TEN #2
Dante stretches his leg to nudge my boot with his. Reluctantly, I look up to find that his smile has turned conspiratorial. “No one else has to know,” he all but whispers. “Your slayer girls will be none the wiser. A harmless, indulgent secret between us, stellina.”
My throat tightens. I should threaten to gut him for teasing me so coarsely, but I’m forced to accept the even more horrifying reality that he’s being serious.
“I-I— No.” I pull my boot away and avoid eye contact, but I feel his gaze linger and pierce me. “I can’t. Not with…with you. Nor with anyone.”
Dante breathes in sharply. His stare burns into me. “Hold on—are you saying the blushing virgin image wasn’t simply an act?”
“We are not discussing this.”
His laugh is disbelieving. “I always assumed you slayers got up to all sorts of freaky shit in that castle. Or did you simply choose not to partake?”
“It’s an abbey, not a castle,” I spit. “And I’ve done…some things. Just not others. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”
Don’t say another word to him, Ariya. Shut up, shut up—
“The Order sees such acts as beneath us. Petty, self-indulgent distractions.” I add this in a hush as though Mother Superior might hear me confessing this out here, in the middle of the Tuscan woods. Lord, I can only imagine the blotches of red across my face.
“Answer me this,” Dante says, ducking closer. He lets the silence stretch—trapping me in anticipation—before a wicked gleam enters his eyes. His voice lowers to a half-reverent whisper. “Did I steal your first kiss?”
With a man? Yes. But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting that even if he put a blade to my throat.
“Fuck off. Keep laughing at me, and I’ll hack out your tongue,” I snap.
Dante holds up his hands as though to signal a truce as he reclines again.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, darling.
Everyone starts somewhere. Learning the rules is half the fun, if you ask me.
” That gleam in his eyes is undaunted. If anything, his curiosity seems to be fanned into a blaze.
“And if you change your mind, you’d be in very capable hands with me.
The countless things I could do to make you scream and squirm…
I’ll have you begging for me to unravel you. Bit. By. Bit.”
He punctuates these last words with a vague, elegant gesture of his hand. I find myself hypnotized by the fluidity of his fingers.
“I do not beg,” I growl.
His smile widens. “I’ll change that.”
Against my will, our wedding kiss surges into focus—the only time our lips have locked thus far, yet I recall it with sharp clarity. Brief but sensual, the taste of Dante’s skin startlingly pleasant. If I gave him time, what else could that mouth do?
“Rules aside, I would rather light myself on fire before touching a single inch of you.” I busy myself with stuffing the linen wrappings into my saddlebag—anything but meet his gaze, lest he see right through to my sinful thoughts.
“Does this whorish rake act really entice victims? I should worry for the intelligence of Italia’s citizens. ”
“You’re awfully ruffled for someone who finds me so repulsive.”
I give him a derisive once-over. “It must be quite jarring for you, for someone to not be immediately worshipping the ground you walk on.”
Dante hums in agreement. “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
This gets a small snort of laughter out of me. “How do you know you’re that heartbreakingly handsome if you haven’t seen your reflection for nearly one-hundred years? For all you know, you could be ghoulish.”
“I make it a point to befriend as many artists as I can. Honestly, they flock to me most times. Apparently I make a fantastic muse,” Dante says, shrugging. “Occasionally I’ll get them to sketch my face so I—” He stops himself abruptly. His jaw works like he’s muscling back the rest of the words.
So you don’t forget what you look like?
A tragic thought. One I have never truly considered.
Dante pushes the shadows from his expression, eyes glinting at me again.
“Besides, there are other ways of knowing. How a room stirs when I walk through the door.” He points at me, letting the pause draw out.
His voice dips into something low and sensual.
“How you hold your breath when I speak. Even now.”
I hurriedly inhale. The way his voice had lowered… It wasn’t hypnotism, like when he’d crawled into bed with me, but it pulled at me all the same. It was something primal, something raw. Something I wasn’t used to feeling, like there was a storm trapped in my body, begging for release.
Shit—I’d leaned in slightly.
“You’re deluded,” I simper, giving him my best fuck you smile. “Looking at you just makes me want to hurt something.”
“A common impulse for you, I’m sure.”
He reclines again with a sigh, shifting to get comfortable. His body is unapologetically unfurled, like the forest around us is his by claim.
