Page 29 of Fuse

He pulls away a little. There’s a faint but beautiful smile across his lips. Some of his hair falls into his electric eyes, and my breath is punched from my lungs. Hell. He has to go and be this beautiful, in this outrageously dire moment? I’m tempted to hate him for real now.

Until he pushes back in, palming my nape and yanking my head up. “Only if I know you’ll be waiting when I’m done.”

I part my lips, knowing he’ll cover them with tender possession—and he does. Then set my chin, knowing he needs to hear my determined pledge.

And he does.

“I’ll be waiting, my love.”

He inhales as if he was waiting to do so. After his equally heavy exhale, he states, “And you get Mom and the rest into the bunker under the command center. Make sure you’re all secure. If Kane’s really in cahoots with those bastards and he’s told them—”

I take my turn to slam the interrupting kiss, because if I even hear the whole thing out loud, it’ll make the horror all too real. “I’ll make sure everyone is safe. And we’re going to be fine. And you’re going to be fine.” Because I refuse to say anything else. To believe anything else. To accept or live with any other reality right now.

Knowing that if I really want it to stay a reality, I have to let him go. I have to watch him go and get the bad guys and trust that the team by his side will help lift him to another victory.

And concede that once more, I won’t be one of them.

No matter how much that truth rips me the hell up inside.

Chapter One

Emma

“What the hell do you want, Kane?”

As my superhero fiancé bellows from the roof of a Los Angeles skyscraper, my mind plunges into a war of reactions. Two huge monitors on the concrete bunker wall in front of me perfectly embody my mental adversaries. The first screen carries multiple images from Reece’s body cams that are embedded in his sturdiest battle leathers. The feeds are a little shaky, giving away the force of the wind, the eye-popping height of that rooftop, and the crackling energy of every breath Reece takes. I don’t fight my instinctual pull to that feed, stepping closer to the monitor with every excruciating second, mentally tethering myself so I don’t reach up and try to touch him. To soothe his rage, his confusion, and yes, even his fear.

But I can’t control my longing looks, either—along with the urge to lick along with the touching. And yes, I’m a little ashamed of that, especially now, but—

No. I’m not one bit ashamed. And am thoroughly blaming the local news, whose coverage is consuming the second monitor, their camera angle even including the lightning-shaped “summoning beam” that rakes back and forth across the smoke-darkened sky. The media is all about extolling the glory of Bolt, the superhero savior of LA—with every sexy-as-hell connotation the label implies. Their lenses capture every dramatic, sinewy, alpha-male inch of him, from his wide-legged stance to his glowing, splayed fingers, to his hair blowing so perfectly, a computer could have generated the effect instead.

I know differently. So much differently.

Over the last year, my fingers have been immersed in those dark, breathtaking waves. I’ve held them through heartbreak, twisted them with frustration, and clutched them at the peak of my passion—and his. I’ve learned every expression of the face framed by those mesmerizing strands and discovered the man behind every one of those nuances.

I’ve learned that the drool-worthy hero captured by those media lenses is only a fraction of the real man—and lover—beneath.

So yeah, I gawk along with everyone else.

But keep the gloating to a private roar.

Not that my stress is giving me a lot of time for that. Thankfully, I don’t have to keep that so private—not when I feel it on every molecule of air around me, courtesy of the two other women in this security bunker with me.

At my side with one hand entwined in mine is my sister Lydia, her gaze glued as hard to the screens as mine. Her brutal grip gives up the truth she’s been denying to my face for so long—things between her and Sawyer Foley are intensifying, and though her lover is nowhere to be seen, she’s terrified he’s not too far from Reece’s side. In the small kitchen behind us, Trixie Richards makes a halfhearted attempt to make coffee. Her other son, Chase, isn’t “on scene” with his little brother but is arguably in just as much danger, having chosen to stay upstairs with his wife, Joany, to lend much-needed extra eyes to survey the dizzying data flooding into the Team Bolt command center overhead. If there’s anyone down here with tension levels close to mine, it has to be my future mother-in-law, who shovels grounds into the coffee maker with war-room intensity.

In short, Trixie’s in the same mood as her son—minus the spark-wrapped fingertips, lightning-laced eyes, and dragon-inspired voice.

“I’ll only repeat it once, man.” The monitor on the right, labeled BBC, Minus the Tea—Wade’s cheeky way of saying Bolt Body Cams—quivers from the force of Reece’s shout. “What the hell do you want?”

The feed shudders even harder, but not from any boosted effort on Reece’s part. This time, the lumbering steps of an approaching creature are the clear cause: a verifiable hulk. Not a mutant in torn clothes, painted thirteen shades of green—but the stranger we used to know as Kane Alighieri, a warrior who, despite being built like a tank, was always the Hodor to Mitch’s Bran. The guy who openly cried at every mushy Super Bowl commercial. The one among us who really did stop to smell the flowers. But now, he’s so transformed from that sweet hero, I expect to see his former clothes in tatters, as more pain fills his glare, more rage pumps into his bulwark shoulders, and more tension notches the virulence of his war-ready stance.

And he funnels every drop of his rage toward the man I desperately love.

If the torque of Lydia’s grip means what I think it does, she’s hopped into the same camp. Kane’s far beyond what any of us expected, even after the warning Angelique brought us earlier today during the memorial service for Tyce and Mitch. Yes, she told us that Kane had voluntarily fallen in with the Scorpios and the Consortium, thinking he could obtain the intel that would take them down from the inside out. And yes, her own cover had been blown once his plan failed and she’d tried—and failed—to help him get back out. So yes, that meant we had to conclude that the shitwads had done their worst to him.

But this is beyond “worst.”

And Kane’s beyond derailed.