Page 25 of The Last One Standing (Rogue X Ara #4)

ARA

F ingers ran across my wrists, stinging the shackle marks like acid. I wanted to rip my arm away, but I was unable to move a muscle.

The shuffling of feet moved closer, and the hand released my wrist to slide the hair back from my forehead, but I couldn’t pry my eyes open.

“It’s been three days,” a man said.

I clung to his voice, imagining it was his fingers combing through my hair. He sounded strong and familiar—safe.

I wanted safe, needed safe.

“Three days is nothing compared to three months, child. Give her time,” a familiar female voice said.

Iaso?

“And you?” He stood at my side, a chair creaking and a subtle breeze from the movement my only indication. “How are you healed? How are you alive ?”

Silence followed, then a slow exhale.

“Sit. I think it’s time I tell you…” Her voice turned distant as darkness crept into my head like a suffocating haze, but I clung to her voice, to consciousness. “…immortal.”

My muscles and joints ached, pulling a muffled groan from my dry throat. Fingers probed my wounds again, but they burned less this time, merely prickling sensitive skin.

Doran’s voice cut through the haze, warped like my head was under water. “Edana’s gone…for now.”

The fingers stilled on my wrist, then resumed.

“So, she really doesn’t remember anything?” he asked.

“Neither do you,” that safe voice said, closer than Doran.

It must be his hand holding my arm. He slid a fingertip over my wrist, down my forearm, tracing some invisible line. When it reached my elbow, he followed it back to my wrist before he ran a thumb over my palm. “How do we fix it?”

There was a long pause before Iaso answered. “We can’t.”

“No,” that safe, familiar voice shouted. “No, there will be no one else.”

“She cannot be trusted, especially not with you, of all people,” a man said—Terran.

She? Are they talking about…me?

Heavy footsteps sounded as someone strode across the room. A fist hit flesh, a body fell, then heavy silence.

“He’s right,” Doran said.

“And how about you?” the safe voice asked. How can such an angry voice still feel so safe? “Can you be trusted, hmm? You’ve been working with him this entire time. Did you partake in…this?”

“No,” Doran said. “No one but Adon.”

My heart jumped at his name, and my breathing turned rapid. Doran was there; I’d known that, seen him.

He’d said he hadn’t touched Livvy either, but I’d seen the blood under his nails, caked in his cuticles. Whose was it then, if not ours?

“You know he can’t get in his mind,” Iaso said. “No magic will work on his kind.”

“I may not remember you, but I know I trusted you,” Doran said. “I know I felt kinship, loyalty.”

“It’s not her we can’t trust,” Ewan cut in. “It’s Adon and whatever he put in her head.”

My heart hurt. Ewan is here? And he doesn’t trust me.

Wait.

What did Adon put in my mind? That manipulative, lying, cowardly bastard better not have touched my head.

But the possibility was there.

More than a possibility. It was likely.

“She’s mine,” the voice growled, more animal than Fae. The scent of smoke flooded my nostrils, sweat beading along my forehead. “ My mate. My claimed. Mine .”

Breathing was audible, louder than any words—my breathing.

No, I’m not , I wanted to scream.

I was not his anything. He was not my anything.

We were nothing, because that safe, familiar voice, I realized, belonged to Rogue Draki, and I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to know him. He was just another ruthless, blood-thirsty king—one I was trapped with in this state.

Captured.

Shackles were bad, but being held hostage in my own body was much worse.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t run.

A serpent of panic slithered through my chest, winding around my heart and up my neck. It clogged my throat until it grew smaller, smaller…

The room was completely oblivious to my suffocation.

Help.

My chest couldn’t rise against the crushing weight.

“ Help. ” My plea was silent.

Rogue’s voice grew closer, spouting words I couldn’t decipher, and a fear like I’d never known roared through me, my thoughts turning to screams in my skull.

A large hand cupped my jaw and tipped my head back.

He blew on my face, and I sucked in a sharp breath before my mind went black again.

Two women whispered back and forth, although it sounded like one person, one voice: Iaso, having a conversation with herself.

“You know what you did,” one seethed. “And then this? ”

“It was a mistake. He was a mistake.”

“He was a murderer!”

“He was kind to me. He loved me. He?—”

“Did he? Or did he love your power?”

A broken, trembling breath. “Power that didn’t matter in the end, hmm?”

“You brought a monstrosity into the world…” A step echoed through the air. The voice lowered to a whisper. “Then unleashed him upon us all.”

“It was a mistake.” A shaky inhale. “A witless mistake I’ve been paying for for over fifty years.”

