Page 82 of Pulse Zero
Reese Morgan is hardwired into my brain, and extracting him would mean cutting me open and hoping I don’t bleed out. Like ripping out nerves and arteries and trying to survive.
My hands are pinned to the wall on either side of my head. The shadows curl around my wrists, not crushing, not gentle, just firm enough that I can’t move unless Reese allows it.
Which is a sentence that really should not be getting my dick hard right now.
He exhales slowly through his nose like he’s losing an argument with himself. Then he reaches for me.
But not withhishands.
With the ones that belong to the shadows.
There are more hands now. With two still binding my wrists, pulling them up higher over my head, others slide up my arms and shoulders like they’re mapping the shape of me, forming steadier fingers, stronger grips. An extension of him, unmistakably. Every movement precise and deliberate. They slide down my chest, and I can fucking feel them over my nipples through my shirt.
My pulse spikes.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Giving you what you want,” he says, his voice low and controlled.
Those shadow hands slide lower, fingers forming and reforming out of darkness as they trace down my ribs. I can feel the pressure of them—cool, weightless and heavy at the same time, like a ghost deciding where my body begins.
“Wait. I—”
They continue their slow exploration, dragging across my front like they’ve got all the time in the world. One of thempauses over my sternum, fingers splaying as if testing the beat of my heart.
That’s when I realize it’s still there. The dread. That awful, creeping weight that comes with his shadows. It presses into my chest the same way it did yesterday when he was torturing me. Cold and suffocating, like my body suddenly remembers every terrible thing that’s ever happened to it.
Except now it’s tangled up with something else.
My dick is still fucking hard.
Dread coils through my ribs at the same time that heat sparks under my skin, and the two sensations twist together into something deeply confusing and profoundly unfair.
I shake my head, my breath coming faster.
“No,” I mutter, realizing my chin is trembling. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
They don’t stop. Reese doesn’t move either. He just stands over me, watching as his shadows slide lower and lower and lower. My breath hitches when dark hands grip each of my thighs, and I look up at him with pleading eyes.
“I said I wantedyou.” My voice trembles, but there’s no fixing it. “I wantyou, Reese. Not…not this.”
“You think I’m going to let you distract me?”
I flinch.
How can he not know what he does to me? What he did to me even when he was dead.
I really did try to convince myself that whatever it was between us had been a side effect of trauma. Proximity. Adrenaline. The weird psychological cocktail that forms when someone kidnaps you and then refuses to be the monster you expect.
Ididbelieve that’s what it was for a long time. I told Reese I knew that’s what it was, but that I didn’t care.
But…it never went away.
I dated other people. I forced myself out into the world, sat across from strangers at coffee shops and bars and tried to feel the things you’re supposed to feel when someone looks at you like they want you. Sometimes I even liked them.
But every single time, eventually, my brain would betray me.
Someone would lean too close, and I’d think about the way Reese used to stand in the doorway of my cell, watching me like I was both a problem and a curiosity. Someone would touch my arm, and I’d remember those moments when Reese had gotten close enough that the air between us felt charged, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
