Her mouth parts on a gasp against my throat just as I lose myself completely, my climax tearing through me with the force of two and a half centuries of need snapping in one violent moment. I bury my face against her shoulder, breath torn from me in a ragged groan, my body shaking with the intensity of it, with the sheer relief of being inside her without that thing waiting beneath her skin like a second heartbeat.
For a moment—one sacred, impossible moment—we are nothing but breath and shared heat and the soft, stunned quiet of survival.
When the last tremor leaves my muscles, I gather her in my arms and lower her to the bed, laying her out across the rumpled sheets like the most precious of gems.
The candlelight skims over her skin in waves of gold, then shadow, then gold again, and I follow every shift with my gaze, hungry, reverent, desperate to be certain.
I push her crimson hair back from her face and trace the line of her throat with two fingers. Then I drag my palms down her ribs, her and back and hips and thighs, slow, methodical, worshipful.
“Lucien…” she whispers, breath trembling.
“Hush,” I murmur, my voice still unsteady. “I need to see.”
I spread my hands over her stomach, her sides, turn her over to inspect the base of her spine, searching for the wrongness that haunted her skin.
The faint scars of the sigils remain, silver and quiet, but the glow is gone.
The heat is gone. The pulse that did not belong to her is gone.
Gone.
I press my lips to the center of her back and exhale, the relief hitting so hard it’s nearly pain. I turn her again and sink my fangs gently into the delightful slope of her left breast and Isip, sip, sip. Taste and savor.
And when I look up, she’s flushed, panting, trembling—but wholly Elara.
Wholly mine.
“It’s gone,” she whispers, awe threaded through the words. “Gods, it’s gone. I can’t feel it.”
“For now,” I say, because even in victory, I cannot lie to her.
Her gaze meets mine, fierce with love and terror and stubborn will. “If I weaken…if it ever tries to?—”
“I’ll be there,” I promise, leaning in until our foreheads touch. “I will always be there. You will never fight anything alone again.”
My fingertips trail one last time over the pale lines where the sigils once burned.
They stay quiet.
She stays warm.
And for the first time in two and a half centuries, the space beneath her skin is hers alone.
No coven.
No Shackle-Soul.
Just Elara.
And me.
14
BLOOD OATH
ELARA
The storm has quieted to a whisper.
