Chapter 18 Warmth Of Poison

• It wasn't a plea for life. It was a plea for the warmth – the biological echo of the woman he’d tried to destroy, the only heat source in his internal ice age. The monstrous dependency was complete.
• Thorne stepped closer, checking the monitors. "BP dropping. Neuro storm intensifying. Dr. Lin…" His voice held a question, a doctor seeking another doctor’s input on the unstable patient before them.
• I didn’t look at Thorne. I looked at Alexander Sterling, brought low, terrified, clinging to the warmth of my poison. The fury still burned, white-hot and righteous. But beneath it, coiling like smoke, was something else: the horrifying weight of this irrevocable, biological tether. He was bound to me now, not by choice, but by blood and prions, a parasite clinging to its unwilling host.