“Gemma.” Alex puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

His hand falls from my shoulder as I rise to my feet. My mind is so wired from the power still lingering inside me that I can barely get my eyes to blink. “I think so, but I think I need to…” I clutch my head, where the wound was and note that it’s no longer there. I should feel better, but I feel strangely dizzy and disoriented. “I think I need to lie down.” I stagger to the side, my elbow slamming into one of the rocks. Skin scrapes open, Alex says something but his voice sounds far away as I collapse to the ground.

Light everywhere. Encompassing me. Stealing the breath from my lungs. Stealing my heart. Alex and I by the lake, holding onto one another as if our lives depend on it. It will be okay. Ice. So cold. Death. Shadows emerging from the trees. I can’t breathe…I’m dying…

My eyes shoot open and I gasp for air as I try to figure out where I am, what’s real and what’s an illusion.

“Breathe.” Alex pats me softly on the back. “Just breathe. Deep breaths.”

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Deep breaths. My breathing gradually returns to normal and my surroundings start to make sense again. The rocks. The warm sunlight spilling over me. The waves crashing against the shore nearby. Alex. His green eyes so full of worry.

“You know, I’ve worried more than I ever have since I met you,” he says, attempting to make a joke as I sit up.

I force a smile, and then I try to get to my feet, bending my knees and pushing upward. But the world dances and I can’t keep up, my legs instantly buckling and I fall to ground.

Alex kneels down in front of me, his hand finding my cheek, almost as if it’s a magnet and my skin is metal. “You stopped breathing for a moment and I...” His gaze sweeps every inch of my body before residing back on my eyes. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Oh,” was all I could think of to say.

I place my hand over his, the sensation of the deadly images I saw while I was out still crisp in my mind and haunting me to the point that I feel like I need comfort. “What do you think just happened? Not just with me stopping breathing, but with the vision thing.”

“I have no idea.” He nods his head at Nicholas still passed out on the ground behind us. “I wonder if he knows something, though.”

“It looked like he might,” I say, returning my attention back to Alex. “But even if he did, what are the odds he’ll tell us the truth?”

Alex’s green eyes sparkle mischievously in the sunlight. “Oh, there are ways to get him to tell us what we want to know.” He gets to his feet and dusts the sand off his jeans. “They’re just not very nice ways.”

I feel a ping of pity for Nicholas. He has no control over what he does—the Mark of Malefiscus does. Although, he was annoying before he was branded. Still it doesn’t mean he deserves to be hurt. Then again, I can’t help but think of all the times he violated me, to the point where I’m pretty sure he was coming close to raping me.

“I’m so confused,” I say, not meaning to aloud.

“About what?” Alex asks, circling around Nicholas with his hands on his hips.

I wish I could retract my statement because the last thing I want to do is talk to Alex about my feelings, but I find myself doing so anyway. “About why I feel the way I do.”

He pauses, looking solely at me. “And how’s that?”

I shrug, getting to my feet and leaning against the rock behind me. “I feel kind of bad for him.”

Alex gapes at me. “You feel sorry for Nicholas?” He steps toward me, examining me closely. “Are you sure your head’s okay?”

I nod, touching my head. “It’s just that he’s branded with the mark… and from what little I can remember, it has a lot of control over you.”

“Yeah, but even when he’s not possessed by the mark, he’s an asshole.”

“I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just feel… well, bad for him.” I scratch the back of my neck where the prickle is tickling. “I’m blaming it on the whole emotional thing. It confuses me sometimes.”

One side of his mouth lifts up to a half-smile. “I know.” He steps toward me, reducing the rest of the space between us. “But trust me when I say that you never, ever have to feel sorry for him.” His fingers tangle through my hair and before I can stop him, he pulls me in for a quick kiss, then moves away. “Now let’s get him back to the house.” He rubs his hands together, fully enjoying this. “I have big plans for him.”

The prickle continues to dance on my neck, little pointed shoes made of sharp metal. Poking. Poking. Poking. Tormenting me. My emotions are on overdrive and I start to wonder if this is really about feeling bad for Nicholas or feeling bad for Alex too because I’m keeping such a huge secret from him. But I can’t help it. Every time I open my mouth, it seems as though another problem arises.

Dizziness overcomes me again. “I think I’m going to be…” I drop to the ground like a bag of bricks. The last thing I see is the sunlight before the sky above me darkens like nighttime only the stars are missing.

I wake up in the bed at the beach house, surrounded by curtains flapping in the light sea breeze. The door is open and I can hear voices coming from the living room. My head feels a lot clearer, although my body a little achy, but I still manage to easily sit up and swing my feet over the edge of the bed.

“Feeling better?” Alex’s voice alarms me as he enters the room.

I stretch my arms out above my head and yawn. “Yeah, I think so. Although, I felt better the last time I passed out and still did it again about five minutes later.”

He crosses the room to sit down on the bed, nervous energy gently flowing off him. “You’re starting to worry me with all the times you blacked out.” He puts a hand on my forehead. “I’m worried that maybe… maybe I’m doing it somehow unintentionally.”

“What do you mean? Why would you being doing it?” My walls start to go back up. It’s not that I don’t trust Alex, but at the same time our past has been full of lies and I can’t help but be wary.

He puts his hand on my knee, his grip firm, subtly holding me in place. “I have to tell you something… about me.” More tension builds and I calculate the distance to the door. “Relax,” he says. “It’s not something that’s going to be life crushing, it’s just something… well, something I don’t tell a hell of a lot of people.”

I meet his penetrating gaze. “Then why are you telling me?”

“Because I want you to trust me and trust comes from telling stuff I might not want to tell.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

He takes a deep breath. “I have an ability that I haven’t told you about yet.” He pauses. “I can…” he withdraws his hand away from my leg to yank it through his brown hair, making it stick up in various directions, giving him that bedhead sexy look I love so much. “I can drain energy from people.”

I think of the energy flowing around inside me right now, connected to him through the star. “When you say people, do you mean everyone or just me?”

“Everyone for the most part. I can make them tired when I need to, but with you, it works a little bit different. I literally drain the energy from you.”

“Have you done it to me before?”

“Not that I know of or can remember,” he says. “Although, from the details you told me about what happened when you tried to kill me and you were possessed, it sounded like I might have. And now I’m starting to wonder with all this passing out that you keep doing, if maybe I’m unintentionally doing it to you.”

“I don’t think that’s what it is. What happened at the beach, at least the last time, felt like it came from my emotions. Sometimes it feels like they’re too much to bare so my body just sort of shuts down.” I could get angry that he didn’t tell me about his ability earlier, but I’d be a hypocrite since I’ve been keeping something from him too.