Page 16 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

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Emerson rolled to the side, taking me with him, maneuvering me until my head rested on his outstretched arm. I could have handled the closeness. Probably. If it wasn’t for the tears burning behind my eyes, threatening to break free. I clenched my jaw, willing them back, but the weight of everything I’d kept bottled up through the years—the heartbreak, the longing, the hatred—was too much.

And yet, no matter how much I wanted to pull away, to run and hide from this moment, I couldn’t make myself leave.

He ran his fingers through my hair and down my neck, tracing the same path he’d followed a thousand times in the past. It was the most conflicted torture I’d ever experienced.

I’d dreamed about moments like this more times than I could count. More than I would ever admit to anyone, no matter how many lifetimes I lived. But in those moments, he’d always talked to me. His warm voice was there soothing me, anchoring my bruised heart.

Instead, a painful silence stretched between us, turning what might have been a moment of relief and reconnection into something else.

He let out a huff that sounded an awful lot like disappointment. “You’re still locking me out.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, cursing the tears soaking into his shirt. So, he had been trying to talk to me, just not out loud. I eased my inner walls down a little, just enough to hear him through the connection he’d forged over a century earlier.

“Senna.” He winced even as his voice whispered through my mind. His arms came around me, pulling me tighter to his body. “That’s better, but you’re still holding back.”

I swallowed back the sadness and regret that were threatening to swallow me whole. “It’s the best I can do.”

He went rigid behind me. Everything in the room seemed to still. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?” Aside from giving into a wholly destructive passion that I had no business playing with again.

“It’s the best I can do,” he echoed. It took me a second to realize when I’d thought those six words, he’d heard it.

Shit.

I shoved away from him, and he let me go, suspicion clouding his features as it doused the smoldering embers of our moment in ice. Swinging my legs off the bed, I stood and dragged my panties and pants up my shaking thighs.

What the hell was I thinking?

Oh right, I wasn’t.

“Wait,” he said. It was a request, not a command, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn around.

I’d fucked up.

I’d given him a taste of what I was capable of back in the alley, but that was intentional. Controlled. It was meant as a warning.

He knew I was more powerful now than I’d ever been when we were together, but our mental connection had always been one way. He could get in my head, talk to me and muck up my thoughts, not the other way around. It had been infuriating some days, and that one-sided access was part of the reason I’d worked so hard to build up my walls.

Communication via the mind, initiating that kind of communication, was a talent reserved for incredibly powerful beings. Gods and demons of the oldest order. When it came to humans, I didn’t even think it was possible. A connection like that, human and demon or human and god, was the stuff of legends.

And it wasn’t like I’d ever tried it before. Why would I?

Exceptionally strong witches could call on pure light. That was nothing new. Tapping into the ribbon, while risky, wasn’t unheard of. But I’d taken it a step farther all those years ago, and it must have triggered something inside me that only Emerson could break loose.

My heart hurt. My emotions were a tangled mess. I was raw when I’d shoved those six words at him, and in that moment of weakness, I’d tipped my hand.

“Senna, for fuck’s sake, look at me.”

I finished buckling my belt and squared my shoulders. “What?” I wheeled around ready for a fight, but I wasn’t prepared for the heat that was rolling off him.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, one foot on the ground. Those broad shoulders were like stone. One big hand gripped the sheets like he was using them as an anchor, and his eyes… they pulsed a deep red, like a vial of blood held up to a flame.

“What did you do?” he asked slowly, lacing each carefully enunciated word with accusation.

I honestly couldn’t tell if he was angry or aroused. Whichever it was, though, on a scale of one to ten, he’d just jumped to eleven.

Easing back a couple of steps toward the bedroom door, I held my hands out in front of me, as if the gesture might calm him in some way. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Those ruby eyes narrowed. “Don’t lie to me.”

What was I supposed to tell him? It wasn’t like I knew this could happen. And telling him the truth would just lead to more questions that I didn’t want to answer and more memories I never wanted to relive.

