“I’m not sure. Days…maybe a week?” I look around me now, the nerves I felt when I stepped into this new and strange world, creeping back. “Everything is so…different.”
He snorts. “Understatement of the millennia.”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrow. “Should I ask how you got by? How you travelled from Florence to Venice?”
A flush of self-consciousness builds but I refuse to be shamed by it. “I didn’t have the correct documentation or indeed the courage for the metal birds that fly through the sky so I took the thing that resembles the…mechanical serpent, the…train?”
For a moment, I can only stare.
The idea of her—my Elara—standing in the clatter and smoke of some mortal station, wrapped in borrowed clothes, braving a world she doesn’t understand, hits me square in the chest.
My eyes darken with a hunger that has nothing to do with blood. “You’ve missed so much, my love,” I murmur. “So many wonders. Steel birds that carry men above the clouds. Towers of glass that scrape the heavens. A thousand ingenious marvels that would have terrified then delighted you. When this is done, when they’re all ash, I’ll show you everything,” I vow.
Her smile falters into something radiant. “I want to see it all. With you.”
“You will,” I promise, voice roughening. “But first, we survive the night.”
I exhale shakily, my body still humming with the aftershocks of whatever happened. Of him. “And what does that mean? What did you taste in my blood?”
His eyes meet mine, and for the first time, I see something hesitant in them. Something almost like fear. He touches his lips to mine. A tiny bolstering that moves me.
“It means,” he says slowly, “that you were right.” His thumb brushes over my lower lip, smearing the traces of blood he left there. “It’s part of you.” His voice drops, a dark terrifying caress. “And it wants me as much as you do.”
A shiver runs through me, despite the heat still pooling in my belly. The implication hangs between us, heavy and suffocating. The sigil isn’t just a curse. It’s a hunger. And Lucien—my predator, my ruin—is its prey as much as I am.
His fingers slide down my throat, tracing the punctures his fangs had left. “It means, we don’t rest. Again,” he reiterates, his voice a velvet command. Not a request. A promise. “We try again.”
I should be terrified.
Should perhaps fight, suggest we rethink the strategy. But the savage resolve in his eyes and the way his cock twitches against my thigh, already hardening again, the way his breath hitches as his gaze rakes, then lingers over my bruised nipples, my smooth belly, my swollen pussy, renders all argument obsolete.
All I can do is whimper, my hips shifting instinctively against him. “Yes.”
The dagger on the bedside glints, as if in approval. And the shadows on the walls seem to lean in closer, watching.
Waiting.
10
THE BONDING BATTLE
ELARA
I’m once again on my knees before him and Lucien’s fingers slide back up my spine, claws lightly grazing the glowing sigil. Its veins pulse faster, writhing like it senses what’s coming—whatheis about to make me feel again.
“Shackle-Soul,” he murmurs against my skin, voice thick with possession and promise, speaking its name for the first time. “Time to come out and play.”
His breath is fire down my neck as he moves behind me, and I feel his cock rise, a steel pole seeking my raw and swollen sex as his body fits to mine with shocking inevitability.
“It wants your joy and love and your fear, Elara,” he growls, fisting one hand in my hair, and yanking my head back to bare my throat to the promise of his fangs. “And it wants my agony.”
He drives into me with one hard, slow thrust that punches a scream out of my lungs. “Well, then,” he purrs, lips grazing my throat, “let’s drown it. In us.”
The sigil flares, violent and molten, answering him with a shudder that rocks me forward. My hands grip the sheets, knuckles white, breath splintering as he begins to move. Eachthrust sends the magic screaming through me, pleasure twisted sharp enough to sting.
I feel a shivery drag against my mind. Like a steel broom brushing across my senses.
