“You are my Beloved,” he said, and took a step toward me, the light from a nearby lamp casting a golden glow on him, shadowing the sharp planes of his face and the little cleft in his chin, burnishing the short, dark chocolate curls that kissed the tips of his ears, curls that I knew were as soft as satin. And his mouth-oh, that mouth with the lush, sensitive lips that could drive me insane with desire even now had me remembering the taste of him, the slightly sweet, slightly spicy taste that was so wholly unique to Kristoff. Instantly my legs threatened to turn to mush. I clutched the back of a chair to keep from melting into a giant puddle right there on the floor in front of him. “We are bound together for all eternity, Pia. I cannot be parted from you.”

“But . . .” My mind was pretty useless at this point, focused solely on remembering a million little intimate moments with him, but I forced it off those extremely pleasant memories and into some semblance of a working state. “But we have been parted. For almost two months.”

“Kristoff did not expect you to take the steps of Joining with him,” a man’s voice said behind me.

The messenger who had been on my doorstep now stood in the doorway. I blinked a couple of times as I realized that I’d seen him before. “You’re Andreas. You’re Kristoff’s brother.”

“He did not expect to have a Beloved,” Andreas continued, his face only slightly resembling that of the man whose memory had haunted my dreams.

“No more than I did, but you didn’t see me running away,” I said, turning back to Kristoff, intending to ask him why he hadn’t contacted me once in the two months since I’d saved his life, inadvertently restoring his soul, but before I could say more, he slipped back into the shadows.

“You are my Beloved,” he repeated as the darkness swallowed him up, the lyrical tones of his voice lingering in the air even as he disappeared from sight. “We are bound together.”