His hands slipped beneath my shirt, stroking my stomach, sliding up, pushing aside my bra. I moaned and bit his lip, reveling in the full press of his weight against me as our bodies began to move together.

With each touch of his fingers my skin came alive, crackling like tinder under a lit match. Burning away fear. Burning away sorrow. Burning away loss.

I heard my own cry of pleasure as his mouth followed the path of his hands, and I struggled for thought in the face of torrid sensation.

I shouldn’t be doing this. I can’t be doing this.

My mind reeled as I called up the image of Shay. He’d been the one to open this world to me. His hands, his body had set my soul on fire for the first time. I’d wanted him so much, and at that moment I was sure Ren was lost, that he’d chosen the Keepers’ path, I’d drowned my grief by giving in to the flood of desire for Shay.

But what if Ren hadn’t chosen? What if we’d left him behind too soon? What if Monroe had been right?

When I’d been faced with encounters like these with Ren in the past, I’d been restrained by the Keepers’ Laws, always afraid to give myself over to the passion he stirred inside me.

I loved Shay. I had no doubts about that. But I couldn’t deny the powerful reaction I had to Ren, to how much he wanted me. I wondered if there was a bond between us that couldn’t be broken, forged from our shared pasts, born out of the pain of our life as Guardians. Was that bond stronger than the new love that had sprung up between Shay and me?

Ren’s hand slipped between my thighs and I shivered. My body knew what was coming and it screamed for more. If I’d had any notion that being with Shay would have smothered the allure of Ren’s caress, it was swept away in that moment. Through my night in the garden with Shay, I’d had my first taste of lovers’ secrets, and I was intoxicated with wanting to know the ways Ren would bring my body to life. And I wondered if giving him that pleasure would somehow take away the horrors he’d been dealt because of me. His touch pulled me back in time, into a past where we were together as it was always meant to be. Where my mother was alive and my brother wasn’t broken.