my wounds. For days, the cuts from the blitzer ripped open again with a sudden movement, a fresh stab of pain destroying the fragile layer of new skin. Torn open and rebuilt, over and over. One layer after another, hiding what’s inside.

My wounds are closed now, the new skin lustrous and striated, untouched by the slow roasting of the sun, healed in the dark of night as my body put itself back together while I slept.

But not my mind.

It’s been the same dream every night since the blitzer—a beating sound, shaking my bed of stone and syncing with my pounding thoughts. I wake up in a cold sweat, the beat still drumming into my mind and body.

“Out.” Eli opens the cell door in the late afternoon, mint and cloves sweeping over me. He’s only been back at the castle for an hour, half of which he spent in the shower, the other half in the teva room with Sypher and Milo. It’s been four days since I was in there with him, and I still feel his hand on my thigh and his mouth around my finger. I’ve hardly seen him. He hasn’t tried new triggers, but he makes sure to leave a note each morning with a bar and a fresh set of his clothes.

“Good afternoon to you too,” I mutter.

“Outside.”

I step beyond the cell door, where he stands in all black, and lean my head back to find his face. “You could be polite about it.”

His shifty eyes look me over.

“Yeah, I know—I’m a prisoner.” My hand is on his arm, resting. I don’t know how it got there. Eli’s head turns, piercing eyes staring at the contact. I pull away. “I’m not running away from that thing again.”

He lets out something akin to a snort and takes a step back from me. “It was a blitzer. We’re not doing that again. It didn’t work as a trigger, and you let it go.”

“It was clearly unhappy.”

“So are you, and I’m not letting you go.” His face is pure defiance.

“You don’t know how I feel.”

“I know you’re as curious as you are pissed,” he says. “And whatever’s in your head is worse than anything you’ve been through in Sonnet.”

He startles at his own words, and my breath hitches. Maybe those eyes of his, with those riveting looks really do see as deeply as they feel. I look back at him, scrutinizing every crease and curve, every minuscule movement, and I swear a longing lurks behind that adamance.

Blinking away any trace of emotion, he adds, “Maybe if you weren’t eye-fucking me all the time I wouldn’t be able to read every damn look on your face.”

I don’t deny it. “You’re the one claiming my body parts for yourself.”

His arms cross, and he drags his gaze from my mess of hair to the toes of my boots in slow motion, tongue peeking out from between his lips. “I claimallof you. And you like it.”

Why why why?I clamp my thighs and lock my knees to keep from squirming. “Look who’s eye-fucking now. If you’re not setting another blitzer loose on me, then what are we doing?” I glance at Sypher and Milo waiting behind the couch, listening to every word.

“Notwe. You’re going to sit in the dirt, and I’m going to practice my shots.” He grabs a knotted mess of straps from the junk pile on the counter, picks it apart with those speedy fingers, works it over his shoulders and clamps it to his pants. The gnarled black straps cross in the back, and an extra strap with pockets crosses diagonally over the front of his shirt from shoulder to hip.

“Suspenders?” I slip my hand over my mouth to cover a laugh. My stomach twists into a knot at the look he gives me, loathing lining every angle of his jaw, but it doesn’t stop me. “You look like an old man, but fuckable.”

Milo bursts into laughter.

Two minutes later my ankles are cuffed and chained to a tree on the edge of the clearing outside the castle, and I’m sitting in mud. The crisp air forces itself into my awareness, whispering in my ears and biting my cheeks.

“What am I supposed to do here?” I look past Milo at the gray clouds hanging low and heavy in the sky.

He kneels at my side, muddying his cerulean jumpsuit and furiously rubbing his hands together. “Figure out how to pull magic from the plants.”

Oh, just that.“I can’t.”

“Eli said he saw you do it once. Do it again.” He leans closer. “I threatened to poison his teva plants if he didn’t give you a week to try and figure it out before putting you through another trigger, so make it count.”

“He chained me to a tree, Milo.”

He smiles bright and makes a further mess of his hair by sending a hand through it. “You called him an old man. What did you expect to happen?”