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“I passed out?”

“You were cold.” Fascination pushes through his dark gaze. “I’ve never seen someone so blue. It brought out your bruises…and your eyes.”

“Good to know my lack of oxygen amuses you,” I spit out, hugging my knees tighter.

He arches two black brows. “It does.”

My fingers coil. “This isn’t even my underwear.”

“Right.Ihave that.” He pats his pocket. “Still wet.”

“You stole my underwear?” I knock my fists on my knees and take a settling breath. “You haven’t even told me who you are yet, and you’re collecting my underclothes?”

He taps his thumb over his lips and ticks his jaw to the side. “It might come in handy for stuffing in that pretty little mouth of yours if you keep talking this much.”

“Fuck.” I try to mask the profoundly wrong sensations that rip through me at his words. I should be appalled, terrified after an attempt to kill me and the confinement of yet another prison, but with the inescapable dark walls of my mind, I’m not. Instead, I escape reality with false desire and pad my nerves with the satisfaction of stubborness. I serve him my most menacing look, which has no effect on him whatsoever.

He stares right back at me—deep brown eyes half hidden behind a collection of loose ringlets—corrupting me from across the room.

“Get up,” he says.

I lean my head against the wall. I don’t particularlylikebeing told what to do. His hand moves to his ear, tugging the lobe, his gaze stuck on me.

I don’t budge.

Intrigue flashes across his face, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Up.”

A challenge. I shake my head.No. Not wearing this. Not without a bra. And freezing. Not with his eyes on me. He’s clearly spewing empty words to rile me, but letting him look is like letting him win.

He huffs and stomps across the small room, stopping at my bare toes, which are turning blue—just like he likes. I curl them under.

He takes me by my ear, rough fingers somehow colder than me, pulling me up and up until my legs rise, and I’m looking at his chest, the top of my head not even reaching his shoulders. The cold stone floor slices into the soles of my feet. I cry out and pull away from his grasp, only making it worse. He holds my ear tight and rakes in all the cuts and bruises as if he feeds off them. “I said up.”

“I said no.”Maybe I have a death wish.

He twists my ear. “Yousaidnothing.”

Oh, so true, and for some reason that fires up my insides more than the burn in my ear. I rise up on my tippy toes as though that might intimidate him.

It doesn’t.

Obsidian shards embedded in my skin plink to the ground, competing with the splatter of rain, and he looks down between us. Two frozen nipples and naked legs betray me.

“Fine.No.”

He releases my ear and chuckles, deep and throaty…and sexy. “Too late.”

I can’t have thought that. Abouthim.

My mind is a traitor.

I fold my arms over myself, seeking privacy. That feeling of darkness whispers around us like cold kisses on my skin as he lowers himself before me, giving off the edgy scent of an endlessblack cave. His knees bend, his head dipping past my chest and belly, so close his hot breath sears an invisible line down my upper half. My muscles pull taut from head to toe. Squatting in front of me, his head at my hips, he reaches a hand between my ankles.

I snap my legs shut and trap his wrist. “Nobody goes between my legs without an invitation.”

His curls fall back as he looks up at me, utterly unable to contain that damn smirk. “Too late for that too.” He yanks his hand free and rises again, following that line back up, the closeness of his body and the ripple of cold air around him raising goosebumps on my flesh. “You had your ass all over my lucky stone.”

I tilt my head up to see the oblong black stone in his hand, iridescent blues and silvers in the grooves. “Maybe I would have noticed if my ass weren’t frozen solid.”