Chapter 8 The Shackle-Soul
THE SHACKLE-SOUL
LUCIEN
Dusk comes again far too soon but I’m grateful for it as I rouse, even though it’s not fully nighttime.
The storm that blew out of nowhere has passed, but the air feels charged…alive, restless. Something stirs in it. Something wrong.
I feel it before I see her.
A ripple in the dark, a prickle beneath my skin. The same way I feel blood before I smell it.
Elara.
She moves through the shadows of my halls like she belongs here…because she does.
I love her barefoot, wearing one of my silk robes belted tight at her waist. Her hair is still damp from her bath, her scent flooding the air. But beneath the lilies, there’s something else.
Metal. Smoke. Cold.
Like something ancient breathing through her.
…something else crossed through with me when I fled.
My jaw tightens. I tell myself it’s only the residue of her spell—the binding’s echo—but the predator in me doesn’t believe it. The air hums differently around her and I’ve lived too long to remain oblivious to danger prowling close.
My house knows it too. The candles gutter when she passes.
And yet, when she steps into the room, I can’t move.
Her beauty arrests me, as it did the first moment I set eyes on her.
She stands by the balcony doors, moonlight spilling over her like a benediction. Every inch of me reacts as if the centuries between us never happened.
“It’s not nightfall yet. You shouldn’t be awake,” she murmurs, without looking at me.
“Neither should you.” The passage of time stings even harder when I’m forced to enlighten her of this new facet of my evolution.
“Also, some things have changed, my dear.” I let the words hang, watching her face as I continue.
“In the centuries since you vanished—and especially these last twenty-five years—I’ve learned to walk in the sun.
Not fully, not yet. But in the hours when it hangs low in the sky, when the light is soft and gold, I can endure it.
Morning and dusk. A few hours before the pain becomes unbearable. ”
Her eyes widen, the shock melting into something luminous.
“Lucien…” Her voice catches, trembling between awe and sorrow.
“You can stand in the light.” A smile ghosts across her lips and it’s pure joy, unguarded, the kind of smile I thought time had erased.
“I’m so happy for you,” she whispers. Then, softer still, “I should have been there to see it. I’m so very sorry I wasn’t. ”
For a moment, the air feels fragile, the space between us charged with everything we lost and everything that still burns. Then the reality presses back in…the coven’s pull, the curse between us, the knowledge that nothing is ever that simple.
Her lashes sweep down for a long moment, then her gaze lifts to mine, soft and dangerous all at once. “You feel it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I confirm. “I’ve felt something since last night.”
“The thing that escaped…it’s inside me,” she says quietly.
Her honesty slices through the semi-dark like a blade. “What did you bring back, Elara?”
Her lips part, but she doesn’t answer.
Instead, she steps closer. Too close.
I fight feebly not to salivate when the tips of her breasts brush my chest or the scent of her damp pussy fill my every sense.
I fight through the sex haze so I can see the faint shimmer beneath her skin now, like something pulsing faintly through her veins. It flickers when she breathes.
A shadow, or a light, or both.
“One more thing you should have told me,” I whisper-rage. Will this ever end? How can she be back in my arms and yet feel farther away than ever.
Her throat moves and her eyes glisten with sorrow. “I tried. Maybe not hard enough but…” She pauses and then her eyes flash. “Would you have listened?”
The truth hits like a blow. Of course I wouldn’t have. The man I was then was too consumed by rage, too proud to see her fear for what it was.
And I fear the man I am now isn’t that different. Except maybe with the benefit of a quarter century of being honed in agony.
I step forward and cup her face in my hand. Her skin is cool, fragile, too pale. Beneath it, the thing she carries stirs—a flicker of movement that shouldn’t exist.
Gods, it feels like another heartbeat.
“Elara.” My voice is low, dangerous, fighting the terror that threatens. “Whatever they put inside you, it is just one more fight. A fight we will win. Tell me you understand this?”
She closes her eyes but she leans into my touch. Then she says words that chill my frozen body. “Not what. Who.”
“What?” I start to pull away, but she catches my wrist, holding me there.
“No. Don’t look at me like that,” she says softly. “I’m still me.”
I shouldn’t utter the words that trip to the edge of my tongue, but sweet fucking hellscapes, it’s been but one night, not even a full twenty-four hours since I found her.
And there are still so many unanswered questions.
