My jaw tightens. I tell myself it’s only the residue of her spell—the binding’s echo—but the predator in me doesn’t believe it.The air hums differently around her and I’ve lived too long to remain oblivious to danger prowling close.
My house knows it too. The candles gutter when she passes.
And yet, when she steps into the room, I can’t move.
Her beauty arrests me, as it did the first moment I set eyes on her.
She stands by the balcony doors, moonlight spilling over her like a benediction. Every inch of me reacts as if the centuries between us never happened.
“It’s not nightfall yet. You shouldn’t be awake,” she murmurs, without looking at me.
“Neither should you.” The passage of time stings even harder when I’m forced to enlighten her of this new facet of my evolution. “Also, some things have changed, my dear.” I let the words hang, watching her face as I continue. “In the centuries since you vanished—and especially these last twenty-five years—I’ve learned to walk in the sun. Not fully, not yet. But in the hours when it hangs low in the sky, when the light is soft and gold, I can endure it. Morning and dusk. A few hours before the pain becomes unbearable.”
Her eyes widen, the shock melting into something luminous. “Lucien…” Her voice catches, trembling between awe and sorrow. “You can stand in the light.” A smile ghosts across her lips and it’s pure joy, unguarded, the kind of smile I thought time had erased. “I’m so happy for you,” she whispers. Then, softer still, “I should have been there to see it. I’m so very sorry I wasn’t.”
For a moment, the air feels fragile, the space between us charged with everything we lost and everything that still burns. Then the reality presses back in…the coven’s pull, the curse between us, the knowledge that nothing is ever that simple.
Her lashes sweep down for a long moment, then her gaze lifts to mine, soft and dangerous all at once. “You feel it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I confirm. “I’ve felt something since last night.”
“The thing that escaped…it’s inside me,” she says quietly.
Her honesty slices through the semi-dark like a blade. “What did you bring back, Elara?”
Her lips part, but she doesn’t answer.
Instead, she steps closer. Too close.
I fight feebly not to salivate when the tips of her breasts brush my chest or the scent of her damp pussy fill my every sense.
I fight through the sex haze so I can see the faint shimmer beneath her skin now, like something pulsing faintly through her veins. It flickers when she breathes.
A shadow, or a light, or both.
“One more thing you should have told me,” I whisper-rage. Will this ever end? How can she be back in my arms and yet feel farther away than ever.
Her throat moves and her eyes glisten with sorrow. “I tried. Maybe not hard enough but…” She pauses and then her eyes flash. “Would you have listened?”
The truth hits like a blow. Of course I wouldn’t have. The man I was then was too consumed by rage, too proud to see her fear for what it was.
And I fear the man I am now isn’t that different. Except maybe with the benefit of a quarter century of being honed in agony.
I step forward and cup her face in my hand. Her skin is cool, fragile, too pale. Beneath it, the thing she carries stirs—a flicker of movement that shouldn’t exist.
Gods, it feels like another heartbeat.
“Elara.” My voice is low, dangerous, fighting the terror that threatens. “Whatever they put inside you, it is just one more fight. A fight we will win. Tell me you understand this?”
She closes her eyes but she leans into my touch. Then she says words that chill my frozen body. “Not what. Who.”
“What?” I start to pull away, but she catches my wrist, holding me there.
“No. Don’t look at me like that,” she says softly. “I’m still me.”
I shouldn’t utter the words that trip to the edge of my tongue, but sweet fucking hellscapes, it’s been but one night, not even a full twenty-four hours since I found her. And there are still so many unanswered questions. As heavenly as it to feel her flesh and blood beneath my fingers, to hear the pounding of her heart like the sweetest music in my ears, what if she isn’t wholly or even fractionally, what she claims to be? “Are you?”
“I am.” Her breath trembles. “And if you don’t believe it, then I’m sure you have a way to prove it.”
