Page 61 of Fuse

“Uh-uh.” Foley clamps a hand around the underside of my jaw, jerking my focus back his way. “Soliloquies later, lightning boy. I need facts. Concentrate, goddamnit.” His gaze is filled with the same holy-shit-this-is-bad sprawl as Em’s, but I don’t have the strength to point that out. Every force in my blood and will of my body is converged on fighting off the ice that keeps creeping and the winter witch that’s bringing it. “Now you’ve got to focus, dude.” Foley rises up, thumping the middle of my chest with even more force. “And remember for me—”

“Remember what?” Emma inserts herself into the small space between the window and me. She’s stretched with most of her weight on one curled knee, with the opposite leg extended along the outside of mine. “Holy shit. Reece? Why does he look like this? Why is he so cold? What the hell is—”

“Emma.” The interjection doesn’t belong to Foley. Not unless he’s turned into a female with a smoky French accent. “Please, you must let Foley—”

“Do what?” She shirks Angie’s hand away from her shoulder but doesn’t rip her gaze from my face. “Do what? And why? Sawyer? Wh-What’s happened?”

As if she hasn’t spoken, Sawyer balls his hand and thumps the middle of my chest. “Richards, I need to know what went down between you and Kane on the roof.”

“Are you joking?” Emma lashes. “He looks and feels like a damn iceberg, and you want him to recount all that now?”

Again, Sawyer hardly flinches, but mutters, “Good point.” Directly to me, he says, “Just the last of it, man.” He pushes in, eclipsing even Emma from my view, and turns his words into a matching order. “You need to tell me, word for word, exactly what the fuck Kane did and said to you, dude.”

I swallow deep in my throat while diving my mind back through memories I swore I’d never touch again. But if Faline gets any further into my gray matter, I won’t even have a will to control that touch. So Nightmare Lane, here I come. “I told him I was s-s-sorry. Then he s-s-said…he was sorry too. No. Wait. The worm came first. Or did it come after?”

“Huh? But—”

As soon as Emma goes quiet at Foley’s halting hand, Foley rasps to me, “What worm, dude? And did you ask him exactly why he was sorry?”

I push some energy into my head. Whether the nod is discernible, I don’t care. I can’t care. I’m without the physical capability. My lungs are ice caverns. My heart pumps arctic rivers. My thoughts are practically crystals of cold fusion. “He…he said…didn’t matter. He said…it was already done.”

“It…what?” Emma rasps.

But all Foley spits back is, “Fuck.”

Angelique releases a dire sigh and whispers, “Mon dieu.”

I let my hand drop from Foley’s shirt, across my woman’s trembling, bent knee. Then funnel as much fortitude through my system as I can, digging my mental claws in to hold on to the parts that are still all me, to take in that perfect face wearing nothing but my heart’s adoration across my face.

But there’s no time to add the thousand sonnets, three thousand songs, and ten thousand novels’ worth of words that’d be necessary to even start expressing my love. There’s not time for even a handful of words. Not with the more exigent ones that need to be issued.

“Foley,” I say, though without deterring my stare from Emma for a second. “You…you know what to do, right? If this all really goes to crap…”

“Goes to crap?” She speed rockets a glare between Foley and me that tempts me to close my eyes again. The fuel in her rockets is thick aqua tears, and they’re fissuring every inch of my heart. But I don’t look away, because in the pain, I find a miraculous kernel of truth. If Faline really pulls this crazy stunt off—has somehow managed to use Kane to plant phantom code into my DNA—then she’ll have conquered my mind and my will, but never my heart.

And never the soul that belongs solely, completely to Emmalina Paisley Crist.

“I asked a damn question,” my gorgeous goddess reiterates. “If what goes to crap? And what the hell is it that you’ll ‘know what to do,’ Foley?”

He gives me a succinct nod, totally ignoring the fact that she’s used his last name instead of first for about the third time since they met. “I got you, buddy,” he assures. “Don’t worry.”

Emma lets out a war cry worthy of the Wakanda veldt. “If someone doesn’t freaking tell me what the hell is—” But she sobs herself to a stop as soon as I grip her knee even tighter with an equally strained sound. “Baby.” She leans over, stroking the side of my face. “Please. You’re…you’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry, Bunny.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just talk to me.”

My protesting wheeze doesn’t help—but I’m unable to help it. The electrons in my veins are slowing and freezing, slaves to another program now. To another power. “I’m so fucking sorry, Emmalina.”

“But why?” She shoves Foley’s hand away and replaces it with her own, circling the space over my heart as if the mixture of her frantic touch and her raining tears will be enough to bring me back online. And God help me, how I long for the same thing—with every fiber of the heart that still beats for her, worships her, needs her. With every shred of the soul that will never stop loving her, longing for her, being grateful for how she’s rescued it.

How, because of her love, it’ll be able to hold on to a tiny piece of heaven, despite the hell for which the rest of me is headed.

“I love you, Velvet.” A massive shudder takes over me. “I do, okay? Always, okay? Until the end of time.”

Until the end of my time.

“Nooooo!”