“I’ll need your clarity. I’ll needyou. I cannot have you roaming the surface for half the day when it comes time to capture the fae and extract its venom. If that means the Beast must get his taste for my blood to ease from yours, so be it.”
“Reshina,” he growled, refusing to look at me.
I took several steps back, slipping out of my heeled shoes in the process. “You see my logic and yet you refuse what you want. I’m offering myself to you.” I reached the stone archway that led into the corridors. “Take it.”
His head turned slowly, eyes black as an obsidian night, replacing the steely blue. The planes of his face hardened, and the corners of his lips lifted as he gave me his answer. “Run.”
CHAPTER 30
Arthur
I countedher footsteps down the corridor before I heard her shift—the flap of her wings growing distant.
BLOOD.
“You must control your bite,” I spoke through gritted teeth, watching the change come over me. Fur, almost black, grew over my arms as they widened. Claws, sharp as knives, curled over my fingers.
BLOOD. BRINGER. NOW.
“If you truly harm her, I will find a way to impale myself on a sword and end us both.”
HUNGER.
My body shifted fully in a torrential rage. The Beast, free of the control I’d held since catching a new scent on her earlier that day, flipped the dining table on its side before he tore through the corridors. Hunting, salivating, fueled with need, I felt it too, deep within the confines of my soul.
Questions of why she’d smelled that way, why the Beast had caught the scent of desire, had plagued me all afternoon, and sitting with her there at that table while she ate and the scent lingered over her skin… It was a divine moment indeed that I had kept myself together. She could have worn a potato sack and the Beast would have roared and raged, recognizing in her the same desire in me.
A Beast could not understand the intricacies of our relationship. For him, blood was blood, hunger was hunger, and sexual desire was easy enough to satisfy when both of us had felt it.
The Beast’s claws dragged along the corner of the wall leading to the staircase. Bits of chiseled stone flew across the floor, hitting my door and shattering to dust.
Goddess, he was the worst I’d ever seen. A bellow of the promise that was coming for Reshina shuddered over the stone, shards crumbling from the ceiling as he climbed the stairs, turning all thoughts to the scent of her.
I peered out from his gaze, seeing the world in his black and white and red. It was all he cared for, the hues of red. The blood from a fresh kill, the marks he’d left on her. In a moment of clarity, I regretted allowing her to do this. I should have walked away. I should have let her leave the table.
I’d never been challenged to keep the Beast at bay for this long and with this much difficulty. I’d need to put everything I could into holding him back from ripping into her flesh in a way that could not be repaired. She’d already keep those teethmarks for years, if not centuries, and new ones would appear from this night, but I could control where.
“You cannot bite her neck again. You will not maim her there.”
BITE. BLOOD. MINE.
“Her wrist,” I ordered. “You may bite the underside of her wrist, so she may easily hide your mark.”
The Beast paused in the snow, sniffing heartily. Reshina was playing with him. She could have been there at the top of the staircase, offering herself and getting this over with, but she was not. She hid, just as she had earlier, and the Beast’s euphoria flooded through me, heating my blood into nothing more than unsatiated lust.
For there, upon the soft chilled breeze, came hers.
She hid at the side of the castle, under the short bridge leading to the servants’ quarters. She hid directly over my rooms in the Underrealm.
“Steady,” I commanded as he turned, prowling low over the mounds of snow. “She is offering herself. There’s no need to?—”
He bolted, flying over the hedged wall and landing on the gravel under the bridge, spraying rocks into the air.
Reshina waited, leaning against the gray stone of the castle, her cheeks flushed red, her chest rising and falling quickly as she caught her breath. “Record timing, Beast. Good. I’m frozen out here already.”
It wasn’t true. She didn’t know she couldn’t lie when it came to her temperature in front of the Beast. The blood in her veins glowed a brilliant crimson, hot and succulent, ready to be consumed.
The Beast prowled forward, creeping over the distance with careful strength.
