Page 20 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

20

I fought like a wildcat when Emerson lifted me off my feet and spun me around, but the next thing I knew, I was draped over his broad shoulder.

“Never, Senna.” He smacked my aching ass hard. “I will never let you slip away from me again.”

That declaration stole what was left of my fight. When he set me on my feet next to my Jeep, he trapped me against the door, his strong arms bracketing me in. His black shirt clung to the planes of muscle beneath, but the jerk was barely breathing hard.

In contrast, my breath was coming in jagged pants that made me want to fold forward and put my hands on my knees. Or breathe into a paper bag. Or sink to the ground and just lie there for a while. But there was nowhere to go.

The way his big frame radiated warmth into my already overheated body, it was like a furnace was going full blast between us. I put a hand to his chest and pushed.

“Too hot,” I said on a rough exhale .

He took half a step back as a smirk turned up the edge of his mouth. “You always were.”

I rolled my eyes. Sometimes his words dripped with the kind of honey and spice that had me dreaming of the many sinful things he could do with that mouth. Other times, he was so corny it was hard not to cringe.

He brought his hand up, brushing a few rebellious strands of hair from my sweaty face. “Did you enjoy your run?”

Did I?

“It was… exhilarating.” I would give him that. Never mind the way my core still ached from the want and need he’d let bleed through our mental connection.

That smirk turned dangerously sexy. “That good, huh? To be honest, I had much bigger plans for when I caught you.”

My heart couldn’t handle this moment.

I already felt dangerously exposed.

Closing my eyes, I rested the back of my head against the cool glass of the driver’s door. “Don’t. Please.” The whispered plea slipped out and his hand fell away. After another endless moment, his presence receded, and crisp morning air replaced the suffocating heat of his body.

“Did I hurt you?” The need to reach out and touch me pushed through our connection.

I shook my head, but that wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t harmed me physically, but every moment we shared felt like an omen. Like I was setting myself up for a world of pain, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

When I opened my eyes, he was standing just out of arm’s reach. My idiot heart longed to close that distance, but I kept my feet firmly planted. “The workout was a bit more intense than I’d been planning,” I admitted.

That got a little chuckle out of him. His eyes had faded from that possessive, glowing red to the deep blue that I loved so much. Truth be told, I loved them both, but it was the blue that pulled me in and threatened to never let me go.

“I wasn’t sure you’d play along,” he said quietly.

“Neither was I.”

Big. Fat. Lie.

The second he told me to run, I knew what we were doing. It wasn’t a game we’d ever played before, but I knew.

He searched my face. “You didn’t answer my question.”

I reached up and fixed my ponytail as best I could before I answered. “I’m fine. I just needed some breathing room.”

Based on his expression, he didn’t completely believe me. It didn’t help that I didn’t believe myself either.

“I asked you to meet me out here to talk about Megan Navali,” I added. That, at least, was the truth.

Sure, I’d thought we might be able to have that conversation during a nice, early morning jog. I ran alone most mornings, so coming out here wouldn’t make anyone at Lexa overly twitchy. And, foolishly, I’d thought it would help me focus on the many things that needed to happen in the near future, and not on the way it felt having Emerson in my head again.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Even when I shut him out of my mind, echoes of him remained. Now, in person, I had to contend with his heated looks, and his warm body, and his nearly irresistible pull.

The ache in my core coiled a little tighter, and I forced myself to look at anything that wasn’t him.

A few seconds ticked by before he leaned against the Jeep beside me. “What about Navali?”

Thank the gods.

If he’d made a move to touch me, or to comfort me, I would have been helpless to stop him. As helpless as I would have been if he’d shoved me against the Jeep and pinned me there with a searing kiss .

And now that image was playing in my head like a movie. Fabulous.

Emerson cleared his throat. “I’m trying to behave myself over here, but you’re not making it easy.”

Sonofabitch. I slammed my mental door shut.

How much of that did he pick up on? From the way he was watching me, with so much hunger it sent a wave of goosebumps galloping across my cooling flesh, he’d felt all of it.

His expression sharpened, eyes narrowed. “You’ve put a lot of work into keeping me out.”

I had to. It was the only way to survive.

“About Navali,” I said, deliberately shifting the conversation. “I think I know what she’s planning.”

He didn’t respond right away, but instead of pushing the issue of my mental barriers, he lifted one dark brow and motioned for me to go on.

“If I’m right, we might want to consider working together to take her down.” Even just saying it out loud felt like a horrible idea, especially after what Phineas had done to my people.

“Hmm.” He brought his hand up, running his knuckles along his strong jaw. “Is that because you want an excuse to work closely with me or because you need something I can provide?”

The ego on this guy. But it wasn’t like he was entirely off the mark.

“Honestly? I’m not sure. Maybe a little of both.”

“A weak truth and a hedge. You can do better than that.” His tone took on a demanding edge, but I heard the undercurrent. He genuinely wanted to know.

“Not if I want to keep my sanity,” I confessed.

Disappointment lingered in his heavy exhale, but he didn’t press. He just folded his arms over his chest and said, “Walk me through what you’re thinking about the witch.”

“We have footage of an attack at a campsite from yesterday.” I had to pause and think for a minute. Had it really only been one day since that whole nightmare? With everything that had gone down in between, it felt like a week had passed. “It was her,” I went on. “That much was clear on the video, but she’s playing with a hell of a lot more power than before.”

