The urge to cover up made me blush but I just stood there, panic growing worse. The sense of loss threatened to make me cry. “H-Have you seen my necklace?”

The emptiness around my neck felt as if someone had stolen my last piece of home—as if I’d lost my mother twice.

Vague memories of the chain breaking—of it vanishing in a gush of bubbles. Perhaps it’d been tossed over the falls with me? It could be in the river—

I have to find it.

I spun toward the water, but Lucien stepped forward and snagged my elbow. He trembled a little as his cock hardened, reacting to me just like I reacted to him. My insides melted, and for a second, it looked as if he’d pin me onto the smouldering ground and take me again.

With a sharp cough, he let me go.

Stalking away, he found his ruined trousers strewn over a smoking bush. Yanking them on, he muttered quietly, “If you don’t want to be flat on your back again, I suggest you get dressed.”

“But my necklace—”

“Put some clothes on, Rook.” His voice was strained and gruff. “Hopefully by then, I’ll be able to concentrate instead of suffering the very real agony of needing to fuck you again.”

With my heart pounding and neck terribly empty, I found the only part of my outfit he hadn’t turned to ashes. At least it’d dried from the fires instead of sopping wet from the falls.

Shaking out the filthy white skirt, I pulled it up past my breasts and fashioned it into a simple strapless dress, knotting the waistband to keep it up.

Only once I was appropriately covered did Lucien roll his shoulders and fix his gaze on mine. “I have a hundred questions that need answers, but for now...let’s focus on your necklace.”

Hope leapt through me. “Do you have it? Did you find it?”

“No, I didn’t. And I’m glad it’s gone. Even if you hadn’t lost it, I would’ve destroyed it. Because tonight just proved I was right.”

I frowned. “Right about what?”

He tapped his fingers on the piece of metal trapping his heart. “You had a vitalsync core...just like I did. Only difference was, you could be trusted to never take yours off and mine? It needed to be surgically implanted to prevent me from destroying it.”

“I...don’t understand.”

“All of this—” he arched his chin at the burning valley “—started the second the vitalsync core was defibrillated back in the bed and breakfast. It’d only been dead a few minutes before I almost melted the damn bathroom.”

My breathing quickened.

“All along, I thought it was the reason I was burning but...I had it wrong.” He shrugged. “I was burning anyway. I’ve always been burning. The longer I’m free, the more memories are returning. I’m almost certain that I was born this way and the vitalsync core was the cage to stop me. Marcus kept me weak because he knew the second I was free, he would be dead. And the blood harvesting? I reckon he’s doing something else with it—not just running the Brimstone reactors.”

He came closer, his voice softening. “But all of that doesn’t matter because...if they truly are after my blood and know what I am, then...I hate to tell you, Rook, but they’re after you too. You’re just another version of me. The opposite of me. And that necklace of yours? It was just another cage to keep you weak.”

My ears rang as my fingers wrapped around my throat. “But...my mother was the one who gave me the necklace. She told me it could counteract my dizzy spells and headaches. She said it’d been especially designed for me by her team at Snowflake Corp.”

“I thought you said you only started having episodes when your parents died.”

“I...” I frowned. “That’s right.”

“Then why did you need something to help...while they were still alive?”

I froze solid.

It was like he tore a blindfold off that I’d willingly worn all my life.

Little snippets that never added up. The fact that I’d always had headaches. Always felt weak on certain days or triggered by strong emotion. The fact that sometimes—in my earliest memories—I’d woken to my room completely white. That occasionally, when my nanny gave me a bath, it’d snowed inside. That one day, when I was five or six, I squealed with joy as my father gave me a new toy, only for the carpet to become an ice rink.

“I...” I swallowed hard, shaking my head, backing up as truth kept chipping away at my naïve stupidity. “But...she said it was to help me.”

“And did it?”

A tearing in my heart. “No...” I couldn’t hold his stare, fearing he’d judge me for how ridiculously obvious it was now he’d pointed it out. “I grew worse. I started fainting from the pain. I’ve...spent the last seven years running away from life because I literally can’t survive it.”

“Are you still hurting now?” he asked gently as if aware how hard this was for me to accept. “Are you in pain now the necklace is gone?”

I sagged with despair.

Because the awful thing was...he was right.

I wasn’t in pain.

For the first time in my life, I was free—no nausea or jitters or vertigo. Nothing threatened to knock me out, even though I felt so many overwhelming things.

Glancing at my hands, my skin suddenly flashed with frost. My body turned arctic, but it didn’t hurt. It actually felt...wonderful.

And I panicked because...

We were a threat.

If anyone found out about us...we would be hunted. Tested.

My parents had done some incredibly dark things in the quest for immortality. I’d seen the results of their experiments but...what if Lucien wasn’t the only one they’d tampered with? What if the very people I’d called family had tampered with me too?

“It’s okay,” he soothed, placing his incredibly warm and comforting hands on my shoulders. “Whoever did this to us or why we are the way we are doesn’t really matter.”

“But how can you say that? What if—”

“I can because...I’m alive thanks to you. And you’re alive thanks to me. Whatever you are is the exact opposite of whatever I am. You’ve always eased me—even back at Cinderkeep. I could never explain why but now...I can.”

Digging his thumbs into my shoulders, he massaged me gently. “I knew you were the key to my freedom, Rook, but I never expected you to be the key to everything else.” He smiled gently. “The pain I suffered? It’s all gone. That weakness I endured? It’s all over. And I’m guessing it’s the same for you. Without that necklace keeping you trapped, I doubt you’ll ever have another headache again.”

I trembled as he pressed his forehead to mine—the move so familiar it made my stomach clench.

“You were mostly dead when I found you,” he whispered. “And I know you think it was all my doing that you’re still alive. But...you didn’t see what injuries I had from losing control in the caves. You didn’t see my skin almost entirely gone or that my insides were exposed.” Pulling me forward, he wrapped his arms around me in an all-encompassing embrace. “I was barely alive, yet you...the second your blood mingled with mine, something incredible happened.”

I squirmed in his arms, needing to see him.

He let me go just enough to catch my eyes, his face darkening. “I want to know why my blood has suddenly changed. Why it’s golden and yours is silver. I want to see if my suspicions are correct: that ever since the vitalsync core broke, my blood seems to burn whatever it touches, yet it never seems to hurt you. And yours...does the same thing.”

“Wait...” I scowled, looking at my arm as if I could see the silver-shining disaster beneath. “It does?”

“When I was healing you, the droplets that fell on the ground froze whatever it touched. Yet when I kissed you and our blood mingled, it didn’t just take away our pain, it reversed every injury within seconds. I saw your skin knit together before my very eyes. I felt you coming back to life.”

Almost as if he’d been able to see into my head and witnessed the flash of memories I’d always discounted as fantastical, he added, “I think if you look back on your childhood, you’ll see things that don’t make sense. Moments you were different. Adults trying to explain certain things away. We’ve been lied to and trapped, but now that we’ve found each other...everything is going to change.”