Chapter Forty
Faceless No More
Pollock
We turn toward the doorway just as another cry tears from her.
The sensation—that of heat festering beneath flesh and bone riles within me once more. Veins carry that feverish awakening to every extremity, and will make me dismantle the world if I have to in order to reach her.
The closer I get to her scent, the worse it gets. Because I desire to mark and mask it with my own, give no other the ability to find her as I have.
She is sunlight and wildflowers. Ripe winter berries in a desolate landscape to a starved soul. A source of nourishment when there is no other. A wild, rare rose nurtured by warmed earth. Full of life, vibrant and untamed.
And beneath it?—
Something darker coils.
It bleeds through her pores and floods my senses until I can hardly separate myself from it.
Incense and ash. A bitter, sacred undertone wrapped in wheat fields and the smell of parchment. Sin braided with devotion. Guilt layered so thickly through her very being, it tastes like a copper halfpence on my tongue.
Fear pulses through her scent, frantically, but hunger weaves through it all. Raw, endless, and aching hunger.
So much so that it rides each breath, resides inside my lungs, and has overwhelmed the rest of my senses.
Frankly, I have come to know as well as my own.
Whatever change in my makeup that has occurred has also brought me to this location, and if I’m right, for this purpose.
For her.
It’s as if my will has been replaced with another's, an influential force that won’t be appeased otherwise.
I pushed it aside to speak with Orán first and have tried to keep myself anchored in reason and restraint. But hearing her pain and being this close has everything she is once again overtaking all else, rushing forward in a flood that I’m incapable of falling prey to.
As if to echo my thoughts, an animal growls low, voicing its displeasure.
Her mewling discomfort quickly follows.
A lace of fire races down my spine.
I reach out and catch Orán by his bicep, stopping him mid-step.
“Wait,” I murmur. “Do you hear that?”
I open my mind to hers, just enough to gauge if I can, and her thoughts pour forward. They slam through the mental doorway in jagged fragments—candlelight and skin on skin, whispered prayers tangled with want. Crosses. Scripture. Sanctimony fractured by longing. Sins committed with a faceless man, others committed alone in the quiet dark, and all of it stitched together by shame that has never been allowed to breathe in the light.
She senses me there.
I know it the instant her awareness brushes against mine.
An unholy sound tears loose from her chest—a low, protesting growl that could be a warning or a want. I can’t yet tell which, only that it unfurls through my veins in answer.
There’s the squeak of the mattress.
A rustling sound.
The growl returns, deepens.
