CHAPTER 10 #3
“Or what?” I scoffed. “You’ll kidnap me and stick me in a deadly round of challenges where I’m forced to watch my friends die before bleeding nearly to death in a cave while a mole creature viciously attacks me? Oh, wait, you’ve already done that.”
I sidestepped him neatly and stomped down the corridor. He kept pace with me easily. “Look, I get you’re upset with me, but we’re linked for the duration of the Trials. You need to get over this and let me train you.”
“Get over this? My friend died. I nearly died. It’s not something you just ‘get over’. It’s actually fucking pointless explaining any of it to you.” I exhaled. “Unless you’re here to tell me everything I need to know about the second Trial, there’s nothing else for us to talk about.”
“You need training. If you hadn’t drawn from the link, you really would be dead right now.”
“But I did, and I survived. Without your training.”
“You were lucky in the caves to have channeled my magic the way you did. It was an instinctual response, but it won’t always be like that. You can’t channel out of fear. Let me teach you.”
I halted outside my room, spinning around to face him. “Teach me what? How to abandon my friends and desert my humanity? If I ever want lessons on being a fucking prick, you’re the first person I’ll come to, don’t worry.”
He slammed his hands against the door, pinning me between it and him. His forehead dipped until his eyes were parallel with mine. Eyes that burned with silver fire. “I am not your enemy.”
“Sure as hell feels like it.”
He breathed deeply, as if he were asking the gods for patience. I knew how he felt. His frustration was mine. His wrath and fury matched my own, twin flames to a pyre. He stared deep into my eyes, so deep I thought he might be looking straight into my soul. “You will let me train you.”
I shook my head, my lips curling into a harsh smile I hadn’t even known I was capable of.
Kilian made me feel things, act in a way I never had before.
Everything was so heightened around him, I felt like a fucking livewire each time he was nearby.
Like I might explode if he so much as touched me. It made me livid.
“I would rather die during the second challenge than spend one minute with you.”
Instead of recoiling, as I had expected, Kilian smirked. A mirror to my own cruel smile. “Your words bite. But you forget that this link is reciprocal.”
“Then you will know for certain how much I loathe you.”
He chuckled, a deep masculine sound that resounded along my bones.
I wanted to capture it in a musical box and play it forever.
“You know, I don’t think you do. In fact,” he said, and, to my horror, dipped his face lower so that his nose brushed the side of my cheek, his breath a soft whisper on my flesh. “I think you quite like this.”
I swallowed, frozen in place against the door. I realized that I was holding my breath. I didn’t want to breathe in his scent. I knew the second I did it would be over for me. “I fucking hate you.”
His lips pressed gently against the hollow beneath my cheekbone, skating along the skin toward my jaw. “What about now?”
“Now?” I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating. Thoughts no longer existed inside my incoherent mess of a brain. There was only feeling. And gods, did I feel. What he was doing to me was excruciating. I struggled to remember exactly what I had been mad at him about.
“Mm.” The rumble in his throat vibrated through me, and my thighs clenched involuntarily.
“I – I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? But you were so sure, Lirah.”
My shortened name on his lips undid me. I breathed.
And instantly regretted it. He was peppermint and leather, the saltwater of the ocean and power so heady it disoriented me.
His scent was so utterly Kilian. And it consumed me.
I wanted to drink it from a bottle and then find the source, so I could guzzle straight from it.
His lips trailed along my jawbone, skirting the underside and my traitorous neck lifted. Only an inch, but it lifted, granting him access to my thin, vulnerable skin, and the heartbeat he could undoubtedly feel hammering away beneath.
“I–”
All thoughts vanished entirely as his teeth grazed the dip beneath my ear, his tongue sweeping instantly across the spot. He sucked at the skin, drawing circles with his tongue and my knees… went… weak.
Lust clouded my vision, my eyes shutting as I gave way to the feeling, allowing it to consume me wholly. I needed more. I needed his body pressed against mine and fistfuls of his shirt in my hand. I needed his hair between my fingers and his face between–
“Your friends are coming,” he murmured, dragging his mouth back up to my cheek. He pulled away slowly. His eyes were hooded, a smug smirk on his lips.
“If you won’t train with me, I’ll send someone else. But you will train, Lirah.” And then he was walking away, as if he hadn’t just assaulted my neck in the most tantalizing way and left me completely breathless. “And I’m still waiting for that paperweight you stole.”
“Asshole,” I muttered.
His answering chuckle set my blood on fire.