46. Nyte—Past
46
N yte— P ast
Drystan thought he was winning this game; Nyte kept his smugness from shattering that hope.
“You’re losing your touch,” Drystan smirked, playing his card. “Something on your mind, brother? A certain fallen star, perhaps?”
Nyte gave him no expression but that only widened Drystan’s smile to a grin.
“Have you figured out anything from that diary yet?”
“This and that, nothing of significance yet. The language is over a thousand years old.”
Nyte’s brow lifted after playing his next card.
“Well enjoy translating fables,” Nyte said.
“You’re no fun,” Drystan quipped. “I’ve taken it on as my personal side quest since you two keep me out of your main affairs.”
“You’ve been with us plenty.”
“ Plenty, ” he repeated with a disgruntled scoff. “Do you know how tedious it is to sit around the keep and listen to father rant to no end about how it’s been years and you’ve still not brought him the star-maiden? Meanwhile I know you’re out there discovering other interesting shit I’ll never know about with her as ally-enemies.”
“I tell you everything once I’m back.”
“Do you though?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Drystan’s chin tilted down in knowing accusation.
“You think I haven’t noticed how you look at her now? How she often looks at you?”
Nyte’s jaw tensed. “You don’t want to go down there, brother. Forget whatever it is you think you observed because it’s false.”
Drystan never did shy away from provoking him. It was damn infuriating.
“She’s it, isn’t she?”
“Not another word.”
“Denial doesn’t erase a mating bond.”
Nyte’s rage flared at the term he spoke so casually. As if it was nothing. As if it wasn’t an impossible, incredible, absolutely world-damning thing that should never be heard.
He took a few breaths to calm the fuck down.
“It changed nothing before. It changes nothing now.” Nyte set down his cards, pinning Drystan with a look that made sure he knew he was serious. “Don’t ever say that out loud again.”
“Why? Don’t you see what this could mean? Shit, unless father found out, he would force you to use it. You would gain her power and be able to wield the key— ”
“Enough,” he snapped.
Then everything quieted with a pull he felt within.
His senses homed in on it by instinct and a stilling calm overtook him. One of cold, terrible dread the likes he’d never felt before. Then he scented it. Blood. Not just any and his eyes snapped to the break in the wall before a nightmare he didn’t know he’d harbored the terror of consumed him, watching her stumble into the archway.
Astraea.
Her silver hair was tangled and painted with streaks of red. She bore her weight against the stone; her hand clutched over her abdomen stained crimson. When her tired eyes lifted to find him with a silent plea for help, Nyte lost it.
His chair flew back with the force he stood with. “Everyone get the fuck out!” he roared.
Channeling through the void, Nyte caught her before she fell.
“What happened?” he demanded, overcome with a sensation that tightened his throat. Panic? It was so foreign he didn’t know what to do with it.
“I didn’t—I didn’t know where else to go,” she panted, face pinching in agony as bodies blurred around them to get through the exit, knowing Nyte was beyond sparing a life that didn’t get out fast enough.
He scooped her up, and Drystan swiped his arm to scatter everything off the table Nyte laid her upon. Her breath came in short gasps, eyes flickering with terror. He cupped her cheek.
“You don’t get to die on me,” he said firmly, forcing her to meet his eyes. “You still have hell to give me.”
Astraea tried to nod, but she didn’t believe him. “I’m scared.”
He slipped into her mind, trying to take some of her pain and terror, but what she was experiencing was like nothing he’d faced before.
“Nyte,” Drystan said, in a tone hushed with dread.
When he followed Drystan’s attention to the wound, Nyte almost fell to his fucking knees. It glowed faintly. A violet hue he knew the sight of.
“Where’s your key, Starlight?” Nyte asked, as soft as he could for her when murderous rage was beginning to tremble his bones. “Who the fuck did this to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said weakly.
Nyte’s chest never skipped such a hard beat as in that moment. She was fading fast. From a wound that would be fatal to her from her own weapon.
He met his brother’s eyes and the grim look in them spoke what he could not, would not, accept.
