Page 87 of Walking in Darkness

Chest-to-chest and breath-to-breath.

The sheets were cool and crisp, and a shiver rolled through me that Pax erased, his body a furnace that burned into mine.

Still, he pulled the blanket up, covering us as if it were a shield of protection.

“We made it,” I whispered into the darkness, my face pressed up under his chin.

His palm smoothed up my spine and to the nape of my neck before his fingers threaded in my hair. “We made it.”

“Thank you for doing it with me. For trusting me that this needed to happen.”

“I will never doubt you, Aria.”

He shifted onto his back, and I curled into his side and rested my head on his shoulder. “I wish we could stay just like this forever.”

Soothing fingers stroked through the strands of my hair, his voice a low resonance that swept through my being. “You are my forever. Whatever that looks like.”

I barely nodded, and a fog of exhaustion rolled through me in a disorienting haze.

“Sleep, sweet girl. I’ll meet you there,” he rumbled.

I snuggled deeper, sagging into the refuge I found in his arms. Into the steady thrum, thrum, thrum of his heart that soaked me like a balm.

I hovered there in the nothingness.

On that shimmery plane where I danced between asleep and awake.

In that weightless moment before my spirit would detach.

And I was there, in Tearsith, with Pax at my side. Descending into Faydor to fight the battle that I was terrified would never cease to rage.

Hours were spent hunting in the bowels of depravity. Slaying every wicked thing we passed while searching for any indication of Ambrose.

Until I was ripped from that realm.

Jolted awake by an explosion of shattering glass.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Aria

A scream tore out of me as shards of glass and fragments of splintered wood blew into the room and rained onto the bed, landing like tiny spikes against my exposed flesh.

The alarm screamed. So loud that I couldn’t make sense of where all the sounds were coming from.

Pelting and piercing.

Chaos and confusion reigned, and I tried to orient myself to what was happening. To what had jerked us from Faydor and to an even more terrifying reality.

Pax scrambled to cover me in an effort to hide me within the darkness that shrouded the room.

“Aria!” he shouted over the disorder. “Are you—” His plea was clipped off when he was suddenly yanked away, taking the covers with him.

It left me whipping around on the bare bed, blinking into the mayhem and trying to process the obscured, darkened scene.

A cold chill snaked through the frigid air. It had nothing to do with the cold wind that gusted in through the broken window.

It was the evil that clouded the room.