As far as I knew, only a handful of witches had been reckless enough to try touching the veil before me, and it had never ended well. The unlucky few who did somehow manage to survive the power drain of the initial connection were too weak to fend off the beings on the other side.

The demons. Like Emerson.

“This is more than the ribbon.”

I shook my head. He always was smarter than he looked.

Had he put all the pieces together yet? Did he know, or even suspect, that he was the reason I’d been able to keep my soul intact when I’d touched the veil?

The trick was having barriers in place. Strong ones. We’re talking castle walls made of three-foot thick stone, backed with steel, and enchanted with a hell of a lot of stay-the-fuck-out.

I’d built walls like that thanks to Emerson’s little excursions into my mind. In fact, if it hadn’t been for him teaching me how to lock him out, I wouldn’t have survived.

And if I was being honest, I hadn’t intended to.

I hadn’t really been sure what would happen, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a ruthless, powerful demon to try to claw its way into my head. If I’d let that monster win back then, it probably would have consumed my soul and slipped into my skin before raising hell in my world .

The masochistic part of me had tried to imagine what I would have looked like with glowing red eyes at least a thousand times since then. Or would they have been inky black like?—?

Black eyes. A powerful witch. The ribbon.

Was that Megan’s endgame? Touching the veil?

“Sonofabitch.” A chill snaked through me. “I have to go.” I checked my pockets, but my phone was gone.

“We’re not done,” Emerson said, getting up from the bed and grabbing me by the arm.

I shot him a glare and yanked free of his grip. “Yeah, we are.” I flipped the blankets and tossed the pillows. “I need my phone.”

He didn’t help me look. He didn’t do anything except stand there staring at me, his broad chest rising and falling as he buttoned up his pants. But I could feel his thoughts pressing against my walls.

“Knock it off. You’re not getting through unless I want you to.”

He huffed out a sharp breath. “Your team can wait, Senna. I need you to talk to me. How did you do it? How are you still alive?”

I scanned the floor, though the effort was half avoiding his gaze and half looking for my goddamned phone. “Do you know what happens when a witch reaches out to the veil?”

All I got in response was a grunt.

“I can’t believe I didn’t put it together earlier,” I said, shaking my head. I dropped to my knees and checked under the bed. “Finally.” It must have fallen out when…

I shook the delicious, distracting thought from my head, and got down on my belly to reach it. When I tried to get back up, I couldn’t move.

Did that bastard really freeze me with his magic again?

“Don’t you fucking dare, Emerson.” If I could have seen him from my position on the floor, I would have spat the words at him.

“I’m just buying time. If you call your people, you’ll leave, and I have no idea how long it will take to track you down again.”

His energy pulsed around me, then his big hands were on me, pulling me up and turning me so I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bed frame. Like positioning a goddamned doll.

“This is not the way to make friends, Emerson.” I tried using my magic to break his paralyzing hold, but his hands had already fallen away.

That was the kicker about touch-based magic, it could only do so much when I couldn’t actually touch anything. Now, if I’d been smart about it, like trying to use my magic when his hands were still on me, it might have gone a different way.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I was better than this. Stronger than this.

He let me sit there glaring at him as he crouched in front of me, his eyes still pulsing that deadly red as they danced between mine. “Are you really you ?”

“Seriously? That’s what this is about?” I would have killed to be able to throw my hands up in frustration. “Yes, I’m me. I figured you might know that, since you just fucked me senseless.”

A smirk lifted his lips. “That was just a hello. Fucking you senseless will take days. Weeks.”

I wanted to fire back with a snarky response, but the thought of spending days on end tangled up with Emerson triggered a flood of lust-riddled memories.

His smirk blossomed into that cocky smile I remembered all too well. A look that said he knew exactly which gutter he’d just sent my mind careening down. “You have a harder time keeping me out when you’re aroused, don’t you?” He leaned in and pressed his lips to my neck, right against the pulse point that gave away how rapidly my heart was beating. “Tell me how we met.”

