Page 23 of Ravished By the Revenant

“It was not an invitation. It was a grievance.”

“File it with the cat!”

I stomp the rest of the way up.

15

ALDRIC

Ihaven’t gone to my substitute bed in the turret. Instead, I pace the great hall like a man awaiting execution.

Share my bed. I said it aloud, in the stairwell, like a drunkard shouting at a tavern wench. We were civil the entire day, and I torched it with a single sentence because she dared to speak of hope.

Hope. I rub my sternum over the useless crystallized organ still desperately pumping blood through my ruined body.

With a sigh, I climb the grand staircase without a candle. I need none. Darkness and I are old comrades. My portrait watches me pass—that smug fool from 1817 who still believed the servants’ children would keep coming, generation after generation.

I’m halfway down the corridor toward the turret stairs when I hear it.

A whimper.

I stop mid-stride. The sound comes again, muffled by the master bedroom’s door. High. Distressed. My eyes narrow before I remember that I’m the only threat to her in this castle. Still, my feet carry me to her door.

I press my palm flat against the oak and push, gentle as a confessor. There’s no barricade tonight. She either forgot or… she trusts me enough not to blockade herself in anymore.

Schmetterling flounces out between my boots with his tail hoisted like a battle standard. He casts a glare over his shoulder that says, plain as speech, she is exhausting and now she’s your problem.

“Coward,” I whisper after him.

Clara lies before the fireplace on a nest of blankets and pillows, curled toward the low flames. Not in my bed. She dragged half the bedding onto the floor rather than sleep in the bed of Lord Blackthorn, as though the mattress itself might claim her.

She whimpers again.

A nightmare, I think. Perhaps dreaming of that man she mentions like her own curse—Marco. I cross the room to wake her, already composing what a decent man says to a frightened woman at the witching hour, when she moves.

Her hips roll. It’s slow, and it’s unmistakable. A wave passes through her body from shoulder to thigh, and her lips part around a sound that doesn’t sound like fear anymore.

I know that sound and I should leave. A gentleman would leave. I agreed to her terms—no touching, no cornering, no growling, no pressing of undead anatomy against alive anatomy—and I have kept them for one entire day, which for me constitutes a moral triumph worthy of sainthood.

Then she moans a word.

“Aldric.”

My name. In her mouth. In her dream.

My cock goes from half-hard to iron between one heartbeat and the next. Whatever remains of my conscience packs its bags and departs for the orchard.

I was never a gentleman. I was a warlord who dressed himself in a lord’s manners the way one drapes a banner over a battering ram. I will not pretend otherwise, alone, in the dark, with the first woman in hundreds of years to moan my name against my pillow.

I lower myself into my chair by the fireplace without a sound.

Firelight moves over her. The blanket has slipped to her waist, her peaked nipples press against her thin shirt, and her hips keep rolling in that slow, seeking rhythm, chasing a phantom.

Chasing me.

I unfasten my pants and take my cock in hand.

There is no shame in me for this. Shame requires an audience of one’s peers, and my peers are dust. There is only the throb of seven centuries funneled into flesh, and the woman before the fire moaning like the answer to a prayer I dared not utter.