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Wild woman.
Elarian twisted her torso, knotting her hands through Lucan’s snowy hair. Pulling his head back, she gazed deeply into his eyes. Though she had looked at him thousands of times before this moment, recognition at last flickered across her memory.
“It was you,” she whispered. “The stranger in the night at the edge of my firelight.”
Memories flooded back.
How she had run away from the moon elves after the Knight-Saint declared her a holy weapon, plagued by rising fevers and a thirst for blood. It had not taken her long to find a new pack of wolves to run with—but they did not come alone. A shadowed man always followed their travels, a wraith of mist and rime. She called to him each night. Come share my fire, she would say. We are two lonely souls in this barren world.
When she finally returned to Melistra’s Grace, she told herself she had imagined it all. That the wolves watched shadows, not a man. That she was truly, utterly, and completely alone in this world.
It was the entire reason she carved the last of her heart from her chest and surrendered it to She Who Is Death.
But before he became the very thing that represented everything broken about her world, she had once said to Lucan Valmere, Come share my fire.
“Come share my fire,” Lucan whispered, as if reading her thoughts.
Tears sprang free from Elarian’s eyes despite herself.
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing worth surviving ever has, Elarian.”
Lucan kissed her deeply, scraping his fangs over her lips until iron bloomed anew in her mouth. Not wishing to think any longer, Elarian closed her eyes and let his roving fingers and gelid shadows ease the burdens of her heavy heart.
forty-four
Bloody Truths
Lucan had imagined a thousand endings for the Ashen Blade.
He had pictured driving an arrow through her heart before she ever reached his gates. Pleasured himself while fantasizing about her kneeling at Aurelion’s feet in chains after another failed attempt on his life. Imagined burying her himself beneath the Evermist where the fey wolves would remember her longer than the moon elves ever had.
He had never imagined tasting her blood…
…and finding it to be the most delectable thing he’d consumed since the moment he first drew breath.
She should have recoiled. Called him a monster. Driven the blade on the bedside table beneath his ribs while he drank.
Instead, she kissed him.
Gods—she kissed him.
That impossible creature who had haunted him for centuries—who once made him long for humanity, then helped sharpen him into a bloodied blade—she wrapped her arms around him and embraced everything he’d hated about himself.
The longer he kissed Elarian, her blood lapped up by his eager tongue, the stronger his need to feel her shuddering against his cock grew. Moving of their own accord, shadows wrapped around her hips until her fiery skin pressed against him. A deep sigh escaped from between their lips; Elarian pulled away with tears in her eyes.
“Just give us this one night. We’ll figure the rest out tomorrow,” he whispered. “Even if it takes another three centuries.”
Lucan didn’t know where these words came from. He’d thought this part of himself long-dead—not even Jace made such honeyed words spill from his lips—but with Elarian held close, her breath cool upon his skin as her blood warmed him from inside, he almost thought it impossible not to feel his heart stirring once more.
“Close your eyes now, and let us dream.”
Moaning as she turned away with closed eyes, Elarian relaxed into Lucan’s shadows. She bent one leg up, black silks rustling over her moon-pale skin and exposing herself fully. Lucan moved with her, his cock almost instinctively following the warmth of her achingly perfect cunt. From the first time he had touched her in the crumbling chapel, to that blissful moment when he first entered her, Lucan knew he’d never take another lover again.
Whatever name mortals once gave this feeling had died the night Aurelion buried his fangs in Lucan’s throat. Soulmate. Lover. Home…Those belonged to another life, were never Lucan’s to claim—an impossible future stolen by the unkindness of the gods.
Yet somehow, Elarian had become all of them anyway.
