The teasing warmth, the fingers dipping into her slick arousal, driving him/me to madness, before finally, he be pushed beyond reason, and he mounted her.
Sliding into her welcoming heat—I moaned like an animal, helpless in the grip of the Dire’s lust, my body quivering with every thrust until he sank his teeth into her shoulder.
And then my world exploded in great, pulsing waves of pure ecstasy. I heard a shout, deep and rumbling.
Not Matt. I didn’t think it be me, but I couldn’t be sure.
Time ceased to exist.
I drifted in limbo, my mind disconnected from my body. Something told me this wasn’t any more natural than being part of Anna’s and Matt’s dream, but it be like a voice at the end of a tunnel—faint, echoing, but of little consequence.
I be not alone. I could still sense Anna and Matt, their life essences adrift, sated, at least for the moment. But something else called to me, as though from far away. An energy...
Like a hound follows a scent, I tracked it.
Although the life essence be vaguely familiar, it didn’t possess Anna’s seductive lure. This be something, or someone, else.
After a moment, I defined it as distinctly male.
And he’d been caught up in Anna’s dream, too. Not as powerfully as I, perhaps. But I’d sensed him in the background.
My mental tracking had a pseudo-physical component. In my mind, my legs be moving, but I be surrounded by a fog so dense I couldn’t see anything, even my own feet. Vague shapes—no more than shadows, really—appeared at the edges of my vision. At first, I thought they were trees, but they be spaced too regularly, more like the columns of a building.
Be I dreaming now, too?
The energy I followed altered. He—it be a he, I be sure—be drifting on the last pulses from the dream. But now, his essence altered. Agony pierced through it. And then a groan. Low and rumbling, not of pleasure, but of pain. A pain so deep it be a thing of the soul.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, but my feet carried me forward, as though something drew me.
A darker shadow amid the fog.
The groan came again, and with a clang of metal, the shadowmoved. Just a sway, back and forth. I realized it be a man. On his knees, hunched forward with his arms splayed out from his sides—they were bound in metal, with what looked like scaled leather running from his wrists to fingertips. Chains ran from the cuffs to rings driven into the stone.
He be naked, and across the tremendous span of his shoulders ran a tattoo. Intricately wrought, of three Dragons in full flight, fighting each other.
My gaze flew to the back of the man’s head—the distinctive shaved sides, the long central braids. So black they be almost blue—
Talakai. I knew it with a certainty that I couldn’t explain. I’d never seen his naked skin—he’d always been clad in his distinctive scales. But it be him. His energy. His body.
I paced around the front of him. His eyes be closed.
I spoke his name, and they flew open, gleaming a deep, metallic blue. His face went rigid as he locked himself down, but I witnessed the surprise that flared in them.
“Sebastian?”
He seemed so real, and yet, this couldn’t be anything more than a figment of my imagination. Or could it?
In my more pragmatic moments, I acknowledged that Fate always got her way. And there be something between us all. We be linked by Anna—the Dire, the Dragon, and I. She’d pulled me into her living dream with Matt. Had she also unconsciously connected me to Talakai?
I stifled the surge of rage that the thought elicited within me. I had no desire to be connected to these two males. And that they might be important to her be impossible to accept.
He be staring at me. But if we be really dreaming together—this be my chance to find him. So I pushed the rage back deep, and asked, “Be you involved in taking the twins?” A sound, at first from far away, but building as it soared closer. A scream, raw, primal, filled with rage and pain and frustration. It echoed through the fog before fading.
His metallic eyes narrowed. “No.”
The Dragon shifter’s eyes closed as his lips pulled back from his teeth, but the fog now swirled clear through him, as though he be fading.
“Tell me!” I shouted through it. “Where be you?”
