Page 116 of House Ignis

The Archives were so quiet I could hear the frantic staccato of my own heart against my ribs.

“She enacted the blood oath to save her life,” Asher read, his voice dropping into a gravelly register that vibrated through the wood of the table. “The two became inseparable in battle. Their magic began to sync. Their boundlings began reacting... instinctually. Mentally. They could feel each other’s emotions. Hear each other’s thoughts.”

I could barely breathe. The air in the library felt thick, charged with the same ancient current pulsing from the yellowed pages.

“They weren’t supposed to fall in love,” I whispered, my eyes fixed on an illustration of a woman wreathed in white-hot flame. “But they did.”

My gaze moved lower.

“And the stronger their connection became, the more powerful the blood bond grew.”

“It says they became the most feared and powerful pair in recorded history,” he murmured, his silver eyes tracking the text with an intensity that made the shadows at his feet sharpen.

I followed the passage with my finger. “Their connection unlocked new forms of magic. Hybrid. Volatile. Dangerous.”

There was more beneath it.

Smaller writing crowded the bottom of the page, a passage taken directly from Alayna’s own records.

A blood bond does not create what is not already there. It magnifies.

My finger stopped.

Well.

Fuck.

I kept reading. Silently this time.

Fae were already intensely instinctual creatures. We felt everything harder than humans did. Anger. Hunger. Attraction. Possessiveness. Desire. Restraint had never exactly been our species’ greatest fucking strength.

But according to Alayna, the blood bond made those instincts worse.

Much fucking worse.

Desire fed desire. Need fed need. Emotion passed through the bond only to return stronger, creating a relentless cycle between the two people connected by it. The more attraction that already existed between them, the more consuming that cycle could become.

Proximity became a need.

Touch became instinct.

Protection became primal.

Possessiveness became almost impossible to suppress.

My pulse stumbled.

That explained far too fucking much.

The way I knew when Asher entered a room without seeing him. The awareness that crawled beneath my skin whenever he stood too close. The hunger that hit whenever he touched me. The irrational possessiveness that had begun clawing its way out of me despite the inconvenient fact that I was still technically betrothed to another man.

And then I reached the next paragraph.

My mouth went dry.

Apparently, if those bound eventually became lovers, the physical connection could alter the bond even further.

Pleasure could travel through it just as easily as pain or emotion. One person’s desire would bleed into the other, their body responding before sending that reaction straight back through the bond. Again. And again. Each response amplifying the next until instinct, magic, and physical need became almost impossible to separate.