Again, that kiss would have been the perfect opportunity to use power to shove him away. But no. The best I could do was to snort out a huff. “You know how we met.”

He eased back. “And if you are really Senna Dalgaard, my Senna, you’ll tell me.”

A test? Really? I tried like hell not to let him see how much that hurt.

At least I didn’t have to reach far to find the memory of our meeting. It was one of those moments that was burned so deeply in my memory that it would always be a part of me.

Instead of telling him what I remembered, I tested my newfound ability and shoved the memory at him through our connection.

I was just shy of twenty-three and already a widow. Of course, that wasn’t uncommon back then, when so many of the country’s men heeded the call to fight in yet another war.

My husband had been a decent enough man, courting me for the better part of two years before we married when I was twenty. Afterward, he’d moved me seven hundred miles away from my family to live with him in his cottage on the outskirts of Hingham, Massachusetts. Less than a year later, he died a horrible death in a pointless battle with a noble name.

It would be a stretch to say I was heartbroken by his death. He was handsome enough, and kind enough, but ours was not a marriage anchored in love.

I was lost, though, and quickly found myself surrounded by other women like me. Some widows, a handful of spinsters, and a few burned-out housewives who desperately needed a break from their lives .

The whole experiment with magic started out as an innocent game. I’d found a collection of occult books at an estate sale and thought they would be interesting to share with my circle of ladies. Two of those musty old books contained spells.

We were foolish. Or maybe just uneducated in the ways of the real world. No one who had any standing in polite society believed in witchcraft back then. If they did, it certainly wasn’t something anyone discussed in public.

Casting that first spell was supposed to be fun. The off-limits kind of fun that made your heart race because—deep down, in that part of your brain that knew things about the universe your conscious mind would never accept without solid proof—you were terrified it might actually work.

And oh boy, had it worked.

With the power of the thirteen of us, we’d managed to call down a rainstorm from a perfectly sunny sky. It sounded like a lovely and harmless thing to try in the stifling summer heat. The problem was, once the rain started falling, none of us knew how to stop it.

Ten days later, when the streets of Hingham were flooded and everyone was convinced the end of days were near, three strangers swept into town.

I would never forget the moment Emerson and I locked eyes. I’d tried to forget it, about a million damned times, but there was no erasing his furious stare or the disdain etched across his face.

He’d thought we were a proper coven that had summoned the storm for some nefarious reason. It had taken a great deal of yelling (and crying and screaming by the others) to convince him and his Brethren that we were just a gaggle of bored women who’d found a couple of interesting books.

Emerson and the others had walked us through how to end the spell. Then they’d packed up the books and left with a warning that we were never to attempt magic again.

“You never did like doing what you were told,” he said with a sad smile.

“Are you satisfied?” I asked defiantly.

“I accept that you are my Senna. But satisfied?” Still kneeling, he tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I have been starving for you for over a century. Carrying a need that has consumed me ten-thousand times over.” He leaned in close, the scorching rumble of his voice vibrating through my core, speaking to that dark place inside me that only he could reach. “One taste of you will never be enough to quell that hunger.”

“Let me go,” I whispered. It was all I could manage with flames of desire licking up my spine. Emerson had always had a way with words. He knew exactly how to get under my skin.

And my skirt.

“Why do you need to talk to your team right this minute?” He stood, pulling himself to his full height, though it wasn’t his six-foot-plus frame that made him imposing.

Okay, it wasn’t just his frame.

I chewed on the inside of my lip. What would happen if I told him the truth about what I was thinking? Would he want to work together to catch Megan? Could he do anything to help?

More importantly, could I really handle working side by side with him?

Before I could convince myself of anything, his front door exploded inward in a cacophony of splintering wood and hollered orders. His magic released me the next instant, but I couldn’t move fast enough. He hauled me up and threw me behind him, shielding me from the threat pouring through the gaping hole.