As heavenly as it to feel her flesh and blood beneath my fingers, to hear the pounding of her heart like the sweetest music in my ears, what if she isn’t wholly or even fractionally, what she claims to be? “Are you?”
“I am.” Her breath trembles. “And if you don’t believe it, then I’m sure you have a way to prove it.”
Her challenge ignites the fire that’s been simmering in me since the moment I walked into this room and saw her again.
I drag her against me, and she gasps as my mouth claims hers—rough, hungry and desperate. It’s not forgiveness. It’s not love. It’s recognition of everything we were, everything we lost, everything we still are.
She tastes like blood and memory and the edge of danger. My hands slide beneath her robe, finding skin that feels too warm, too alive. The faint pulse of that other presence flares beneath my palms, and I want to rip it out, destroy whatever shares space inside her.
But then she moans my name, and I’m undone.
The room vanishes before the sound can catch up.
One heartbeat she’s standing in the living room, the next she’s pinned beneath me against the velvet-draped wall of my bedroom, breathless and trembling while the world is still trying to remember how to move.
I press her back against the wall, lips trailing down her throat, fangs grazing but not piercing. The sound she makes—the tiny, pleading catch of breath—shatters what’s left of my restraint.
I seize her mouth again, lifting her off the floor.
Her legs wraps around my waist as the robe slips, revealing skin pale as moonlight, marked by the glowing sigils along her ribs. They pulse faintly with each of my thrusts, matching our rhythm, until I can’t tell where she ends and I begin.
“We are not leaving this room,” I murmur against her skin. “Not till there’s nothing or no one between us.”
“I yearn for nothing else,” she breathes. “Please, Lucien.”
Elara
The moment Lucien’s fingers curl around the edges of my robe, I know there’s no turning back. The fabric whispers against my skin as he yanks it off and tosses it away, the cool air of the chamber raising gooseflesh over every inch of me.
His breath catches just for a second as his gaze rakes over me, dark and hungry, like a predator savoring the sight of his prey.
Candlelight flickers, painting his sharp features in gold and shadow, the glow licking over the planes of his chest, down to the ridge of his cock, thick and heavy between his thighs.
My pulse spikes. My nipples tighten into aching peaks, betraying just how much I want this. Want him.
“On the bed, arms up, thighs spread wide,” he commands, his voice a low growl that vibrates through me, settling deep in my belly. I don’t hesitate.
The stone beneath my feet is cold, the sheets rough against my skin as I crawl onto the mattress, my ass lifting just enough to tease him—to let him see how wet I already am.
The sigil on my spine twitches, a dull, throbbing heat that flares in warning. I ignore it. Right now, all that matters is the way Lucien’s eyes burn into me, the way his fingers flex around the hilt of the dagger he’s set aside.
Then he picks it up.
The blade catches the light as he turns it, the edge gleaming wickedly. A shiver runs through me, my breath quickening as he steps closer, the mattress dipping beneath his weight.
The first touch of the dagger’s tip against my collarbone is ice-cold, a shocking contrast to the heat engulfing me as he hovers over me. I arch into it before I can stop myself, a gasp ripping from my throat as he drags the blade downward, slow and deliberate, tracing the curve of my breast.
“Such a greedy, blood-thirsty little thing,” he murmurs, his free hand cupping my other breast, his thumb circling my nipple until it aches. “You crave this, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And the thing inside you, does it crave this too?”
The dagger presses just hard enough to dimple my skin, and just the threat of a cut makes my pussy clench. A whimper slips out before I can swallow it and my hips rock uselessly against the empty air.
“Answer me.”
“Yes,” my voice trembles in a single breath. “It feeds on what I feel,” I whisper, “And right now, all I feel is you.”
That undoes him completely.
I arch against him, my voice breaking on his name. Every breath gives feels like absolution and punishment both. “Lucien,” I gasps. “Don’t stop.”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
The air hums around us, charged with magic and need.
Somewhere deep inside me, that other heartbeat quickens—thirsting, echoing mine. For a terrible, beautiful moment, I feel it join us.
Then I feel power surge through him, through us, lighting every nerve, every vein. The world narrows to heat, breath and blood.
The first sting of the blade is so sharp, so sudden that I cry out, my back bowing off the bed. A thin line of fire blooms across the swell of my breast, blood welling up in its wake, dark and glistening.
Lucien’s tongue follows immediately, hot and wet to lap at the wound.