Bars. Titanium and reinforced steel.
It took me a moment to realize where we were: Callum’s basement, the place where we’d first met, when Chase was newly turned and half wild with moonlust, and I was stupid and impulsive and unable to stay away.
This time, I was in the cage with him, and he was human.
“Caroline shot you,” I said softly, wishing I could say something else. “You got bitten by a snake.”
Chase blinked, his eyes brimming with acceptance—and something else. “Yeah.”
I reached for his cheek. He nuzzled my hand.
“That snake was going for Maddy,” I said, wondering if this was the last time I would ever touch him, feel the warmth of his skin. “You took its bite for her.”
Chase reached out, touched my cheek, and I leaned into his hand. “I told you that if it came down to the pack or you, it would always be you. But if it comes down to me and them …”
I closed my eyes, rubbed my cheek against his hand.
“I’d pick them,” he said softly. “For you.”
Callum had said that being alpha was lonely—but all I could think, lying there next to Chase, sharing this dream, was that I wasn’t alone.
“You’re going to be okay,” I told him, my lips a fraction of an inch away from his. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Bryn,” he said, his breath warm on my face, his voice wild and irrepressible and sure. “Love you.”
We’d shared dreams before, back when we were hunting the Rabid—enough for me to know that anything Chase said here was as real as words he said when we were awake.
There was no coming back from this moment, not now, not ever.
Somewhere his body was bleeding, poisoned with venom and silver.
Somewhere my body was burned.
But here, in this dream, as we lay side by side in a cage with all of heaven spread out above us, we were okay.
And I wasn’t alone.
“Love you, Bryn,” Chase said again, his voice hoarse. “Always you.”
My mouth went cotton dry, and for a moment, I was scared—terrified—that I wouldn’t be able to say it back. But somehow, I found the words, convinced my mouth to string them into a sentence—one that felt true.
“Love you, too.”
The moment I said the words, his body gave in to the poison, and he began seizing. His limbs twitched, but he didn’t Shift. He didn’t blink. He didn’t take his eyes off mine. He just faded away, bit by bit by bit, until I was lying there alone, the ghost of his touch lingering on my fingertips, my lips warm and swollen with the kiss we hadn’t shared.
Bryn. Bryn. Bryn.
I sat up in the cage and willed myself to wake up so that I could go to him, save him, but instead, the world around me morphed, until the sky was nothing but stars, nothing but brightness, and I wasn’t alone.
“You.” The word ripped its way out of my throat, but I couldn’t coax my body into moving, couldn’t rip the intruder’s jugular out, the way I should have the first time we’d met.
“Me,” Archer said. The word sounded like some kind of confession. “It’s just me this time, Bryn.”
No nicknames, no gloating. This was a side to my psychic stalker that I hadn’t seen before. I glanced at his eyes and noted the ring of lighter color around the pupil, and then I realized what he was trying to tell me.
“Just you,” I repeated. That meant that Valerie was …
“Dead,” Archer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. He flicked his wrist with halfhearted showmanship, and images flashed into my mind, courtesy of his psychic interference. This time, there were no flames—just a series of still shots of the coven’s members, bleeding from the nose. “When Valerie died, her influence went with her. It was sudden. It hurt. But it was enough for the rest of us to realize that the monsters we were fighting weren’t.”
“Weren’t fighting?”
“Weren’t monsters.” Archer looked at me with an expression somewhere between pity and pain. “You’re just kids.”
He couldn’t have been more than five or six years my senior, but for a split second, I could almost see myself the way he did: sixteen, battered, old eyes, thin.
“I’d like to say that we didn’t know what we were doing,” Archer said, trying to sound like the words didn’t matter to him nearly as much as they did. “But we weren’t completely brainwashed. We knew. Valerie just made us feel like it didn’t matter, made us hate you enough that we didn’t want to question what that hatred was making us do. We let it happen. I let it happen.”
I shut Archer down before he could say the word sorry, because I didn’t want to hear it. “I need to wake up,” I told him. “Now.”