“Fifty years?” The cold, humorless laugh that followed sent chills down my spine. “Not long enough. Not when he lives and you hide here, striking your meaningless deals and drinking yourself into oblivion. It will never be long enough.”

Steps sounded before an icy hand met my temple. I wanted to flinch, but as it grew colder, I wanted to thrash. It submerged my head in the coldest, deepest depths of the ocean.

“I’ll pay my price, but when will you?”

Warm fingertips found my other temple, then fire hotter than the sun flowed from them, cracking my skull and shredding its contents. A vine of thorns trailed down my spine and descended every nerve.

Fire and ice clashed.

An involuntary scream ripped from my throat.

I peeled my eyes open and immediately screwed them shut. Bright light poured through an open window, flooding the room.

I lifted a hand to block the sun and groaned at the pain in my stiff joints before something moved at my bedside. I whipped my head toward it—toward him.

Rogue Draki sat in a nearby chair.

I scrambled back until my spine hit the headboard, then realized I hadn’t been shackled.

My eyes dropped to my arms. No cuffs. No ties.

No scars.

I wrapped my fingers around one wrist. There were no ridges, scabs, or open wounds. It was all gone. My skin was smooth. Not even the fractures remained.

My gaze cut to him again. He hadn’t moved an inch. Just watched me with an unnerving interest.

“Get out,” I croaked, then swallowed to wet my dry throat.

“No,” he said plainly.

“Get out.” Trembling in my voice matched the trembling in my hands. I gripped my shirt and glanced down with wide eyes—clean. Someone changed my clothes.

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “No.”

“Get out! ” I threw the covers back and leapt out of bed, searching the room for a makeshift weapon: a candle holder, a letter opener, a fucking chair, anything.

The glint of metal caught my attention, and my spine stiffened when I found him holding a dagger. My heart hammered as I prepared to flee or fight, my eyes flitting between him and it—but then, he flipped it in his hand so that he held it by the blade and offered me the hilt.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why?”

“You’re looking for a weapon. Might as well hold your own.”

My chest rose and fell quickly when I saw the stone in the handle: storm’s eye. The dagger was mine.

My brows furrowed. I thought I’d never see it again after losing it in the pond all that time ago. How did he get it? How did he even know it was mine?

I didn’t ask, though. Instead, I snatched it out of his hand and backed several steps away from him, lifting it between us. I leveled it at him, but one corner of his mouth ticked up as his eyes dropped to his hand. A drop of red slid down his finger from a small nick.

I cut him.

With a trembling arm, I lifted the dagger higher.

I expected anger or reprisal, but got neither. Instead, he leaned back in the chair, legs spread, wiping the blood on his black trousers. “Would you please lie down?”

“Would you please leave?” I laced my voice with as much venom as I could, but he remained unfazed.

Worse, he laughed. “Glad to see he didn’t obliterate that fieriness, too.”

Too?

My mouth fell open, presumably to say something, anything, but no words would form, only confusion, my tongue tied as tightly as my thoughts.

He lifted a glass from the side table and swallowed the dark liquid without taking his eyes off me. His throat bobbed, once, twice, three times, then he set it back on the table with a clink. “No, I’m not leaving. You and I need to talk.”

I took a small step around the bed toward the door and cursed under my breath when I realized I’d have to pass by him to leave. “About what?”

“About what’s in that pretty little head of yours.”

My cheeks burned. “Don’t say that.”

“Say what?” he asked, cocking his head.

My hand tightened around the metal in my hand. “Just…don’t. Don’t say that.”

“Why?” He seemed amused, like a cat playing with a mouse, and it made me want to cut his tongue from his mouth.

Another subtle step to the door, and his eyes dropped to my feet. They flickered with fire, just like they had the night he caught me. My heart hammered at a dizzying rate.

Rogue Draki was a beast—a dangerous, fire-wielding beast —and I would not be his damsel.

“We have nothing to talk about.” I took a cautious step towards the door. “I’m leaving.”

His gaze slammed into mine, and my feet halted, my lips parted on a sharp inhale.

His eyes were… slitted . “Never.”

For a second, I was rendered unable to move. Two warring sensations rose in me, followed by shame. Intense shame. Because it wasn’t just fear that caused my heart to race. My legs somehow simultaneously tensed in preparation to dart and went lax, my knees threatening to give out.

He’d catch me if I did either. That much I knew.

Those flaming eyes grazed down the hollow of my throat, and I could feel their heat as it rose beneath my skin. I swallowed hard when my body reacted in unmentionable ways.