Page 121 of Hunted

If I want her cooperation, I cannot keep speaking around the centre.

I release her shoulders slowly and step half a pace back, enough to put space between my body and hers before the mark and my blood and my appetite make a liar of my composure again.

When I speak, my voice is quieter than before.

‘Because if I do not find and bond with my fated mate within three years,’ I say, each word precise as a cut, ‘I will perish.’

25

EIRA

Did he just…

No. He didn’t.

The Heartshard Glass behind me is all well and good, weirding me out and mesmerising me at once, seeing him in glass like some impossible fairytale inversion, but what he just said⁠—

I spin to face him. ‘What do you mean, perish?’

Valentin doesn’t move at first. Or rather, he does what he always does when something matters too much. He goes still, body a fortress, emotion permitted only through guarded gates.

When he speaks, his voice is precise enough to cut. ‘Exactly what I said. In the precisest meaning of it.’

‘But… you’re immortal.’

The wave that moves through me this time is stronger. Lower. Private. Humiliating.

Dread.

Fear.

For Valentin Moretti.

I almost laugh at myself, except nothing feels funny and the sensation is too sharp to dismiss. One week ago, I would’ve tossed a rose into his undead grave and gone back later to dance on it with champagne in one hand and a karaoke mic in the other, singing something petty and off-key in honour of the occasion.

Now?

I want him to live.

Because we’re friends? Fuck no. Yeah, we’ve shared a few kisses and the fated mate thing sounds slightly less murder-y than the dire blood-ritual nightmare I initially imagined.

I shake my head, harder this time, because I’m talking myself out of the implications of my own emotions, and because his dark eyes, rimmed with dangerous silver, are boring into me like he can read every thought that should not be there.

‘But how is that possible?’ I ask, quieter.

He steps closer to the Heartshard Glass, not to me, and the relic throws his image back with eerie clarity.

‘It is possible,’ he says, ‘because immortality is not invincibility.’

Ice cold water dances over my skin.

‘What I am grants longevity. Power. Resilience that mortals mistake for absolutes. But there are laws to my kind, Eira, older than any city I rule, and conditions under which even we may end.’

‘You mean your… bond is one of those conditions.’

‘Yes.’

The syllable lands like stone.