Chapter 31 #4
Then his voice slides through my mind again – filthy, intimate, impossibly close – and my body reacts before I can think when he raises one hand and I watch the tips of his vampire claws on one extended nipple.
“Oh… Gods.”
Hmm. Like this unfettered pleasure gliding through you. Because you love me inside you. Don’t you, little hunter?
I gasp. “Yes.”
You do not need to speak the words if you don’t want to. Merely think it and I will hear you.
My whole spine lights.
Yes. Yes. Yes!
I feel his pleasure blaze through me then. From his mind straight into mine.
‘Sweet demons, Eira…’
With a feral growl, he fucks me harder. Faster. Staring deep into my eyes as I feed on his blood.
As every cell in my body ignites with the purest bliss as I start to come. Again.
‘Yes! Milk me with that tight cunt, little hunter,’ he croons as I break apart with his name on my tongue.
His fangs bare, then Valentin roars. Loud and savage as he loses himself, and the sight is so primal I shudder around him. Then he drops back to my throat, convulsions wracking his body as he takes another mouthful.
He licks at the place he bit as if he can’t get enough of me.
And when he shudders one last time, it’s with a low, wrecked sound that makes my whole body tremble, his arms crushing me close as if he’s afraid of losing me the moment he lets go.
After, we lie tangled in dark sheets, breath slowing, skin still humming.
For one impossible minute, there is no prophecy. No bloodline or cursed mark burning its way across his chest. No dead teleporter or hidden name lodged like a blade beneath my tongue.
There is only him.
Only me.
Only the ruin we have made of each other.
Then his mouth returns to my throat, gentle now, almost reverent, a kiss over the bite marks he left there. I should shove him away and rebuild every wall he has spent the night tearing down with his hands, his mouth, his cock, his devastating restraint.
Instead, my fingers slide into his hair, then his breath catches against my skin.
The sound is too sharp. Too sudden.
My eyes open. ‘Valentin?’
He’s utterly still, and it’s not the controlled stillness I’ve learned to read or the predator’s pause before violence.
This feels… worse.
This is his whole body locking around something vast and impossible, his mouth sealed to my throat, his fangs still grazing the tender, broken skin where my blood beads slowly against his tongue.
Then he shudders.
Once. Hard.
The mark beneath my palm ignites.
A brutal flare of crimson-black light tears through the room, blasting across his chest and beneath my hand like a living brand.
Valentin makes a sound I have never heard from him before.
A howl tears out of him, low and broken at first, deep enough to vibrate through the mattress, the floor, my bones. Then it rises, ancient and violent enough to make the room flinch.
It rips through his polished control, through the centuries of restraint, through the ruthless, sovereign mask he wears like skin. The sound is all blood and ruin, the kind of thing that should come from the dark beneath graves, not from the mouth pressed to my throat.
It keeps going, too long to be human, too raw to be controlled, as if a locked tomb has split open somewhere inside his chest and whatever was buried there has risen on claws and rage.
For the first time since I met him, Valentin Moretti sounds afraid.
The Heartshard Glass screams.
I jerk against him as the mirror fractures from top to bottom, red-black veins splitting through its surface like blood through ice.
Somewhere beyond the bedroom, deep in the Tower, something answers.
A violent, bone-deep reverberation that rolls through the walls, the floors, the very steel bones of the building.
Then voices.
Not spoken.
Felt.
The Black Twelve.
Their shock slams through the air so hard I gasp as Valentin lifts his head from my throat.
His eyes are no longer silver-rimmed. They’re burning.
Black. Red. Ancient.
Fixed on me.
Bride’s Mercy burns cold in my veins, fighting whatever truth my blood is trying to scream, but it’s not enough against this. Against him. Or against the mark blazing beneath my palm as if it has been waiting six years to wake.
His hand closes around my jaw, cruel and merciless, his claws digging into my skin. ‘Your. Blood.’ His voice is ruined, sub-human.
My heart stops.
His nostrils flare wide as his gaze drops to my throat again, then back to my face, and I see it. The brutal collision of hunger, fury, deep confusion and something too vast to name.
He may not know… but his blood does.
The Tower does.
The curse does.
And somewhere, in a place older than night, something laughs and Valentin’s grip tightens.
‘You,’ he whispers, and the word is a blade sliding between my ribs. ‘Little hunter… what did you do?’
Before I can move, lie, or do anything but stare up at the vampire I have spent six years running from, the Heartshard Glass screams again.
And the whole Tower goes dark.