Page 198 of Problematic

Immediately, my body did that fun thing where every feeling I had been avoiding lined up and kicked me in the ribs. Lux’s face. Scarn’s hand in his hair. The chains around his throat. His voice, furious and ruined, telling Scarn to leave me out of it. The way he’d let me leave. The way he lied. The way he replaced my couch because, apparently, guilt for rich men came with velvet upholstery.

“Think of him,” Sam whispered.

“I am. It sucks.”

“Think of the bond, not the broadcast.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Neither did I at first.” Her thumb rubbed over my knuckles. “It’s not in your head. It’s lower.”

Mandi leaned in. “Hornier?”

Sam snapped, “Mandi.”

“What? She’s a succubus,” she whined.

A laugh broke out of me, ugly and scared. She made me think about him in a not-so-mad way, and not that I was thinking about him naked, but the bond opened pretty quickly after that.

It ripped through me like someone had hooked a chain under my ribs and yanked.

I doubled over.

Sam caught my shoulders. Kalon took one step, then stopped himself, because touching me had become a whole thing.

Pain flooded in first, then the silver, the taste of blood and a pressure around my throat that was not mine. Lux’s rage burned under it, locked down so hard it trembled. Beneath that, fear.

Not for him.

For me.

My knees nearly folded.

“Where?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” I gasped. “Down.”

“Down where?”

“Down.” My hand shot out toward the window even though my eyes were closed. “Lux Tower. He’s still at Lux Tower.”

Kalon exhaled hard. “They didn’t move him.”

Mandi made a face. “They made that whole dramatic broadcast and stayed in the same building? Lazy ass villains.”

“No,” Kalon said. “Smart villains. If Scarn controls tower security, city defenses, and Lux’s own prison levels, he has the strongest holding site in New Abaddon.”

I opened my eyes.

“Prison levels?”

Kalon went quiet.

I stared at him. “Kalon.”

“It is Lux Tower,” he said carefully.

Mandi lifted one finger. “Because of course the man has a dungeon.”