She was dying, and there was no curing such a wound. Not even with his own blood.
But there was one way to save her.
Nyte wasn’t thinking right. He wasn’t thinking at all. Only desperation drove his actions.
“Get out of here,” he said in a cold calm to Drystan.
“What are you going to do?”
Astraea’s eyes slipped shut.
“Get out!”
Drystan backed a few paces as Nyte lifted Astraea into his arms. He didn’t go far, lowering himself against the wall with her back against his front.
“There’s no going back from this,” Drystan said carefully, concluding what Nyte was planning to do.
Nyte expelled the noise Drystan added to the sirens already blaring in his mind to try to stop him.
“Leave, and don’t speak a word of it to anyone.”
With one last lingering look of concern and protest, Drystan nodded before he left.
“Stay with me,” Nyte said, willing his heart to calm as he dragged his sharp teeth over his wrist, cutting his flesh. He brought it to her lips. “Please.”
It was madness how much the value of something became abundantly clear the moment it came close to slipping out of his possession. He’d denied the depth of his caring for her all this time and now he would resent himself if he was to lose her.
The silence beat too heavily, his skin slicked all over with the adrenaline coursing through him. Astraea stirred at his blood flowing down her throat. Her small hands reached for his forearm, not to pull it away but in a weak attempt to take more from him.
His lips pressed to her head and Nyte’s eyes closed for the only damned prayer he’d ever utter in his gods-forsaken life.
Astraea’s hand fell away from him limply, and when he held her still form and looked upon the paleness of her face, it was like the world began to cleave beneath him.
He only had seconds to make this decision.
In her most desperate moment, for some reason he couldn’t fathom but became utterly beholden to, she’d come to him. Not Auster.
“Gods of the Stars, the Mother, and Death, hear me.” His chest rose and fell deeply with the deceleration that flared a life inside him. “She is mine. I claim her.”
A tether within him reached for her as his mouth closed on her neck, puncturing her delicate flesh. The moment her blood entered him he became irretrievable.
He was hers.
Until his last breath he would be everything for her. Even if she woke and still declared him her enemy. He would find her in every darkness. Trek realms and defy time to reach her.
His soul snapped like rope that frayed with fragile threads, searching for the new and better half to forge something precious. A bond he would protect for the rest of his life. Nyte clutched her tighter, a desperation overcoming him that couldn’t get enough of her. When their souls finished reforging, he drew back with shuddering breaths against her neck.
The weight of what he’d done started to bear down in fractions.
He’d Bonded his enemy.
The one person he was never supposed to have.
She might very well hate him for it. But at least she would be alive to do so.
Pulling back, Nyte examined her chest first. Her breathing was shallow, but coming back stronger like the beat of her heart. Her wound stopped bleeding.
Nyte couldn’t move.
So he held her, letting her head rest tucked too perfectly against his shoulder as he slumped back.
“Stay with me,” he whispered. Over and over. The same three words wouldn’t stop repeating from his lips as if she could be standing in a void to make her choice right now and he needed her to know he wanted her to come back.
He took one moment to pretend things were different. That what he’d done… wasn’t cause for the end of the world.
Nyte’s eyes widened with the spark of her weak hand slipping over his.
He breathed for her soul now. Lived for her heart. He was bound to her eternally and had so much to prove to be what she needed.
“Nyte,” she barely whispered.
Her voice he would run to. Every time she called.
“Starlight.”
“What—what happened?”
Astraea started to come around. She peeled off him when he wanted to beg her for a moment more. For what he’d done was about to shatter this peace he’d never known could exist for someone so dark and wicked.
When she stood, he copied slowly. Waiting for her to realize. Her brow furrowed and it was like he could feel her reaching for fragments of memory as she looked around, then down at herself as her hand caressed over the tear in her leathers and her bloodstained hands. Then she examined him.
“You saved me…” she said, calculating. “How?”
“Why did you come to me?” he asked, almost a beg.
If she’d gone to Auster, he would have had no choice but to do the same. She would be Bonded to him instead.
