Page 161 of Hunted

“Because you haven’t turned anyone in⁠—”

In over a hundred years, he confirms, and I feel the quiet weight behind it, the choice, the restraint, the loneliness he never names.

“But you can do it with anyone who’s tasted your blood?” I press, fascinated and unnerved.

If I will it, he says. It is a thread. A thin one. But it exists.

My pulse skitters. “Does that mean you can hear me? Read my mind?” I ask, and then immediately hate myself because it sounds too much like fear mingled with… hope?

What the hell?

His eyes darken.

No. Only what you give me. Another pause, and this one is deliberate. But you give me so much when you forget to guard yourself. Or perhaps it’s when I’m inside you like this?

Heat coils in my belly at the implication. And he pushes up inside me in an effortless display of raw power.

Then his voice slides through my mind again – filthy, intimate, impossibly close – and my body reacts before I can think when he raises one hand and I watch the tips of his vampire claws on one extended nipple.

“Oh… Gods.”

Hmm. Like this unfettered pleasure gliding through you. Because you love me inside you. Don’t you, little hunter?

I gasp. “Yes.”

You do not need to speak the words if you don’t want to. Merely think it and I will hear you.

My whole spine lights.

Yes. Yes. Yes!

I feel his pleasure blaze through me then. From his mind straight into mine.

‘Sweet demons, Eira…’

With a feral growl, he fucks me harder. Faster. Staring deep into my eyes as I feed on his blood.

As every cell in my body ignites with the purest bliss as I start to come. Again.

‘Yes! Milk me with that tight cunt, little hunter,’ he croons as I break apart with his name on my tongue.

His fangs bare, then Valentin roars. Loud and savage as he loses himself, and the sight is so primal I shudder around him. Then he drops back to my throat, convulsions wracking his body as he takes another mouthful.

He licks at the place he bit as if he can’t get enough of me.

And when he shudders one last time, it’s with a low, wrecked sound that makes my whole body tremble, his arms crushing me close as if he’s afraid of losing me the moment he lets go.

After, we lie tangled in dark sheets, breath slowing, skin still humming.

For one impossible minute, there is no prophecy. No bloodline or cursed mark burning its way across his chest. No dead teleporter or hidden name lodged like a blade beneath my tongue.

There is only him.

Only me.

Only the ruin we have made of each other.

Then his mouth returns to my throat, gentle now, almost reverent, a kiss over the bite marks he left there. I should shove him away and rebuild every wall he has spent the night tearing down with his hands, his mouth, his cock, his devastating restraint.