When I woke, the world was soft and muffled, as if someone had pulled a blanket over everything I knew. Light burned at the edge of my vision, and my head felt as if a thousand small hammers tapped insistently behind my eyes.
Pain lived in every joint; I tried to move and the body protested in a dialect I did not understand. Panic fluttered in my chest until I realized there was a person near me — a figure, steady and impossibly familiar, but the face was blurred by tears, sleep, and the fog in my skull.
I somehow managed to clear my vision, and I saw him.
Damon.
His broad frame hunched forward, his face pale and shadowed, his dark eyes fixed on me as if afraid I’d disappear. I wanted to call out, to demand what happened, but the first thing that escaped me was a sound I couldn’t hold
