Chapter 80

When dawn breaks, Brendan is wide awake.

Sleep doesn’t come as easily, apparently, after forty-eight hours of continued torture at the edge of a blade.

He has already slept far more than enough.

Besides.

Glancing down at the girl sleeping beside him curled half into his lap, one hand tangled tightly together with one of Brendan’s with her cheek resting atop their joined hands, Brendan supposes that sleep is a needless concept when he has this particular vision spread in front of him.

Of Alcina, lashes fanned across her delicate cheeks, her skin aglow in the light of the breaking day.

Brendan’s thumb shifts and counts the beats of Alcina’s pulse on the inside of her wrist.

Wonders, when that rhythm had become the singular center around which the rest of the world revolves.

Wonders when and how he had managed the inconceivable: to gain the love of a creature as unsullied as Alcina.

It is this thought, then, that begins to spread outwards and consume his thoughts, such that it’s still