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A kitchen.

A real kitchen, though not a warm or lived-in kind, but a cold, run-down, abandoned thing. All dusty, with dim gray light and a long island down the middle of it. My frantic eyes scanned elements of the room, my panic doubling as I started to recognize more and more. There was even a loaf gone green and blue with mold forgotten beside a bread knife on the counter.

This place… I knew it with the unquestioning certainty dreams allow, and the certainty landed bone-deep before the memory could even fully catch up. But when it did, sheer dread took over me. The empty house at the end of the long woodland drive, the dark pressing in at every window. The very house that had come with far too many teeth and yet another night where I nearly lost my life to a Myth.

To a Lycan.

But this wasn’t the first time I had dreamed this exact memory before. That was the worst of it, not just to live it, but to dream it again. The moment I woke up in that stolen bed and found it in the room with me, I thought I was done for, there and then.

As for the kitchen, this was where the real fight had happened. Which was why in my dream now, the wolf was coming through the back door. My own mind played back my memories differently, just as it had done when Atlas had forced me to dream the same dream, wanting to see that night for himself.

But as for right now… I wasn’t exactly sure what this was, as I knew I wasn’t asleep. Which also meant I was now questioning… was it real enough to hurt me? Or…was it here to finish what it started and achieve what it failed to do the first time?

Fuck, I hoped not!

But then again, I also wasn’t going to stand around and test the theory either. I knew I needed to run instead of just backing away slowly from the door, as I could see it prowling outside through the dirty glass panel.

My hand instantly went to the source of how I beat it the first time, only to find my unconventional weapon gone. My wrist was bare, the little silver charm bracelet I’d choked the life out of a monster with was missing. Which meant I had no way to fight it off a second time, and with no Atlas here to save me, a dread so final filled my veins, freezing me to the spot. The fear felt like chains tightening around my entire body as true panic took over.

A hand closed over my mouth from behind, a horrified scream tearing from my throat, which died against the palm containing it. A thick muscular arm then banded across me and hauled me backward off my feet. I screamed again into the palm pressed against my lips and clawed and kicked at the person caging me in hard muscle and bone.

But then a voice penetrated the panic, and I swear it felt like a gift from the gods. A voice that spoke low and urgent against my ear, a voice I knew better than my own heartbeat. A voice I hadn’t heard in what felt like a hundred years.

“It’s me. It’s me, it’s okay, I’ve got you… I’ve got you now. Now come with me, come on, before it hears you.”

I went still all over, and this time not through fear but through blinding hope. He pulled me back through a door I hadn’t seen, into a quiet, close, half-dark space. It was only once he had shut the door softly behind us that his hand came away from my mouth and his arm loosened enough to let me turn.

It was Riley.

Riley, who was obviously trapped here too, but still managed to find me and save me from my nightmares. His hair was too long, and his eyes were too tired, but he was still the man who’d walked into my life three years ago and never once walked back out of it. The man who’d taught me how to throw a punch and how to laugh when there was nothing left to laugh about. The one piece of home I had left.

I didn’t decide to do it, it just happened on instinct as I flung my arms around his neck and held on as though the whole drowning world depended on it. The sob that tore out of me came from somewhere I hadn’t let myself go near in months.

“Riley.” It was all I could say. “Riley, it’s you… It’s really you.”

“I’m here, it’s okay… it’s okay, I’ve got you.” His arms came around me in a fierce hold as if he never wanted to ever let me go, and at the same time, his face lowered to my hair.

For a long moment, we just held on, two pieces of a life that no longer existed, in a place that wasn’t real, and I let myself believe in it for as long as I dared.

Then he drew back, his hands rising to cup my face, his thumbs brushing away the tears he found there clinging to my cheeks. His stunning hazel eyes searched mine like a man counting his blessings and not trusting a single one of them.

“I can’t believe it,” he breathed. “I can’t believe he’s got you, too. After everything. After everything that happened.” His voice cracked clean down the middle. “How are you here, Alex? How in God’s name did it get you?”

So, I told him. Told him about crossing the rift to put an end to the darkness, ending a war, about the dark chamber where it took me and what it had shown me. He listened to it with his jaw tight and his eyes wide with unspoken disbelief. And when I was done, he shook his head and pressed his forehead to mine.

“I tried to keep it away from you,” he whispered. “That was the only thing I had left. The only thing it couldn’t make me stop wanting. And it still found you.”

“Riley…”

“I could see it.” The words came out of him in a rush now, broken and desperate, the confession of a man who had been holding it in the darkness for a very long time. “All of it. When it wore me. I could see everything it did with my hands, and I couldn’t stop it, Alex… I tried, I swear to God I tried… I screamed, and I screamed inside my own head, and nothing came out…” His hands moved to my shoulders and then my arms, frantic, checking me over, as if even now he could undo it. “The basement. I remember the basement. Fuck! I remember what I did to your back. I remember the look on your face, your screams, and I would have died, I would have died a thousand times over before I…”

“Stop.” I caught his hands in both of mine and held them still against my heart. “Just stop, Riley, and look at me. It wasn’t you, okay… I know… I know it wasn’t you.” I placed my hands on his face, reaching up and holding him there, making him meet my eyes. “Do you hear me, Riley? I know it wasn’t you. It was never you. Not for one second.”

His whole body shuddered. And then he pulled me back into his chest and held me so tightly it nearly hurt. His face buried in my shoulder, and against my skin, he said, low and wrecked, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you. I don’t…. I never have stopped… wanting you… to be with you, just like we talked about.”

And there it was. The thing that had always sat just beneath the surface of us, finally spoken aloud, in the worst and last place it could ever have been said.

Because the reality was simple, as it wasn’t. My heart now belonged to another, and our time had skipped us by without the chance of it ever getting back to that place.