Page 40 of What Whispers in the Dark
His name roared?—
Hmm, I do love when you beg me.Daggered hands squeezed his throat. Blackness, inky and frigid, took hold of him.You must be enjoying this.Her wicked gaze gestured to his lap.Look how you stand for me.
Whore. Malik’s voice now, along with his night-dark flames. Submitting to his command, they swelled and burned at his boots.
The smell … Garrik would never forget it. The smell ofhis burned flesh singeing his senses as he burned and burned and burned.
“Stop touching me.” Garrik’s body violently shivered. He whimpered, “Please.”Please.
The serpent’s head whipped over her shoulder.
Five figures merged into one.
Then warmth. So much warmth.
Thalon’s mouth was moving—speaking—but his words muddled together like a language Garrik had never learned. And he certainly could not invade minds at that moment to use the language of his own tongue.
But Thalon continued, his words hushed, unhurried. Tender as he slammed his knee into the dirt by his feet and faced his High Prince.
That fast, the female faded to vapor, dragging her nails across his upper thighs as she faded away.
The shaking in Thalon’s voice mirrored his warm touch as he carefully guided Garrik’s head to rest against the tree. Warmth enveloped his ice-fevered cheeks, and those words he could not decipher now became clear.
“You’re alright, brother. She wasn’t here,” Thalon cut through Garrik’s haze, and frantically, his tattooed hand flattened against Garrik’s heartbeat. Profound relief breathed from his quivering lips before he repeated, “She wasn’t here,” and again, “she wasn’t here.” Removing his hand from Garrik’schest, Thalon brushed his drenched forehead, disturbing the gray hair soaked there.
Garrik stiffened. Heart thundered. His eyes widened in horror, conveying a simple, unspoken message. A message Thalon understood clearly by the instant retreat of his hand.
“Please,” Garrik begged, voice shaking. “Please, stop touching me.” Liquid lined his eyes, making it impossible to see even the golden beads in his Guardian’s braided locks. Realizing his tunic remained open, he clutched his scars. Still open and exposed. An easy target for wandering, greedy hands.
The face of his Guardian softened. Thalon laid his hands against his own thighs and murmured as if the sound of his voice would cause a great deal of pain, “Garrik, listen to me. It’s Thalon. You’re safe.” When Garrik made a small, pathetic sound, Thalon added, “I'm going to take you home now. You hear me? I’m taking you home.”
No. Everyone would see.They could not see?—
“Leave me.” The words less commanding than he meant them to be. His silver eyes strained to focus on anything; Thalon’s face, that golden glow around him marking him as a Mystic, the stars fluttering above. But his treasonous attention forsook him as he desperately struggled to cover himself. To cover what she left him as. Wholly exposed, or so he thought, his belt and pants open, scars an angry shade of wet crimson as if they were wounds born anew by her touch. “Leave me.”
“Over my dead body,” Thalon softly snarled, shifted forward, and reached for Garrik’s arms?—
Garrik flinched back; terror filled his eyes.
Thalon retreated, hands so close he could feel the heat from his palms. Not touching, not forcing, notleaving. Just … there. There waiting for the moment Garrik calmed. The moment his vision—his heart—steadied.
“Please, Garrik. I will not hurt you.” A careful, firm declaration. There was truth there. Something honest, akin to brotherly love and protection. “Please, let me touch you,” Thalon whispered. Pained golden eyes pleaded. “I need to get you home.”
Garrik’s coherent thoughts were gone. Only a drunken and panicked jumbled mess of disorganized and irrational instinct remained.
Silver eyes dulled, void of any life. The fallen High Prince, reduced to a common broken plaything, hoarsely rasped, “She ruined me.” Garrik shook, fumbling to button his tunic with trembling fingers, desperately attempting to cover himself … but failed. “She fucked me. I—I did not want her to.” He forced himself not to meet Thalon’s gaze. To not offer him the indescribable shame and humiliation that filled his every fractured word.
A fucking coward.
But a choppy breath, a sudden wet sniffle had him finding those golden irises.
Thalon’s eyes had welled with tears; his throat worked as he whispered, “I know.” He leaned forward and so carefully, sosocarefully, looped the buttons through Garrik’s tunic over his retracting abs.
“Stop, please.” Garrik’s breath punched hard and fast. Usually twisting from the source of the touch—the pain—but as the bourbon worked harder on his mind and body, he couldn’t. The terror of it had nausea settling in. His veins nearly emptied as if they could not be bothered to pump blood, prickling his limbs with burning shards of ice.
“I’m sorry, I know this hurts. You’re safe—you’resafewith me, Garrik.” Thalon fastened the buttons as quickly as he could manage while Garrik angled his cheek against the bark, resigned to the torture he had no hope of fleeing.
A silent apology filled those honey eyes, knowing what the touch was doing. How even the air dancing around them was unbearable to Garrik’s skin.
