Page 76

He tries again, and again, and again. Eventually, his thrusts stutter and stop until he’s completely still beneath me, his red-gold eyes fixed on my face, unblinking as he studies me.

The stillness is worse than the thrusting. Because being examined while he’s inside me makes my skin crawl in a way the roughness didn’t, and I can’t hold his gaze. I can’t hold anything.

I need to get out of here. I need my Logan. I need to forget the dead version of him in the field, and the soulless version of him in this bed, and be back with the Logan who fought the drakon with me and told me he loved me and that he’d never let me go.

I’m tracking the exits in the room when his hands slide up my back and pull me down against his chest, his mouth finding mine before I can protest. He kisses me the way Real Logan does—slow and thorough—and maybe Real Logan is here, beneath the Revenant, waiting for me to find him.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my lips—the exact words he said in the boat before we stepped into the vortex—and electricity arcs between our mouths, making him shudder beneath me as my body melts into his.

Just like that, there’s no throne room, and no scepter. There’s only the stretch and slide of him inside me, and the climb toward the edge he keeps building me to. He turns my head to kiss the spot next to my ear, and my eyes open on the chair to the left, and⁠—

Sapphire’s there. The Star Disc is buried in her throat, and the stardust that trailed from it is dark and crusted with dried blood. Her hand is raised, fingers half-curled toward the disc’s handle, frozen in the position of a woman who spent her last second trying to pull her own weapon out of her body and failed.

Her eyes are aimed at the bed—at me.

The stillness creeps back into my limbs, thick and heavy, and my body twitches with the need to move again. Not for the pleasure, but to escape the quiet.

“Hey.” Logan’s hand comes up to my face, his thumb tracing my cheek. The gesture is so familiar that my body leans into it, even as his empty, red-gold eyes make my lungs squeeze until I can’t breathe. “You keep looking at them.”

“They’re dead.” My voice sounds wrong in my ears. “And they’re sitting in thrones around our bed.”

“They are.” His hips keep working beneath me, and there’s a coiled tightness in his movements now that’s more threatening than anything else so far. “You were incredible tonight. Especially with the wolf girl. She trusted you, then she turned her back to you, and you put three arrows in her before she hit the ground.”

I remove my hand from his chest—the ankar token is gone, because of course it’s gone—and he flips me. My back hits the silk sheets, and he’s on top of me, the weight of him pressing me into the bed, hunger shining in his eyes as he hooks my knee over his hip and drives into me so hard that he shoves me up the mattress.

“Remember the sun girl’s face when you caught the scepter?” he murmurs in my ear when he’s buried as deep inside me as possible, his breath cool against my skin. “She threw everything she had at you, and you walked right through it and turned her own weapon around to end her.”

My hands go to his shoulders, and I try to push him off. He just smirks, pulls back, and drives into me harder, one hand clamped around my hip, the other braced beside my head as I twist beneath him. My legs kick. My back arches away from him instead of toward him. But he keeps going, never breaking rhythm, riding my resistance like it’s another motion of my body.

“The fae girl was the cleanest,” he continues, his eyes bright with a satisfaction so hollow it makes my vision blur. “One throw with her own disc. You didn’t even hesitate.”

“Stop.” The word comes out breathless, and the sound of it terrifies me.

“Why?” His hips pin me to the mattress again, and I squirm under him, but he groans with some sort of sick pleasure that could never come from my Logan and holds me down harder. “You loved every second of it.”

The worst part is that I’m suddenly aware that the place in my chest where guilt is supposed to live—where the part of me that would die before hurting Ruby and the others is supposed to be—is empty.

I don’t have a soul.

The absence of guilt is so shocking that I stop fighting. I just lie there and let Logan keep going, because I now understand why Revenants are what they are. Without a soul, there’s no reason to stop. There’s no voice saying this is wrong. There’s only want, and the satisfaction of getting it, and the empty contentment of a body that’s untethered from the thing that makes it human.

Logan’s mouth finds my ear again. “Relax.” His hips slow to a deep, grinding rhythm that drags him against every nerve I have, and my electricity crackles, rolling through both of us in a slow wave that makes him shudder against me. “You’re thinking too much. You always think too much.”

“I love you.” The words come out of my mouth, aimed at the hollow behind his eyes.

I need to hear him say it back. I need to know that he can still form those three words and mean them.

“You’re the most powerful witch I’ve ever known.” His mouth curves against my neck, the vibrations on my skin as he speaks making me shudder. “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.”

“No.” My hands are on his shoulders, my fingers digging in. “I said I love you.”

“I want every part of you.” His eyes are closed, his mouth dragging up my throat. “Always.”

His hips keep moving, and he’s looking down at me with those red-gold eyes again, and I can see him reaching for the words, and they’re not there. They require a soul to mean it, and the Revenant on top of me is running on empty.

He can’t love me, because love isn’t a want. Love is a choice, and choices require a conscience, and his conscience is gone. It’s lost to two intertwined rings that could be anywhere in the world, if they still exist at all.

His hands slide up my arms and close around my wrists, pressing them into the sheets above my head, and that’s when I feel it.