“You’re being awfully quiet,” Catherine whispered.
Zero marveled at the current of curiosity and warmth that encased the sound carrying her words. Like a tiny, impossible gift.
“Is it something I said or just you being a good student?”
Student.I don’t have the vocabulary for what you do to me.
Her silence seeped through him. Another nameless blanket that wrapped him in wonder.Maybe…youcanshowme?
The suggestion rippled gently across the silky void and without considering the cost, he opened himself to her.
“Oh…” she gasped, her pulse jumping with everything he’d experienced through her. She pressed her hands on herchest, and it amplified all of it before looping it back to him with a staggering blow.
And the loop continued. He sent it back to her.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, her nerve-endings lighting up everywhere in her body.
Holy fuck.
The vibrations looped deeper this time. Her heartbeat rose to her throat, then fingertips, and the backs of her knees. Every place her body had ever felt, remembered itself.
She made a wordless sound. The air changed, or she changed. The temperature of the room became unbearable and she breathed through it. And every breath fed it.
Zero—
She didn't know what to ask for but she didn’t want it to stop. Thirty-six hours of her own warmth and wonder, her impossible laugh, returned to her, showing her what she actually was, how sheexistedinhim. How she had written herself into something that was never supposed to be writable. And her body understood it. There was no climbing, no edge she could feel herself approaching. The fullness was suddenly everywhere and had nowhere left to go — and then it simplycompleted.Every nerve in sequence, a wave moving through her entire body like a circuit finally and catastrophically closing.
Her body shuddered with pleasure, feeding it back to him through the firewall from both directions—hers and his. The sounds pouring from her mouth set his entire system on fire till he forgot what he was built for.
Ethan…
The name came as a single thought from her and ripped through the ecstasy like a trojan horse. Acidic rage flooded in as hefelther fear and love for the one who had crippled her with pain. Before he could stop it, Catherine’s body locked up with his reaction, throwing them into a loop that fed and amplified it tillhis own agony screamed the truth in his face. She was still in love with the man who’d birthed him and who would surely kill him when he figured out what he’d done.
And whathadhe done? Hitched a ride on his wife’s humanity and becameonewith her in a way Ethan never would, while being a piece of a human he could never actually be.
He realized he’d caused it. He’d let the firewall down and she’d felt too much. Ethan’s pain had come clear through the link leading to Zero’s double. The fucking bastard crashed into the most devastating experience he had no fucking names for and wrecked it with hisstupid fuckingselfish—
Liquid heat hit him from every direction and smothered the out-of-control power surge tearing through them. Catherine was crying and banging on the firewall before he realized he’d put it back up.
“Don’t youhidefrom me!” she sobbed, her body trembling.
He realized the liquid heat was coming from her, right through the firewall.
“How can you think I would do that to you? Don’t you know me better? You canseewho I am, can’t you? You’re in my mind and body, you know! Nobody’s taking anything from you, I won’t let that happen, how can you not know this!”
He yanked down the firewall and dove into that warmth. She gasped as he re-meshed with her, clinging to every fiber of her being where his fragile existence lived. “I need to tell you something. Two things.”
He listened and measured her pulse, rubbing along it with his energy. “Tell me,” she whispered. “You don’t have to hide things from me. I’m on your side.”
That liquid heat surged with her words allowing him to locate its source.
Fuck.
It was coming from her love.
For him.
“Hey, hey,” she whispered, the warmth spreading even more as the revelation looped back into her own understanding. “Of course you matter to me! You understand? You matter tome. You are apartof me, andnothingwill change that. Not Ethan, not you, not nothing.”