My fingers tighten around the glass until it fractures. The blood inside drips through the cracks, dark as rubies against my palm.
A soft sound breaks the silence. Fabric against stone. The creak of a door.
I look up just as Elara steps into the doorway.
She’s barefoot, wrapped in one of my shirts, the hem brushing her thighs. Her hair spills loose down her back, scarlet against white linen.
For one suspended heartbeat, all I can do is look.
No mortal woman could wear centuries and still look like that.
Unaged. Untouched. Untamed.Utterly breathtaking.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks softly.
I don’t answer. My gaze drops to her throat, to the pulse fluttering beneath the delicate skin. I remember biting her there once, hard enough to feel her life force on my tongue, in another lifetime. I remember the way she’d gasped, whispered my name, begged me to never stop.
Now, when I look at that spot, I see only the invisible mark of her absence.
She steps closer, wary but not afraid. “Lucien?—”
“Don’t.” My voice is sharper than I intend. “Not yet.”
Her lips part, but she closes them again.
Good. Let the silence stretch.
But I’m the one to break it.
To let the first of a thousand questions spill from my furious tongue. “Where was that place, Elara? The one I saw in your memories. You claim not to remember the night we…parted. But surely you remember where you’ve been all this time?”
I expect confusion. But she nods, stunning the blood faster in my veins. “I know where I was. The coven…they didn’t keep that from me.”
I wait, nostrils flared, rage chewing through me. “Where?” It barks out of me.
“Beneath the Convent ofSaint Obscura,” she whispers.
The next thing to bark out of me is laughter.
Harsh and searing and obscene. Because how many times did I stride past the holy convent in Rome, how many times did I breach its doors, seek out its secrets to no avail?
“You expect me to believe,” I say slowly, “that you vanished into a holy tomb for centuries, right under my fucking nose? Do you have any idea how many times I visited that place? How many of those infernal nuns I interrogated?”And killed because I knew they were lying to me?
Her eyes flash. “They were spelled by the coven. Every inch of that place was spelled.” She moves with ethereal grace and I can’t help but stare, agog, at the smooth lines of her supple legs, the hypnotic sway of her hips and breasts as she closes the distance between us. “And, Lucien, you weren’t supposed to look for me. You were supposed to die and, failing that—because I dared to hope you would defy death—you were supposed tolive.”
My fists clench and the ravaged monster inside me itches to strangle her just for daring to say that to me. “Yes, indeed, despite your every effort, I did. Barely.”
She flinches. “You call this living?” she whispers. “A palace full of corpses and ghosts?”
I turn away before I can break something else. “The corpses deserved it. Every last one of them. As for the ghosts…” I turn back to her, rake my gaze from her magnificent red hair to her pink tipped toes and every lush curve and valley in between. “I think we’ve proved conclusively that you’re very much alive. Living and breathing and very much able to have sent word. A dream. A whisper. Anything. And don’t tell me you weren’t powerful enough. I know you are, Elara.”
Which means…which means…
I strangle the thought because I can’t bear to finish it.
She reaches out but her arm falls back to her side. And I want to curse her all over again. Because I yearn for her touch. But I force myself to listen.
“I tried,” she says again, voice shaking. “Every spell, every plea, every drop of blood I spilled in the dark—you never heard because they sealed my name away. The nunnery was more than stone, Lucien. It was a prison woven from silence.”
