Chapter Four
How can I not?
The panic thrums hard like the wings I both don’t see and see that sit on his back. “Like I have a choice.”
“There are always choices.”
“No!” I spit the word at him. “There aren’t. I can’t even kill you.”
I take off my cloak and hand it to him. “At least cover yourself.” His manhood’s distracting, and I don’t need any more distractions.
He takes the cloak, laughing softly because I’m sure he can see my thoughts better than I can see his.
The Cursed One ties it on at his hips. “Better?”
“Barely,” I say. I try to focus on anything other than his handsome face or finely sculpted torso, but it’s near impossible.
“So, does the little human have a name?” he asks, which takes me by surprise.
My brow rises. “Like I would tell you.”
“I just figured I should know the name of the person I’m to be bound to for the rest of eternity.” He half-shrugs. “Unless you prefer to be called ‘little human.’”
This is absolutely absurd.
“Lyra,” I say. “My name is Lyra.”
“Rowan,” he replies with a bow. His wings fold in against his back.
“Your name is Rowan?” I ask, frowning as I look at him.
“Is that a problem?”
“No,” I blurt. “It just sounds…” So human. I readjust. “It’s a strong name.”
“I could say the same about yours, Lyra.”
My name on his lips echoes in the ruins, wrapping about me. It streaks terror and desire through me, and I stumble back. He winces as my foot catches on some rubble and pain shoots through me. But luckily, I manage to stay upright.
“This is no life.” I wave the dagger at him.
“It can be. We break my curse and then—”
“You kill again? I won’t allow that.” I shake my head. “We break this bond and then I kill you. As fate really intended.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” He turns, not bothering to watch the dagger. He moves to the edge of the ruins, breathing in. I can smell for a moment what he can. The moist, rich earth, greenery, and a sweetness that pulls at my loins. His. “And there’s no way to break the bond. It’s—”
“Fate, yes I heard you.” I lower my dagger. “Maybe you’ll just steal my soul and suck my bones dry instead.”
“Now that’s just hearsay. I don’t suck bones dry. I don’t eat them.”
“Don’t you?” I counter because the burn of need is in my veins, and it’s a tangle of his needs and mine. For a moment, dizziness hits. I don’t know where he begins and I end. “So you don’t—”
“Kill women?” There’s heaviness now, blanketing down, and I’m not sure I could move if I wanted. “Not how you think.”
“Dead is dead,” I say. “Kill is kill.”
“It’s not deliberate.” He turns, and he’s erect. It tents my cloak out, and if I survive this catastrophe, I’ll have to burn it or I fear I’ll sleep wrapped in it. “I’m forced to lie with the female who comes to me, and with each coupling she is absorbed.”
“Until…” I trail off, tension vibrating through me.
“Until she’s nothing.”
I harden the walls around my heart. I don’t understand. I don’t.
“Yes, you do.”
“Get out of my head,” I growl.
He laughs, and I’m not sure I’ve heard a sadder sound. “Then do a better job of keeping me out. Your thoughts shout so loud they might split the night in two.”
I swallow. “You’re taking what doesn’t belong to you.”
“Some might escape a life they don’t want, and others…”
“You take them.” I look at that handsome face, carved perfection in moonlight. “Each one—”
“Yes,” he says. He turns back, coming to the dais, and runs his fingers along it. “I try to take the willing, or the ones who seek to manipulate another’s heart.”
Those last words cut deep into me for reasons I don’t understand. Just like I don’t understand how I can feel the weight of wings on my back neither of us have.
“A lost love is a loss everyone shares,” I say. “It’s a risk, to offer your heart to another, Rowan. It can always end badly or bring immense joy to your life. You shouldn’t be the judge of that.”
He stops, eyes seeming to glow as he takes me in. “I don’t want to be. I’ve done what I need to survive.”
“How can you live with yourself?”
“You’re a child,” he says, loathing thick in the air. “You know nothing of love or loss.”
But he’s wrong. I lost my parents. I know that pain. I gave up a world of possibilities for the discipline of the Order.
My point remains. His loss and curse shouldn’t stain our part of the world.
“Or punishment.” He stares at me, but I get that, too. That’s why I’m here, and what would’ve been a marriage to Solarre’s pig of a son.
Rowan frowns, but either doesn’t read the thought or ignores it.
“And what would you do, if you were cursed like me?” he asks.
“Die.”
“I see.”
I can breathe in that sweet scent like honey that’s all him, and once more, my loins pull and the urge to lose myself in temptation fills me. I swallow again. I have to get rid of him. I must. Apart from it being my job, it’s right.
“Then why don’t you just kill yourself?” He approaches me slowly and reaches his hand out. I’m frozen in place. “It would stop my heart as well. And your mission will have been successful. Your village will see you as a hero.”
Rowan’s fingers dance light and electric over the skin of my cheek, and he shudders a sigh.
“Do you know how much I’ve longed to touch and not take?” His words are mine as they weave through me, and I want to sink down into them, lower to my knees and take him down with me.
“Do you know?” His voice bounces around my head.
Too long… I answer internally, answering the question for myself as well.
“To feel the warm silky skin of a woman without the fear, the need to devour…”
Without my consent, my body moves, wanting more. He cups my face. His flesh is warm, hot, the burn so sweet I yearn for more of it up against me.
“To taste their lips…” His finger runs along my bottom lip. And the thumping need in his veins is in me, driving my blood. “To explore all your hidden depths, the secret places you crave to be touched.”
My head spins and the dagger’s no longer in my hand. I try to step back, but I can’t move and all I feel is heat. I caught the shift in his words from ‘their’ to ‘your,’ and the promise it holds vibrates within me.
I find myself lifting my head to his as his hand drifts from my cheek down to my throat to wrap there.
Then…then… Then he kisses me.