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The corners of his mouth twitched into a half-smile, as if he took it as a compliment. “Quite so.” He looked away for a moment, sweeping his gaze over the turbulent sea before returning it to me. “This is your pitiful attempt at escaping said… bastard, I presume? Are you teasing me with a good chase?”
I eyed the edge of the cliff, which suddenly didn’t look quite so scary anymore. “I would have preferred to find my gift first.”
Arm lifting, he beckoned me to him with the curl of his finger. “Come to me.”
I took a step back and lifted my chin. “I will not.”
An ink-black tendril of shadows shot at me, curling around my body like icy ropes. One hard tug, and it pulled me toward him. My toes all but dragged over the snow as wind whistled past my ears. A yelp escaped me, replaced by a single choking sound as my throat slammed straight into the clasp of his hand.
He dug his fingers into each side of my esophagus, stopping just shy of pain, stepped up to me, and ran his nose along the side of my face where he growled, “Hear me, Galantia. No matter where you go, no matter what form you take, Iwillfind you. You cannot outrun me. You cannot outfly me. Every path you tread, be it north, east, south, or west, I will chase after because… you… are…mine.”
I clenched my eyes shut, shivering in the throes of his threat and the way his lips brushed over my cheek. “I’m not a white dove, and I’ll never be yours.”
“You will always be my little white dove.” His fingers trailed down, circling the scar on my breastbone through the fabric of my woolen dress. “The thing is, Galantia, you left youranoabehind during your first shift. Even if you found your gift, it would go straight to your scrawny little bird… which, I just so happen to have.”
My teeth ground together. Could that be true? Maybe. It wasn’t like I’d counted my ravens in all this turmoil.
I looked up at him. “So you’re still holding parts of me captive?”
Malyr stepped back, reached into a large satchel that rested on his hip, and pulled out a little white… Gods, that bird was, yes, scrawny, small, and… ugly. “Anoasare notoriously difficult to care for. They don’t fare well when separated from their unkindness for too long and might just… waste away.”
That sounded like another threat if I ever heard one. “Let me guess, you want something in exchange for the return of my bird. What is it? The bond?”
Of course it was. Malyr wasn’t someone to bestow kindnesses without gaining something himself, and what could he possibly want from me but to amplify his powers?
He reached the bird closer, which barely lifted its droopy head my way, then dissolved into feathers and white plumes, sending a sinking sensation into my chest. “See it as a token of my affection.”
“Affection?” One word, and the shards of my heart shot up like shields. Now I knew not to trust him. “As if your hateful soul understood any of it, other than how to feign it. To deceive me.”
“Deception and truth aren’t always adversaries.” He grabbed me by the throat once more, crowding me with his body, his lips trailing along my jawline. “Deception’s most profound irony is how it can make the realest truths look like the greatest deceits.”
My breath hobbled, my body trapped between his body heat and the chill of winter licking at my back. “Are you trying to have me believe that your affection was sincere?”
He pressed his thumb against my jaws, turning my head until it gave way for his nose to brush over the fine hairs at my temple, then his whisper purred over the shell of my ear, “All of it.”
At that rush of his breath caressing my skin, and those words, a shiver wrecked through me with a sensual potency that carved at my bitter resolve. “Everything coming out of your mouth is a lie. There was no affection, no love. You hated me the entire time.”
“How could I not have hated you, hmm? A human. A presumedBrisden,no less.” His mouth lowered to the side of my neck, where his lips kissed a languid, slow path along my pounding vein toward my earlobe, where he rasped, “You want to know what made it worse? How I loved to spend my days with you outdoors, my mornings with you at my desk, my nights with you in our nest. You are quite extraordinary, Galantia, in a way that is not obvious, unless someone looks closer.Ilooked closer. And what I saw, I loved.”
I closed my eyes, reveling in his words and succumbing to the divine sensation of his tongue playing with my earlobe, even as I shook my head. “Liar.”
“Yes, I am a liar.” His breath caressed the shell of my ear before his lips ghosted hot toward my mouth. “I told myself I hated you as honor demanded. That I did not indeed betray the memory of my entire family with how I longed for you, wanted you, spent every fucking second…obsessingover you.”
“Stop it.”
My heart wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t nearly healed enough to protect itself from his schemes and lies. Yet… I ached for more of it, desperately searching for more pieces of true love now that I’d finally tasted it in my birth mother’s sacrifice.
“I loved how curiously you watched the little girl at the cliff, loved how you cantered over that meadow, loved how you braided my hair, and loved just about any other fucking mundane moment between us.” His lips prodded the corner of my mouth, gingerly at first, only to gradually demand as they tried to catch mine. “And I hated you even more for making me feel that way,anoaley.”
Oh gods, the way his tongue lapped at my bottom lip was absolute torture, making me ache to give in to him. “Don’t call me that.”
“You feel it, do you not? Even without your gift, you can feel it. We are two parts of one whole.” His whisper caressed the small gap he’d worked between my lips, parting them more with each sensual lap. “From the moment I first saw you, I felt it. You and I belong together. Forever.”
I fought this incessant pull in my chest that seemed to inch my balance toward him. And those gray-brown eyes… No man ever looked at me the way Malyr did now, giving me his undivided attention, as though I were the very epicenter of his universe.
“Kiss me,anoaley,” he rasped against my mouth, his lips nuzzling mine, urging them to seal. “Let myanoareach for yours. Bond with me.”
Bond with me.
