Page 113 of Goldsin

I see black. I see nothing.

“N-nothing,” I voice.

“Good,” he murmurs, thumb stroking my cheeks. “Now, what do you hear?”

“Only you,” I whisper.

He removes his hands and I collide with celestial blue eyes. And a realization that I’ve lived a similar moment before.

“Whenever you need to escape this place, you cover your eyes, okay?”

“Julian . . .”

His brows twitch as he studies my expression, capturing the words I can’t find the strength to say out loud. “You forgot about that night, didn’t you?”

The memory of Emeric’s party, a few months before I broke things off with Adrian, comes crashing down on me. Eleanora invited me to it. Emeric hosted the party at his place to celebrate finally getting a promotionin his family’s wine business after years of convincing his father he was ready for a more influential position.

I’ve already had too much to drink when Eleanora has the brilliant idea of stealing a bottle of wine to spite Emeric for choosing a job that will see him traveling overseas more often. She coaxes me to share it with her, until my head’s swimming with the effects of the alcohol and my bladder’s fit to burst.

“I need to find a bathroom,” I tell her, my drunken words slurred, but even as I get up to leave I don’t think she hears me, too lost in her own alcohol-induced haze as she rants on about Emeric in between bursts of tears.

Yet she swears she’s not that into him.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” I hear myself say on some far-off level of consciousness as I walk out on her mid-rant. It’s probably for the best. She’ll only deny everything she’s saying when I bring it up again in the morning.

The Grimwards’ three-story mansion is like a maze, and I’m tripping over things and stumbling into walls, pretty sure I’m lost forever and will never find my way back to the party, when I hear glass breaking farther along the corridor.

I don’t know where I am. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in this part of the house.

Following the sound, I find myself on the threshold of a guest bedroom in ruins.

And there in the center of the room ...

Julian.

He’s brutally unplugging the bedside lamp, his breathing ragged, hair tousled, as he yanks and yanks at it.When the lamp finally gives up, he throws it against the wall and lets out a guttural scream.

He doesn’t notice me.

But I’m watching him.

He’s on a rampage, his emotions in tatters, losing all self-control as he unleashes his anger on the room. I’ve never seen him like this before. I can’t put a name to the feeling that washes over me as I watch him. I’m simply frozen in place, a captivated viewer.

Until he looks at me finally.

And for some reason, whether it’s because I’m drunk and not thinking straight or something else, I decide to pretend all those years he ignored me don’t exist. Pretend we’re still best friends and that I’m not dating his brother.

What I didn’t know back then was that Julian was having a panic attack, and I was going to help him get through it the same way he did with me tonight.

I also didn’t know I was going to straddle his hips and beg him to fuck me when he forced his lips onto mine.

Or that I was going to forget about it.

“Until now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

AURELIA

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