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Malyr tasted sweet and dark, like the last blackberry on a snow-covered branch, promising pure delight one moment, but threatening downfall, decay, and death the next. It overwhelmed my entire being. Shoved me off that cliff and into the throes of his shadows, drowning me in a flood of fulfillment. In that moment, I would have gladly suffocated on his lips.
By the time his mouth melted away from mine and I opened my eyes, black and white floaters speckled my entire vision, the world spinning. Dangerous longing slinked through the wall of my ribcage, spreading through my core until a hint of wit returned to my brain.
This was bad… Really bad.
Malyr stroked from my cheek to my chin, clasping it tightly, staring down at me from an arched brow. “So pale all of a sudden, little white dove?”
My pulse fluttered so wildly at the base of my throat, nausea once more rose, faster when I scrambled out of Malyr’s embrace and sat up. “Just a dizzy spell. I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine.
I was falling.
I rose too quickly, swaying on legs that seemed to have turned to water as I struggled to remain standing. “We should head back.”
“Hmm, why does your sudden urge to depart not surprise me?” Malyr’s arm suddenly rounded the small of my back, steadying me against him.“De’inde, Liual! De’inde!”
No sooner had he spoken the words, did Liual trot up to us from where he’d peacefully grazed. Malyr once more framed my waist with his hands and lifted me into the saddle.
“Now you might want to hold onto that pommel, at least until I’ve got him ready,” he said just as he slipped the headstall back over the horse’s head from where it had hung from the saddle. He mounted behind me once more, one hand holding onto my hip, the other onto the reins. “Are you running from me again?”
How could I not? I’d been prepared for many things, but not this. Not this…
“Why go through such exertion?” I looked down at that arm that held me, my head a spinning mess, my heart a thudding wreck. “Even at a walk, I seemed to have landed myself in your arms, just like you said.”
With a click of his tongue, Malyr commanded Liual into a walk, steering us away from the cliffs. “And is it such a terrible place to be?”
“No.” All day, there had been a sense of safety in his arms that shouldn’t have been there. Should not be there. “Not until they will hurt me again.”
“As they will,” he said. “How else could I reconcile how I kissed you, hmm? How my body longs for yours? How I brought you pleasure with my mouth on your cunt? How I spend… way too many hours watching you, annoyingly fixated beyond sense or reason?”
A desperate flutter in my chest tingled along my ribs like wingbeats, causing such a stir of reluctant faith that I twisted in the saddle to look back at him. “Will you have me believe that every cut, every bruise, every scar is a token of your affection?”
With his gray-brown eyes locked on mine, he lifted his hand from my belly to my cheek. Slowly, so slowly, he raked back a handful of strands that the wind had blown over my mouth. He brushed his thumb over my bottom lip while he wetted his own, causing that flutter to intensify until I swayed in the saddle.
His fingers climbed to my head, clasped my skull, and turned my gaze back to Liual’s twitching ears. “Look forward.”
I let out a huff of annoyance. “My balance is just fine.”
“It is not your balance that concerns me.” Arm once more slung around my belly, he pulled me tighter against him before he whispered by my ear, “The longer you make me look at you, little dove, the harder it is for me to rememberwhatyou are. And I fear that, if I look too long… I just might forgetwhoyou are."
An overpowering sense of hope expanded at my core. Hope that he would forget. Hope that he could then love me. I struggled to breathe it away as I stared straight. Stared straight for the entire fucking ride home.
ChapterThirty-Four
Galantia
Present Day, Deepmarsh Castle, Galantia’s chambers
Istared out the window behind my desk, watching black clouds lined with silver slowly drift in front of the moon as I traced the scars on my breastbone beneath my nightshift, the bracelet on my wrist jingling. Thunder rumbled far away, faint and nearly indistinguishable from the low hums of wind that cradled the sleeping castle.
Nothing but the last of autumn’s warmth colliding with winter, too weak to let even a single lightning strike illuminate the raven carved into my skin. To give me a reason to run in fear—and straight into the arms of the man who’d put it there. What would Malyr do if I fled across the corridor and into his rooms?
Hurt me.
Because he needed to, didn’t he?
Needed to treat me like his enemy to justify that he would make me his wife. Needed to show me his hate to reconcile whatever affection he hid. How could it not be so after the ride across the meadow? The way he’d watched me? After all he’d said? All he still refused to say? After how he’d kissed me…
