Her smile is small, sad, knowing. “You always were too proud for heaven.”
I press my forehead to hers, our breaths tangling. “Heaven wouldn’t have us.”
Outside, thunder rolls across the Arno, the first warning of another storm. Inside, her heartbeat slows against mine.
When she blacks out, I collect her against me, grappling her close.
For now, the monster inside her sleeps.
For now, she’s still mine.
Elara
The sigil’slight consumes me, burning through my veins, my nerves, my mind. Pleasure and pain twist together, indistinguishable, until I can’t tell where my body ends and the entity begins.
My vision blurs as the edges darken.
The last thing I see is Lucien’s face—his chest heaving, his fangs still glistening, his expression something between awe and terror—before the world tilts and goes black.
When I come to, it’s in stages.
First, the cold.
Wetness of tears beneath my cheek, the damp chill of the chamber seeping into my bones.
Then the scent of blood, sex, something metallic and dark, like ozone after a storm. My body aches, a deep, throbbing pulse between my legs, my throat tender where Lucien’s fangs have been.
I blink but my lashes are heavy, and find myself cradled in his arms, my limbs limp, my skin slick with sweat and other fluids. His chest rises and falls in sharp, uneven breaths, his heart hammering against my ear.
The candles have burned low, their flickering light casting long, wavering shadows across the walls. The dagger lies on the bedside and I watch its blade gleaming ominously, as if waiting.
Lucien’s fingers trace deceptively idle patterns along my arm, his touch feather-light.
I turn my head just enough to see his face.
His lips are still stained red, his eyes dark and unreadable. There’s tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his fingers flex against my skin, as if he’s fighting the urge to grip me again. To use me. For sex. For war.For us.
“You’re awake,” he murmurs, his voice rough.
Not a question. A statement. A warning directed at not just me.
I swallow, my throat dry. “Did it work?” I ask, even though I’m almost sure of the answer.
A beat of silence. Then, a low, humorless laugh. “No.” His fingers curl, just slightly, as if he’s resisting the urge to squeeze. To keep squeezing until wills and foes bend to him. “I still feel it inside you. On your skin. In your blood. But it reacted…enough.” His eyes turn deadly black for a moment before they morph back to crimson gold, intent on my face. “How do you feel? Does it…hurt you?” There’s a shiver of agony beneath the terse question.
I curb the need to rush to reassurance and examine myself warily, hold my breath in relief when I take account. Then shake my head. “No…at present it’s just the ghost of its heat, like an ember slowly dying. It’s never done that before.”
If I expected that response to please him, it does the opposite.“It bides its time, seeks a specific purpose. Does this cursed spelled thing have a name?”
A voice stirs behind my ribs, too ancient to belong to anything mortal, too cold to belong to me. “They called it the Shackle-Soul. They…they forced it into my body as part of the binding ritual. A parasite forged from a witch’s dying breath and sealed to my soul with blood I never consented to give.”
And now it wants power. Untold, insane power. The kind forged by the eternal love born of a vampire and witch.
“Then I’ll rip it out of you with my teeth if I have to—no coven, no god, no hell-born parasite takes what’s mine.”
My shiver is steeped in pure, raw belief that he means what he says.
His fingers spike into my hair, angles my face to his. “I never got around to asking. How long ago did you escape?”
