Chapter 28 #2
Something in me tightens; fear, yes, but threaded through with something else I don’t want to name.
Something that feels like recognition in a place I should only feel revulsion.
A pull toward the forbidden, toward the sharp edge of him.
Toward the truth that danger has always spoken louder to me than safety ever could.
He moves behind me, his presence an enormous gravity, shifting the air, filling the silence like a second heartbeat.
I can feel him studying me, reading my stillness the way someone reads a diagnostic panel, measuring which wires spark, which ones overheat.
His knowledge of bodies isn’t abstract. It’s intimate.
“Come here,” he says.
Not a request.
A command spoken like a thought he’s already decided I’ll obey.
And I do.
He reaches for another vial, this one filled with something nearly clear; waterlike, but sharper when the light hits it. He holds it between us, letting it sway gently from the pinch of his fingers.
“This compound,” he says, voice low, “stops the respiratory system in fifty seconds. Quietly. No thrashing. No noise. Just… a slipping away.”
A coil of dread winds down my spine, but it’s not the kind that drives me backward. It’s the kind that roots me in place and forces my breath to shallow.
He turns the vial in his fingers, the glass catching the lamplight like a blade.
“You’re pale,” he murmurs. “Are you frightened?”
“Yes,” I say.
My voice is barely there. Not a scream. Not defiance.
A confession.
His eyes narrow in something that is not pity, not cruelty; something far stranger. Something drawn taut between predator and… something else.
He sets the vial aside with a soft glass tap that reverberates in my bones.
Then, without warning, he steps closer.
I back up instinctively, my shoulder hitting the cold metal rim of the center table. My pulse spikes. He doesn’t stop. He advances again, slow, deliberate, the way he would approach prey already trapped by its own breath.
I bump harder into the table.
The steel bites into my lower back.
“Lucan—” My voice hitches, breath caught somewhere useless.
He doesn’t answer.
He keeps walking into me until the pressure forces me to climb backward onto the edge of the table. The metal is freezing under my palms. I slide back involuntarily, trying to keep balance—
He doesn’t let me.
He places one hand on the table beside my hip, then the other near my opposite side, boxing me in. The shift of his weight makes my body lean back, spine meeting the cold slab, legs still dangling over the edge.
My heart is pounding so loud I can hear it echoing in my ears.
He looms over me, scarred face carved in shadow and dim light, eyes trained on me with a focus so intense it feels like an incision.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
He tilts his head slightly, as if considering the question in terms of biology, not humanity.
“Teaching,” he repeats, but the word is different now. Darker. Heavier.
The position he holds me in—hands braced on either side of my head, his chest inches above mine—is intimate only in the way cliffs are intimate: one shift, one decision, one surrender, and the world falls away.
My breath trembles. Not entirely from fear.
“Why—” My voice falters. His shoulders shift as he leans in closer, and heat blooms in my throat. “Why teach me this? These things?”
“You wanted to understand,” he says. “So I’m showing you the world as it is. Not as you hope it is.”
His thumb brushes the edge of the table, dangerously close to my temple. He never touches my skin, but the proximity sets every neuron on fire.
I swallow hard.
He watches the swallow like he’s tracking the movement of prey.
“Lucan…” I whisper, the name slipping out before I can stop it. His eyes flicker in response—not softening, not warming, but darkening, sharpening, as if something inside him answers to that name alone.
A reckless question claws its way out of my throat.
“Have you ever…” My breath shakes. “Had romantic feelings for your… victims?”
The silence snaps.
Then—
He laughs.
A low, dark, utterly humorless sound that scrapes along the air like a blade dragged slowly across glass.
It’s not loud.
But it devastates.
Because it isn’t a denial.
Isn’t a confession.
Isn’t even amusement.
It’s hunger.
Controlled.
Measured.
Directed at me.
He leans closer until his breath ghosts over my cheek, until the smell of cold leather and metal and him fills my lungs. I tilt my chin back instinctively, exposing my throat without meaning to. His eyes drop to the movement like it’s something he shouldn’t see and yet refuses to look away from.
“Feelings?” he murmurs. “No.”
My stomach drops.
Then he steps closer still, and the table’s edge digs into my spine as he pushes me fully onto it. My legs shift, knees bending, feet off the floor now. My back hits the cold metal in a full line. I gasp at the temperature.
He cages me in completely—hands planted on either side of my head, arms tense, shadow falling over my body like a sealing ritual.