“I—uh…” Astraea blinked, pacing away as she scrambled for the reasons, the event which led her here and Nyte’s rage was trickling back dangerously to hear it. “I was ambushed. And I—there were three of them. One of them managed to get the key and when they struck—”
Astraea’s hand covered her mouth and he ached to reach for her. He’d never wanted to comfort a thing in his life but he could hardly bear her terror and pain. Nyte strained with the new surge of need to take it all from her.
“How did you save me?”
His chest had never pounded so hard. Never in battle, nor while staring in the face of death. This fear that drummed in him now was so foreign he wanted to claw it from its cage.
“You should have gone to Auster,” was all he said.
She didn’t know they were mates. Perhaps if she had been aware of it she wouldn’t have risked coming to him.
“I didn’t know who I could trust there,” she said. “So I didn’t want to go back yet.”
Astraea scanned him. Twice. Unease backed her a step away and he didn’t know what she was seeing.
“What did you do?” she asked carefully.
“The only thing I could.”
She shook her head. “Did your blood heal me?”
Astraea must be able to feel him, and this was her conclusion.
If only it had been that simple.
“That wouldn’t have been enough,” he said.
Then her hand lifted to her neck, to Nyte’s mark that was both terrifying and absolutely stunning to see on her pale flesh. Astraea gasped; ice-blue eyes snapped to his in shock.
“What did you do?” she repeated with ghostly fear.
“I think you know what.”
“That’s not possible. You’re not—I mean, we’re not…” her words faltered as she seemed to feel the denial was wrong. “How can you be my Bonded when Auster is?”
Nyte ran a hand through his hair. Mostly to distract from the flash of murderous resentment at the mention of the High Celestial. She wasn’t Auster’s Bonded, not anymore. Only Nyte’s.
“I thought you were tricking me at first,” he confessed. “The first day I saw you, I felt it—this pull to you I could only conclude as a mating bond.”
“Why the hell would I trick you with that?” she snapped.
His eyes sliced back to her. “To make me fall for you? To get close enough to attempt to kill me?”
She laughed bitterly. “I don’t need a damn trick to do that.”
“Oh, really?”
Nyte stalked to her and Astraea backed up slowly. Something simmered between them. It was wild and passionate and he was on the brink of detonating from it.
He asked, “Which part do you find easy? Making me fall for you, or killing me?”
She met the wall, never breaking Nyte’s stare, with heated anger that he found tempting. To provoke, unleash, then devour.
“If I wanted you dead you would have been,” she said.
“And if I wanted to love you? Would you have let me?”
“This isn’t a fucking game, Nyte. You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“Oh, my Starlight. I know exactly what I’ve done. You came to me. You gave me no choice.”
“You could have let me die.”
“No. You made yourself mine the moment you got yourself captured in Astrinus. Your life, your death, and everything that exists beyond. You can’t escape me now. Try realms, try time, I’ll come for you. Or better yet, I’ll wait for you because you can’t continue to deny that you’ve been drawn to me too.”
“We had a common goal, that’s all. There will be a way to break this bond, there has to be.”
Nyte’s jaw tightened. His fists clenched.
“Tell me you don’t want it.”
“ You don’t want it,” she accused. “You can’t want it.”
“Because monsters can’t feel?” he said. Astraea’s hard frown faltered. Nyte should leave. Let her find a way to break the bond, and he would be rid of her. But he didn’t. Instead he braced hands on the wall to cage her in, tormented with his thoughts. The only reprieve would be to let them free. Something he wasn’t used to doing.
“I’ve never felt fear,” he began, reflecting to himself as much as confessing to her. “Not like this. Like I had something to lose. When I was young I would fear my father’s hand and his words. A bit older I feared his cruelty to Drystan. Now, I fear nothing at all. How can one fear when one cannot die? I’ve felt it many times, dying, but I don’t fear the pain. Then just moments ago, there it was. You. This thing I never knew I wanted so much that saving your life wasn’t a want, it was a desperate need. It threw out every caution, consequence, and reason. It was fear so all-consuming I had no choice.”
