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“Yes.”
His kisses trail down my front, over my shirt, until his head is level with my pelvis. Gently, he pushes my skirt up over my waist, and my heart shudders with nerves and anticipation and pleasure.
“Is this okay?” he asks as he plants another kiss on the top of my thigh.
“Yes,” I gasp.
He moves my legs slightly apart and feathers kisses on my inner thigh. Then he sinks his teeth into my flesh, and the intensity explodes through my body like a thousand synapses firing all at the same time.
I arch my back, and Cyrus grabs my hand in his. Myhead lowers onto the stone steps above us, and I stare up at the ceiling, up at the rafters and the cobwebs, and wonder if anything will ever feel this good again.
Cyrus pulls away, and a drop of blood lands on my skin. “Kira. Lovely, Kira.”
He pulls me into his arms, and we stay like that for so long my eyelids begin to droop. I don’t want to move, but I disappeared after dinner, and Laila will be wondering where I am.
“I’m so glad you awakened me,” he murmurs. “You’re my saviour and my beautiful girl.”
“When we’re here, it feels like we’re the only people who exist. Nothing else matters. I want it to be like that all the time, but then I remember everything else going on. The academy. The murders. How I raised you and how the people up there might want to kill you.” I turn to him and trace his lips with my finger. “You’re the most wonderful secret I’ve ever had.”
He kisses the tip of my nose and smiles. “And yet we do have to face all of those things.”
“Yeah. I’m eighteen, so I’m an adult. I have to make the right decision. God, it sucks.”
He chuckles and strokes my hair.
“What if I can figure out how to get the ward down, and we smuggle you out of the castle?” I suggest.
“I would be living in secret, which isn’t much of a life. But I don’t know if there’s an alternative.”
“I wish there was someone I could confide in. Just one person. Someone I thought would do the right thing and keep you safe.” I shake my head. “But even Octavia has ancestors involved in all of this. If Collette Pax set up the wards, Ican’t see Octavia wanting to bring them down.” I sigh and readjust my legs on the stone steps. “I wish I could tell Laila, but I don’t know how she’d react.”
“We need to act soon,” Cyrus says. “I can’t keep living this way. When you’re not here, I go crazy.”
I stroke the side of his face. He’s right. Neither of us can carry on like this.
Thirty-Seven
It’s latewhen I leave, which makes the tunnels even darker than usual. The candles flicker along the corridor, and the long red curtains shiver in the breeze. My skin prickles with the sensation of being watched, but there’s no one else here. It’s just my racing thoughts.
Cyrus took more blood than usual in the heat of the moment, and I’m weak at the knees as I make my way through the passageway. He’s right, though. He can’t stay in that crypt on his own for much longer. It would be enough to drive anyone mad, let alone someone recently brought back from the dead. I can’t think of anything more dangerous than an insane vampire.
I slip back into the study and close the secret door behind me. So far, I’ve been lucky not to bump into any students in the tunnels, because, of course, they’re used as a hookup spot. I should’ve guessed that before I wandered in blindly.
One of these days, I’m going to stumble out of Cyrus’s chamber, heady from blood loss and euphoria, and find some horny couple going at it.
It's almost two a.m. I’ve lingered in the crypt for far too long. Hopefully, Laila has the good sense not to report me missing, but with the two murders in the academy, I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I mean, it would be kind of nice to know she cares. Laila walks around with permanent poker face.
I’m nearly back to the dorm rooms when the sound of voices grabs my attention. They’re low, barely louder than a whisper, but I notice a rhythmic nature to the voices. Like a melody. No, not a melody—a chant, whispered by a group of people.
Considering where I am, in an academy for fledgling witches and warlocks, the chanting I’m hearing could also be a spell. I hesitate. I’m not far from my room now, but curiosity is getting the better of me. What if this chanting has something to do with the murders?
If it does, you definitely shouldn’t be there, Kira,I tell myself.
On the other hand, I could learn something important. Knowledge is power, and I need to learn as much as I can about this school if I’m going to help Cyrus. Plus, I have some added power of my own. I think about the spell Cyrus taught me and how it threw Gabrielle halfway across the island. I’m definitely not the damsel in distress that I’ve sometimes considered myself to be.
Fuck it.
I turn back and head towards the chanting voices. They intone in a low register, like monks singing medieval music. It’s like stepping into some cheesy murder mystery on television, and I can’t help but smile because my dad loves those shows.