“On second thought, maybe it’s good that we wait,” Dante remarks. “I’d utterly ruin you for every dick that enters you after me, and that wouldn’t be fair to you.”
My jaw drops clean open, and I hurl the damp rag at him. “I almost miss your charade of being an air-headed noble—when every other word out of your mouth wasn’t the most vile shit I’ve ever heard!”
Dante clucks his tongue at me. “You really shouldn’t speak to your husband like that. Misbehavior provokes punishment.”
My hand closes around the nearest rock, and I hurl that at him next. Dante’s laugh echoes through the clearing as he dodges, the rock smashing into the formation behind him harmlessly. This time, he winces a little from the sudden movement.
“Fuck…” Dante looks down at himself, fingering the sliced fabric of his tunic.
The bear’s claws had torn right through the finely-stitched navy fabric in several areas, dampening the fabric with smears of dark blood.
He peels off the garment—muttering gripes about its loss—to analyze the damage directly.
Immediately, I see why he’s concerned. The gouges rendered across his chest and abdomen are still there—stitching up as vampires did, but very, very slowly.
I frown, leaning in to watch as Dante gingerly touches one of the slices across his abdomen with a furrow in his brow.
Blood still oozes slightly, but he looks irritated more than anything.
The sheer foreignness of his bare torso holds me captive long after I’ve registered the issue. I’ve studied anatomy at the abbey, been surrounded by soft curves and modestly-covered forms my whole life. But this? It was forbidden, new, and…entrancing.
My eyes trace the hard angles where his shoulder meets his arm, the well-defined plane of his abdomen.
The firelight dances over his skin, shifting his fair complexion to a warm bronze.
An ache blossoms in my stomach as I wonder what it would feel like, to reach out and squeeze one of those rounded biceps.
Two pinpoint scars lay at the base of Dante’s neck, almost silvery in the flickering light. Alessandro’s long-ago claiming bite—the moment that turned him.
“What’s wrong with you?” I demand, wrenching myself from my stupor to jut my chin at his wounds.
Dante glares at me, scoffing indignantly. “I’m hungry. Healing usually takes minutes at most.”
“Weak, you mean,” I say.
He growls in his throat. It’s a pleasant change, getting under his skin for once. “If you had just let me steal a bite from you earlier, this wouldn’t be an issue. I’d have been strong enough to manage that creature single-handedly. It would have been easy.”
He balls up his half-ruined tunic and chucks it across the circle in frustration. A beat passes as he stares accusingly into the fire. Gradually, I feel the tension crackling off him in waves soften into something more reproachful.
“I don’t suppose you’d reconsider.” When he speaks again, he’s wrestled his voice back into a restrained decibel.
“I meant what I said before… A modest little swallow would restore my strength—to protect you. To protect us both. You know as well as I that a bear has nothing on a tyrant like Alessandro. Next time, your tricks may not be enough. If we’re going to make it through this, you need me stronger than this. ”
I press my lips together, studying the wounds between us.
There is no denying we’d been lucky. One ill-timed movement, a missed blow, and we’d be gone.
I would, at least. Dante is, at present, a little harder to kill.
Once again, I hate that there’s truth threaded there; even another well-fed vampire of his stature would have been harrowing—let alone a vampire lord, with their unparalleled powers.
“Seems like this benefits you far more than it does me,” I quip, giving him an icy once-over. He was enough to manage at half-strength.
“I’ll owe you a favor,” Dante presses. “I don’t put myself in others’ debts often, mind you. You can ask it of me anywhere, at the time of your choosing.”
I scoff out a cold laugh. “Even if I needed someone eliminated, I’d simply end the poor bastard myself before setting a leech on them.”
“There’s more to life than stabbing, you know. For example, I’m exceptional at blackmail—”
“I can handle my own threats just fine, thank you.”
“Ariya—please.”
That single syllable gives me pause. His voice is deep, tethered, urgent. God above, I think he’s close to grovelling on his knees—not that it wouldn’t be deserved. A part of me—one I’d never admit to—wonders what he would look like, prostrated and desperate before me.
I try to study Dante’s face for any deception. His odd, weary earnestness makes all the fire in my chest flicker, falter. An honest vampire? I’d sooner expect the pope to paint the Sistine Chapel himself.