Page 47 of Fuse

Almost too good.

My chest now feels like an erotic power grid, circuits crisscrossing and colliding with heat and arousal, to the point that I can’t feel air entering and exiting my lungs.

Am I still alive? Do I want to be?

“Em?” Reece’s voice registers, though it’s broken up by all the static in my senses, as if there’s a crappy radio connection separating us. “Emmalina? Fuck!”

That comes through clearer. Not the words—but the panic behind them. His panic. Why?

Okay. I’m alive, then—but shifting into a strange version of the meaning. My head is swimming. My heart is hammering. There’s pressure on me—so much pressure. Who shoveled all the boulders onto me?

“Jesus God, baby. What the hell have you done?”

His growl sounds far away, registering through a mist of consciousness. I answer by lifting a weird smile. I know his question is lethally serious, but I can’t give him a coherent answer. The words echo through me in my own voice but with different emphasis—what the hell have you done?—as I peer down at my chest and my hands massaging the liquid electricity all over my breasts. I moan again. The sound spins through my senses. The marks of his milk across my flesh… It’s like gazing at magic come to life, and I’m covered in its hot, bright sorcery.

But how is it taking me over from the inside too?

Everywhere.

His power penetrates in places it’s never been before. It scrapes at my bones. Squeezes my blood vessels. Bites at the organs that give me blood and life, patiently waiting to stab all the way inside.

That’s when understanding washes in.

My breast ducts.

Which must have carried the electricity in and spread it through me that fast.

Well, hell.

But even trying to grasp that whole realization is like trying to locate the sun through smoke. Still, I look up through the heat storm, knowing it’ll be there. Knowing he’ll be there. My sun. My heat.

My everything.

“Emmalina!”

My killer?

Ironically, possibly…yes.

But as soon as the thought beats in, even past my wheezing lungs and thundering heart, so does its contradiction.

Definitely, imperatively, no.

Only it’s damn clear, as soon as I behold the horrified lightning in his eyes, that only one of us believes that.

He’s still lost to the dread of accusing, trying, and convicting himself for my murder. Because apparently, reasoning out everything that happened with Kane wasn’t enough for hashing out that neurosis.

Ridiculous, senseless man.

Doesn’t he see the obvious yet? That we were a tag team getting me into this mess. That we obeyed the screams of our lust and listened to the magic of our connection, not the cores of our logic.

But more critically, not recognizing that logic is the perfect way back out of this bullshit.

“Fuck!” He’s bellowing again. And again. And again. The repetitions have quickened, keeping time with my strangled strains for breath, while he’s completely stopped seeing the pleading in my eyes and the cries of my mind. He’s picked now to turn off that crazy ability to read everything I’m thinking? Seriously? “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Emma. Oh dear fuck. Emma. Not you too.” His violent movement, twisting his entire upper body, is discernible despite my fuzzed-out vision. And then how he sharply whips his face toward the stars too. “Not her too, damn it! Haven’t you taken enough from me today?”

“Reece.” Incredibly, perhaps only because of the fate of the stars that brought us together, I’m able to scrape my hand up to his forearm and then stab my nails in deep enough to jolt his attention. “Damn it, l-l-listen. I”—have to take a second and gulp for air—“I’m g-g-going to—”

“No!” he spits. “You’re not going to die, goddamnit!”