Embraced (The Eternal Balance #2)(36)

The man clawed at Jax’s hands, but made no progress. A moment later, his eyes rolled up. When his body went limp, Jax let go, and the man fell to the ground. The slight rise and fall of his chest told me he was still alive, but he’d been beaten. Badly. His lip was split in several places and both cheeks were raw. Patches of bright red decorated his arms, and thick trails of blood below his ears and nose were half dried, like this had been going on for a while. Already there were darkening bruises and places where the skin was turning purple.

Jax stood over the man, a towering figure, so vengeful and cruel. When he turned to leave, he looked right at me. He didn’t see me, but I saw him. The right hand corner of his upper lip curled slightly, and there was a spark of excitement in his eyes. Of utter satisfaction. As he started forward, everything went dark.

Again the scene changed. This time I stood on the outer edge of a bedroom. It didn’t look familiar, but the two people on the bed were. Jax and me. His shirt was off, as was mine, along with my jeans.

“Oh, God,” I moaned, arching into him. My fingers raked across his back, and he let out a hiss of pain followed by a wicked laugh.

Despite the fact that this wasn’t real, that I was merely a spectator in Michal’s weird peep show, the sound sent shivers down my spine and goose bumps jumping up all over my skin. This wasn’t the past. I’d only been with Jax once. The future maybe? Was it possible that Michael was showing me that there was hope for us?

Between the kisses Jax trailed down my neck, he whispered, “Just how badly do you want it, Sammy?”

The me on the bed gave another ecstasy filled moan.

“Say it,” Jax demanded, nipping the flesh at the hollow of my throat. “Tell me how bad you want it. Tell me to take you.”

“I—” The other me gasped as he slipped his hand into the satiny material of my panties. “No. We can’t—it’s…”

“We can,” he insisted in a deep, seductive tone. “We will. Your body is giving me all the answer I need, Sammy. You want me.”

“I want you,” I said in a breathy whisper. “But—”

He swallowed the rest of whatever protest I was about to make with a scorching kiss. It wasn’t really me being devoured by those lips, yet I felt it from the bottom of my toes, to the tips of my hair.

Another voice floated from the darkness. A hulking form, vaguely female, stepped from the shadows on the other side of the room. “Do it,” the thing cackled. “Take the prize, Azirak.”

My pulse spiked, heartbeat humming through every inch of my body.

“Claim the Pure!”

I blinked. That was all. The quickest flutter of my eyelids. When I opened my eyes, all our clothes were off, and Jax was inside me. And by me, I meant me. I had taken vision-me’s place on the bed beneath Jax.

The moment it happened, I felt it. A single moment of utter surrender was all it took. The air in my lungs froze. Solidified. The world fell away. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. A million teeth tearing at my flesh. Ten thousand dull knives digging at my skin. A scream tore from my throat, but there was no sound. There was nothing. In that moment, I stopped existing.

“Sam?”

I whirled around, losing my balance and ending up a heap on the concrete in the same spot across the street from Rick’s house where I’d started. A vision. None of it had been real. Michael’s sick idea of a bad joke. Still, as Jax—the real flesh and blood one this time—reached for me, I couldn’t help scooting along the ground to avoid his reach.

“Sam, you’re shaking. What the f*ck just happened?”

He reached for me again and I scrambled to my feet, putting as much distance between us as possible. “Don’t!” I forced in a breath. Yeah. Breathing was good. Necessary. “Don’t… Just give me a sec.”

“You’re scaring me,” he said. But he stayed where he was.

“I’ve been seeing—”

“Scenes from our past, right?” He looked worried.

“Your past, mostly,” I said.

“What have you seen in my past?” There was a note in his voice that left me cold.

“Nothing I didn’t already know.” It wasn’t a total lie. I figured the point of this was to show me that Jax wasn’t the docile, warm and fuzzy person Michael assumed I thought he was. I knew all that, though. I saw Jax clearly. He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t a hell spawn, either. He was flawed, but in that imperfection lay the man I loved.

“That doesn’t answer my question, Sammy.” He moved in a little closer. “Was that—is that why you were near hysterical? Because of something you saw?”

“No matter what I saw, it changes nothing.” And that was true. The vision wasn’t real. It hadn’t happened. It didn’t change my feelings for him. But, it had freaked me out. There was a reason I’d been shown that, and the motivation behind it is what scared me. “If you’d just give me a min—”

“Bullshit,” he snapped. “If you think—”

A rumbling noise cut him off, and the ground beneath us began to shake. Jax grabbed my arm and pulled me up, but it was too late. The concrete opened up and swallowed us whole.





Chapter Fifteen