I turned and opened the driver’s door, fishing my tablet from between the seat and the center console. It only took a few seconds to enter my passcode and find the copy of the video clip I’d sent to myself this morning for just this occasion.

“Watch.” I hit play on the video and handed him the device.

“What am I looking for?”

“You’ll see.”

“Are those all bodies?” He asked the question clinically, like the sight of them didn’t affect him at all. Probably because it didn’t.

As hard as it was to admit that some part of my heart still belonged to Emerson, it was even harder to see him for what he really was sometimes. When I looked at him, I still saw a ruggedly attractive man with a dark brow, a square jaw, eyes that could see into the very depths of me, and lips that were six kinds of sinful. All that handsomeness rested on top of strong shoulders that tapered down into a leanly muscled waist. And damn, he had the ass and legs of a dedicated mountain biker.

The problem was, Emerson wasn’t a man. He was a demon, and his view of human life was worlds different from mine.

He watched the rest of the video with that same emotionally detached interest. Handing my tablet back, he nodded. “She’s found some powerful dark magic, which officially makes this Brethren territory.”

“She’s also a witch. Which makes her my problem,” I said firmly.

“Then we split the job. You take care of her, and I’ll take care of stripping her magic. ”

He made it sound so easy.

“Aren’t you at all curious what she’s up to?” I asked. “The penumbra is one thing, but her eyes? That’s a whole different level of dark. And think about the kind of power she’s been collecting.”

Understanding rearranged his expression into something more calculating. “You think she’s planning to reach out to the veil?”

I tipped my head to one side and gave him a little shrug. “She wouldn’t be the first. There were twelve dead at that campsite, including a child. What would motivate a power hungry witch to slaughter that many people?”

“Twelve. Just like the first coven.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Show me the video again.”

I pulled it up and let him watch it again. And again. When he hit play for the third time, studying the grayscale gore intently, I couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Am I missing something?”

He paused when he got to Megan’s creepy wink and expanded the video so her face took up the entire screen. I’d already seen it all on the much larger screen back at HQ, and I hadn’t noticed anything helpful aside from the ebony eyes and the shadow.

Emerson tipped the tablet toward me. “Her humanity is nearly gone.”

“I kind of figured the pile of bodies gave that away.”

He shook his head. “I don’t mean she’s just given in to her darker side. The woman herself might still be in there, but she’s opened herself up to the darkness.” He cast me a wary look. “You’re tapped into the ribbon, right? That’s where some of your newfound power comes from?”

My heart sank. I knew the conversation would end up here eventually, but I was hoping it wouldn’t happen quite so soon. Of course, I didn’t necessarily have to give him the whole truth .

A quick search of his eyes had me backtracking on that last thought. If he wanted to know, who was I to keep him in the dark? Maybe then he would at least start to understand.

“Not just the ribbon.” I licked my lips, bracing against the rest of the confession. “I crossed through the veil.”

His face hardened in a way I’d never seen before, and it was a little bit terrifying. He pulled the tablet gently from my grip and tossed it on the driver’s seat before pinning me against the Jeep with one big hand splayed across my middle. “Are you telling me you traveled into the Alius?”

A hundred and thirty years ago, it would have taken everything in me not to shrink under that furious glare. Today? All it did was piss me off.

I shoved him back, putting a healthy dose of power behind it. “Yes, and you don’t get to be angry about it.”

He shook his head, but the gears in there were clearly turning. He let out a heavy breath and raked his hand through his unruly hair. “How? How did you get there? How did you get back? How did you survive?”

“When it came to surviving, part of it was luck.” I paused for a beat, fighting an internal battle about sharing the rest. “And part of it was you.”

Skepticism blanketed the look he shot me.

“When you said I’ve put a lot of work into keeping you out of my head, you were right. More than you will ever know. But I didn’t reach out to the veil looking for more power. When I touched it…” The memory of how miserable I’d been swam through my mind.

Back then, there were too many days when dragging myself out of bed was all I could manage, and those were the good days. Never mind bathing. Or eating. I was too numb, too wrapped up in mourning what I’d lost. I didn’t have it in me to care about anything, including myself .

I met his gaze. “I wasn’t planning on living through it.”

So many emotions flickered across Emerson’s face that I couldn’t keep up with them all. In my next breath, he had me pressed to the Jeep again. Only this time, his hands came up to cup my cheeks.

“No,” he whispered through a tight jaw. “You don’t get to quit. Ever.” Fury sparked in his ocean eyes. “Do you hear me?”

If it hadn’t been for the way he was holding me, I never would have felt the tremor in his careful grip. “I hear you, but your lecture is over a century late.”

His eyebrows shot up.

I wrapped my fingers around his wrists and eased his hands away from my face. “My power isn’t new to me. My trip through the veil wasn’t last week or last year. It was three years after I left you.” Three miserable, self-pitying years. “When I felt like I had nothing left to lose.”

Hurt pinched Emerson’s features, but his eyes were what drove a stake deep into my heart. The blue seemed to drain from them, leaving a stormy gray in its place.

“I’m not that person anymore,” I went on. “Just like I’m not the woman you knew back then. And as much as I appreciate your fighting spirit, believe me, I found my own.”