บททั้งหมดของ Reckless Royals of Nocturne Prep: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

CASSIANI watched Rae's fingers touch Annalise's cold hand. The air in the morgue felt heavy, thick with the smell of antiseptic and something metallic underneath. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, that constant hum you stop hearing after a while until suddenly you can't hear anything else.Kieran stood on her right side. I stood on her left. We both leaned in at the same time, both of us opening our mouths to speak. Our voices overlapped."Take your time," I said."You don't have to do this if you're not ready," he said.We stopped. Looked at each other. His jaw tightened. Mine probably did too. The healer near the wall shifted her weight, clipboard pressed against her chest, watching us like we were about to start throwing punches.Rae ignored us both. Her hand shook as it hovered over Annalise's fingers. When she finally made contact, I saw her whole body tense. Her shoulders went rigid. Her breathing changed, became shallow and quick."It's not working," she said after a mome

CASSIANI stepped into the corpse dream and everything tilted sideways.The storage room materialized around me like a photograph developing in reverse. Colors bled in slowly, washed out and wrong. The air felt thick, syrupy, like trying to breathe underwater. My form flickered at the edges. I looked down at my hands and watched them phase in and out of existence, there one second and translucent the next.Fuck.Incubi were terrible at dream walking. We only ever used it for one thing. Sex. Because when you could promise someone mind-blowing pleasure on the other side, they didn't care that you'd shown up in their dreams uninvited. The energy drain was worth it when there was a reward waiting.But this wasn't dream walking. This was corpse dreaming. So much worse. I was burning through my reserves faster than I could track. My father had warned me about this once, back when he still pretended to care about teaching me anything. Never enter a corpse unless you're prepared to lose every

CASSIANRae yanked me down by the shirt and pressed her mouth to mine. Heat rushed through me on contact. Not the sweet kind. It was raw and bright, like plugging into a live line. My lips opened without thought. Instinct took the reins. Hunger snapped my control in two. I drank. It did not feel like a kiss. It felt like taking in air after drowning.Her chi rolled into me. It hit the empty places first. Those dark hollows I had burned clean with fire. The pain eased. My sight sharpened. My form steadied. I could feel my body again. Solid. Present. The room stopped tilting and locked into place.The barrier cracked behind us. A hard pop, then a long spider line that split the air. The Dark Passengers surged. Red eyes. Hooked hands. That crawling, hungry sound that never faded once you heard it.I did not break the kiss. I raised one hand. Fire answered. Not weak and sputtering this time. It roared up my arms and leaped from my palms. White at the core. Blue at the edges. Pure hellfire

RAEI followed Cassian through the silver threads. They stretched ahead of us like a pathway made of moonlight, pulling us up and out of the decaying storage room. My hand stayed locked in his. His grip was the only solid thing in a world that kept tilting sideways.The darkness pressed in from all sides. Not regular darkness. This was thick and alive, like oil sliding across glass. It moved with purpose. It reached for us with invisible fingers that made my skin crawl.The threads held steady at first. They hummed under my feet, vibrating with the magic I'd somehow managed to pull together. I focused on keeping them solid. On maintaining the connection between my body in the morgue and whatever was left of me in this nightmare.Then something snapped.The sensation hit like a rope breaking under too much weight. One second I was climbing toward reality. The next I was falling backwards into nothing."Cassian!" I screamed his name but the sound got swallowed by the void. My hand slipp

CASSIANThe light faded gradually. Rae settled down to the floor, her body almost weightless as the threads released her. Her eyes opened. Stared up at the ceiling for a beat. Then another.She sat up.That was when the healer lost her shit."She just fucking resurrected herself," she said, her voice cracking. Her hands shook as she gestured at Rae. At the spot where we'd been doing compressions just seconds ago. "Did you see that? She was dead. Completely dead. And then she just came back."I didn't say anything. I couldn't say anything yet. I was still processing what I'd just witnessed. What those threads meant. What that pull of gold and silver had done.Rae's eyes found mine. She opened her mouth and said my name. Whispered it like I was the only thing keeping her tethered to the world."Cassian..."Then she was gone. Her eyes rolled back and she crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.I caught her before she hit the floor. Checked her breathing. Steady. Checked her pulse. Strong