He lowers his voice.
“But you,” he says, “are not a victim.”
“I— I don’t understand,” I stammer.
“Yes,” he murmurs, leaning in until our foreheads almost touch. “You do.”
My pulse trips into panic.
But something else pulses with it.
Something deep. Forbidden. Terrifyingly alive.
He lifts one hand and hovers it above my jaw—not touching, just letting the weight of possibility sink into me.
“You’re lying on a table,” he says quietly, “where I’ve ended men twice your size.”
A tremor runs through me. My breath comes shallow, uneven, as if my body can’t decide whether to flee or melt.
“I know,” I whisper.
“And you followed me in here anyway.”
My chest tightens. “I didn’t— I didn’t think you would—”
“You thought I wouldn’t press you?” he asks softly. “Challenge you? Corner you?”
He leans down another fraction. The cold metal under me, the warmth of him above me—it feels like being suspended in some impossible temperature, caught between fire and winter.
“I think,” he says, “you walked into the dark because part of you wanted to see what would happen.”
His words strike something deep inside me. Something I’ve never dared look at directly.
He sees it.
He always sees it.
My voice breaks. “Stop.”
“No,” he says.
The word lands like a hand around my wrists.
“Because you’re not asking me to stop,” he murmurs. “You’re asking me to understand something you don’t have language for yet.”
My breath shudders out in silence.
He lowers his face just enough that I feel the faintest brush of air when he speaks.
“You asked me about feelings,” he says. “Let me give you an answer.”
His hands remain braced beside my head, but his body leans closer until our chests nearly touch, until every inch between us is charged, coiled, waiting for a spark.
“I don’t feel what normal men feel,” he says. “I don’t want what they want. I don’t love the way they love.”
My fingers clench on the table edge.
“But attraction?” he says. “Danger? Recognition?” His scar catches the light as he tilts his head. “Yes. I know those.”
My breath stutters.
“And something in you,” he murmurs, “answers it.”
I can’t move.
Can’t blink.
Can’t breathe without betraying myself.
He studies my face with unbearable intensity.
Not the way men look at women.
The way hunters look at predators they did not expect to find in the same woods.
Then, with a slow exhale, he shifts his weight onto his palms. The table groans. My body sinks a fraction deeper into the metal.
“Does it frighten you,” he says softly, “that you don’t want me to step back?”
My heart slams so hard my vision blurs.
“Yes,” I whisper.
His eyes darken further.
“Good, that makes us officially fucked, Elara.”
I whimper, I know what’s coming now, and I consent to it.
“What I feel for you,” he murmurs, “isn’t something human.”
My stomach twists. My chest tightens. My whole body feels dragged into orbit around him.
His grip on the table tightens—brutal, hungry. Then ever so slowly his hands moves towards my wrists, lifting them above my head, the cold metal infiltrating my skin. My fingers tingle beneath the pressure. I could struggle, but it would be useless. Worse: I don’t want to.
“You want honesty?” he whispers. “You want truths?”
His mouth curves in something predatory.
“Then listen carefully.”
He lowers himself closer, until every breath he exhales becomes mine, until the metal table beneath me feels suddenly like an altar.
“I don’t desire you the way men desire women,” he says, voice sinking to a slow, exquisite ruin.
“I want you the way predators want territory. The way obsessions want to consume. The way violence wants a witness.”
My throat tightens under his palm.
“I want you,” he breathes, “like something I intend to own.”
Heat storms through my chest.
My lips part—but no sound comes out.
He sees. He studies the tremor in my inhale like a scientist observing the first twitch of a live wire.
“That fear in your eyes,” he murmurs, “it isn’t revulsion.”
The thumb of his free hand drags gently across the corner of my mouth, pulling my lip.
My breath shatters.
“It’s recognition.”
“No—” My voice breaks. “Lucan—”
“Yes,” he snaps softly. “You feel it too. That pull. That darkness. That answer.”
He shifts his weight, bringing his body closer, not pressing, not touching intimately, but closing the last inches of air until my heartbeat slams against the table.
His hand on my wrists slides upward, intertwining our fingers, not tender, but claiming, binding me to the table, binding me to him.
“In all honesty Elara, I hunger for you like a wild animal. Things are growing back in me which I ought to be long dead and gone.”
The words punch straight into my spine.
“And, God help us both…” His voice fractures, then reforms sharper. “…I feel a fraction of humanity again when you touch me Elara Vance.”