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“I lied to you. Unintentionally, but it was a lie all the same.”
My back stiffens; my limbs go rigid. It shouldn’t infuriate me as it does. After all, I’m the queen of lying by omission, of deceiving those closest to me, but there’s something about the fact that it’s Nox that makes me feel as if I’m cracking from the inside rather than the outside. Like there’s a hairline fracture in my soul that keeps feathering outward.
It’s the most I’ve felt past the hunger, the lone prick in a void of numbness.
“I came to visit her, Cinderella, the first night you changed.”
His words ring like a gong in my ears. Pounding like the pulse at his neck, racking at my very skull. Unwelcome images assault my mind—Cinderella’s lips on his, her plush body inviting. I want to gag and claw and rip her to shreds, but my fingernails are digging into my flesh.
“Blaise.”
My attention flicks back to him, and something like fear—no, awe—shutters his gaze.
“I thought I was dreaming. She sliced her arm—your arm. The scent of the blood dragged me from my bed. I was half-asleep, and I thought she was you. That it wasn’t real.”
“You thought she was me.”
“Yes.”
“She was in my body. She didn’t change.”
“No, she didn’t change.”
Fear burns through me, and it’s the third feeling I’ve had since waking. Before whatever happened to me, there would have been no use in counting feelings, with how each tangled with one another. But now they’re separate. Distinct, separated by a void of nothingness until they crash in spikes against my iron heart.
“What happened?”
Nox doesn’t hesitate to answer. He thinks I deserve the knowledge of what happened to me. To my body. After it was taken from me. That’s about the only thing that keeps me from exploding when he says, “She offered me your blood. I thought it was a dream, a…a fantasy, so I took it gladly.”
This is the point my cheeks should heat, but they don’t.
“She wanted my blood in exchange. I didn’t even think to say no. Like there was a cavern in me begging to be filled, and that sharing my blood with you—not with her—was the only way to seal it. I wasn’t aware at the time that bloodsharing is a common practice among others of my kind.”
“Bloodsharing.” The word is foreign on my lips, but familiar to my soul. Even as I try to push out the horrifying, invasive thought of my lips sipping at Nox’s wrist, there’s a pang there. A longing for something I never knew I could want so badly.
Nox doesn’t have to tell me it’s meant to be an intimate ritual. Not with the way my chest cracks at the realization this moment with him was stolen from me. That I wasn’t the one to experience it with him.
Nox’s eyes are full of weariness, a regret that carves its way into my very soul.
“Bloodsharing is performed among my kind when they wish to declare eternal mates.”
Mate. The word rings through my head, scales past my memories. Evander used to tell me bedtime stories when I was young. Many of the faerietales involved mating bonds that formed when a Fated couple first laid eyes on one another. He always teased me incessantly about the way my eyes went starry over the notion.
But what Nox was referring to was not a Fate-willed match, but a match made by choice, by mutual agreement.
An agreement I hadn’t been allowed to make.
“The ritual binds the two souls together. Provides each party equal control over the other. It’s supposed to balance out, I suppose. To signify unshakeable trust in the other. But when the bloodsharing ritual is offered to a human, the balance is swayed, and the human is left with considerably more power over the vampire than the other way around.”
Vampire. The word raps against my skull. Not the outside, but the inside, as if asking politely to be let out.
“She wished to control you,” I say, and he nods, his teeth clenching. “And she did.”
Any anger I might have been harboring unconsciously toward Nox withers at that thought. At the notion of what that wretched parasite had taken from him.
But his eyes are wide and glazed over, and I know there’s more to the story.
I also know he won’t hold back, and I derive a modicum of comfort from that.
