When I pull back, the bond between us vibrates like a struck chord.
Her eyes flutter open, wet and dazed. “Do you see it now?” she whispers. “Do you see what they did to me?”
I can barely breathe through the rage and grief twisting so tightly together inside me until I can’t tell them apart.
“So all these years, you let me believe you’d betrayed me,” I hiss, voice breaking into something all-vampire, all-feral, fangs sinking into my bottom lip and drawing blood, drips. “You let me drown in my own fury.”
Her breath catches as she follows the drop that lands on her bosom. “I didn’t let you. I was locked away.”
“By whom?”
She doesn’t answer. Her silence tastes like guilt.
“Tell me,” I roar.
Glass shatters and lights douse as my power moves, a sinister percussion of rage through time and space. Mortals and immortals alike cower and drink faster.
“You’ll kill them.”
“Of courseI’ll kill them.”
Something dark flickers in her eyes. Fear…yes, but not for herself. “Lucien, please?—”
That single plea breaks something vital inside me.
I release her throat, but my hand doesn’t move far.
Instead, it slides into her hair, tangling in the silken strands as I lean closer, my lips ghosting her ear. “You have no ideawhat you’ve done to me, Elara,” I whisper, horrified to feel that fracture widen.
“I do,” she breathes. “Sweet heaven and hell, I knew torment every second I didn’t know where you were alive or dead. And I know even worse torment now I know what you’ve endured. Lucien…” her voice breaks. “My darling Lucien.”
A tear finally defies her. Falls.
And that’s all it takes.
Centuries of restraint shatter. I crush my mouth to hers.
Rough…insane desperation turns to violence, longing into fire.
She gasps against me, her hands gripping my coat like she can’t decide whether to push me away or drag me closer.
Her lips taste exactly as I remember. Deadly. Angelic. Ambrosia. Blood. Like every second of bliss I knew with her and every hour of torment without.
Our mingled blood is smeared on our lips when I pull back only enough to speak, our foreheads pressed together. “You tormented me, Elara. You let me believe you were gone.”
“Iwasgone.”
Another roar builds. Frantic voice whisper. “Don’t play word games with me.”
“I had no choice.”
“Everyone has a choice.”
Her eyes flash. “You think I wanted to vanish? To sleep in darkness not knowing whether you were alive or dead?”
Her words tremble with fury, with pain, with truth I don’t yet understand. “The spell that kept me alive was a prison, Lucien. I couldn’t leave it. Not until now.”
I stare at her, the pieces refusing to fit. “A spell?”
