to her hips. It slid them roughly up and down several times before finally going for the button of her jeans. “If I—if it takes over again, you have to find the stone. You have to—”
With one last push, I fought. I couldn’t let the demon do this. I wouldn’t. My fingers gripped the button, but it didn’t slip through the hole. Instead, my hand shook, every muscle in my body igniting in horrible pain.
Sam tensed. “Jax?” She shimmied out from under me and shuffled herself into a sitting position.
“I…” My fingers curled tight—my doing, not Azi’s—and I sucked in a greedy lungful of air. It didn’t last, though. My fist uncurled at the demon’s command, and Azi lifted my head, gaze meeting Sam’s. It moved forward and reached out to her as its hunger spiked to an all-time high. In that moment, the demon had never wanted anything more than her. “We have to—”
“It’s not me!” The words were mine, and better than that, they came with actual voice. The shock on Sam’s face was powerful, but it wasn’t the thing that stole my breath away. It was Azi’s surprise—then unparalleled fury—that brought the house down.
One minute I was looking at Sam, seeing her with my own eyes, the next I was overcome by a spinning sensation. I closed my eyes and reached out for anything to keep from toppling over. When my hand touched something solid, I opened my eyes to find that I was back in the white room. The black shadow was on the other side.
“No one has ever done that,” Azi said. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a note of admiration. “Forced me back.”
“I used to do it all the time,” I wheezed. Greedily, I pulled in a series of long, frantic breaths. Every part of me was tapped out. My pulse was a barely-there patter, almost as though it was about to come to a standstill, and my legs shook beneath the weight of my body—fucking hysterical when you thought about it. This wasn’t even a physical form. “What the—” I pulled in another deep breath. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
The shadowy figure seemed to shake its head slowly. “It truly is a pity. You are so much less inferior than your fellow man.”
“Fuck you.” My fists curled, and it took all the self-control I had not to lunge forward despite my weakened state. Sure, it wouldn’t have done jack shit. Even if I could have crossed to the other side, you couldn’t beat the crap out of smoke. But it might have made me feel better.
The demon didn’t respond. It stood in the corner, next to the pencil, and made a sound that was almost like a sigh. After a few minutes, it said, “I have lived a thousand lives, and not once have I felt regret.”
“Regret? What you almost did goes way fucking beyond that!”
“My regret has nothing to do with Samantha Merrick.”
“What then?”
Silence…and the longer it went on, the more I feared the answer.
Chapter Six
Sam
Jax stirred and, after a moment, opened his eyes. They were the same stormy gray I knew and loved, but that didn’t mean a thing. Since Azi had taken over, Jax’s eyes had remained the right color. Still, I had to be sure.
I swallowed and took a deep breath, but when I tried to push the question out, the words wouldn’t come. Really though, was there any point in asking? If it were Jax back in control, he wouldn’t be across the room. He wouldn’t be staring at me with that cold, clinical glare.
“It was you,” I said softly, tamping down the tidal wave of disappointment—disappointment that was followed closely by fury. “When I woke up.”
“I told you,” it said, sitting up on the bed. There was a smallest hint of a grin on Jax’s lips. “I can be him.”
Yeah, it could. A flash of guilt went through me. How could I have not known I wasn’t kissing Jax? What kind of a person did that make me? “You can act like Jax, I’ll give you that. But you can’t be him.”
It tilted Jax’s head and a small chunk of dark hair slipped into his eyes. I had to remind myself it wasn’t him, that moving to the other side of the room to brush it away, to feel its soft texture, wasn’t right. “You are angry.”
I bit down hard on my tongue and clenched my fists. My nails had grown