Her breath catches. The silence between us trembles like a blade.
Her eyes hold mine, dark and endless. “I can’t. You know I can’t,” she half-sobs.
It’s my undoing.
I press her against the wall again, the muscle-memory of mitigating my strength against her fragility, somehow kicking in, even after all these centuries.
My forehead rests against hers, breath ragged and control dissolving. “Then you’re mine,” I whisper hoarsely. “Again. Always.”
For one trembling heartbeat, she lets me believe it. Lets me hold her like the centuries between us never happened.
Then she whispers, “Not if they find me first.”
4
FIRE & FANGS
LUCIEN
Something inside me snaps.
A wild, untamedhungerthat has nothing to do with blood and everything to do withus.
For every second I’ve had to endure without her, a thousand years of hunger spear daggers into my skin, bones and blood.
I hook an arm behind her knees and lift, barely leashing my power.
She gasps, fingers gripping the lapels of my coat, and I’m already moving, up the grand staircase in a rush of wind and shadow, past archways and candlelit corridors she once knew, past the mirrors I’ve turned to face the wall.
Doors fly open at a brush of thought, the house recognising its mistress even if she doesn’t recognise herself.
My bedchamber is a cathedral to obsession.
Mine for her.
It elates and humiliates in equal measure that she should witness my utter debasement and weakness.
I don’t need to glance at the velvet drapes heavy as midnight. Or the ceiling painted with constellations I traced to survive the long years without her, the endless paintings that cover the walls—oil, charcoal, silverpoint—ofher, in every era my hands could not touch.
Elara in moonlight.
Elara in winter.
Elara in a white dress with her scarlet mouth parted on a forbidden prayer.
I watch her instead.
See her jaw slacken, eyes wide, the shock cutting straight through me as she turns in a slow circle, absorbing my obsession into her bones. Bones I haven’t decided aren’t heavy with treachery.
“Lucien…” It’s half a plea, half a warning.
“Take it in if you must. But no questions and no explanations,” I say, voice rough. “Not yet. I need you too much. And I’m not waiting a fucking second longer.”
I set her on the edge of the high bed and stand between her knees. My hands bracket her hips; the fever of her seeps through her soft clothing, and I swear the room tilts.
She lifts her chin as if to argue, but I’m kissing her.
Claiming, coaxing, devouring.