The beat of silence kept his body tense.
“What are you saying?” she asked quietly. Like she knew but needed to hear it.
He pushed off the wall. “I’m saying that somewhere along a measure of time I forgot to keep counting, that I grew to want to love you more than I wanted you dead. Then perhaps I wanted you dead to stop fucking loving you. Because I can’t stop. And I didn’t realize it was a root taking hold of me all this time, growing deeper and deeper. It’s terrible, and something I wish I could rip free, but in all my capabilities this isn’t one of them. But you can. So tell me you don’t want the bond. Rip yourself free from me, Astraea.”
He counted her precious heartbeats in the silence as she contemplated his words. Each one of those beats he carried in his palm, protected with his soul. That heart was his even if she would never admit it.
“When I was hurt, I wasn’t entirely thinking right. I only wished to be somewhere safe, to be with the person who would help me most. I didn’t command a place, or a name, when I used the Starlight Void to get away. Only a feeling, and that brought me here.”
Nyte couldn’t stop the hand he raised, easing across her jaw. Their skin on skin sparked through him like they created their own energy. This was one touch—they could ignite the world if they gave in fully.
“You shouldn’t find safety with your enemy,” he said.
“I shouldn’t fall for him either.”
His walls had been crumbling around her, and the moment he collided his lips to hers in a needy, desperate kiss, they all came crashing down. There was no part of him that wasn’t hers anymore.
She had the armor to bear his claws.
The light to shine in his darkness.
She had the wit to outsmart him and the passion to ignite him. The anger to break him and the smile to reforge him. Nyte didn’t believe salvation existed for the realm’s darkest creature.
Astraea—the Daughter of Dusk and Dawn, the star-maiden — became his new existence.
In the years that passed keeping their bond a secret hadn’t been difficult. He didn’t care what the world knew, only that Astraea knew she was his.
There was a time before Astraea that Nyte had been complete darkness. He pitied that existence now. All that he couldn’t see in the dark. His fingers traced lightly over her bare shoulders, down her spine, and he basked in the bliss of her soft sounds.
Nyte found the vampires that attacked Astraea a while ago, but he didn’t get to kill them. The one that struck her died from wielding the key; his two companions were already corpses by the time he hunted them down. It was a torment that still often stole his thoughts. It would be easy to assume it was just an attack on their greatest enemy, perhaps to claim reward from his father for killing her, but that just put Nyte more on edge. He didn’t stop trying to discover if anyone else knew anything about it, and more importantly, if there could be an active plot to try again.
He needed a distraction right now from his simmering vengeful thoughts about it.
“It’s coming up to Star-Maiden Day,” he muttered.
They lay in nothing more than black sheets in the bell tower. Astraea watched the twilight while he watched her.
“Mmm, don’t remind me,” she said, eyes fluttering at his gentle caresses.
“You don’t like to be celebrated?”
“They rejoice in the creation of a savior. I don’t often feel like such.”
His lips pressed to her shoulder, then her neck.
“The creation of you is something I’d kneel before the gods who despise me for.”
Astraea turned onto her back, looking over his face with thoughtful silver eyes while her hands—those damned blissful hands that soothed a century of pain—traced over his chest.
“What about you? When is your birthday?”
Nyte’s brow furrowed.
“What?” she asked.
“No one’s ever asked me that before,” he said. Nyte took her hand, kissing her knuckles. “Truthfully, I don’t know.”
Astraea pushed herself up abruptly, face pinched in adorable accusation as Nyte lay back, hooking an arm behind himself.
“How can you not know?”
“Most of us don’t have a whole realm reminding us every full circle of the sun.”
“Your father must know,” Astraea demanded, more passionate about the topic than he expected.
Nyte’s hand caressed her arm propped beside him.
“I’ve never cared to ask him.”
“Rainyte—”
“Shhh.” He pulled her over him. Her skin against his was the single most rapturous feeling in the gods-forsaken world. “I don’t want to talk about me. Certainly not about my father.”
“This is important—”
His mouth claimed hers. “I can think of more important things,” he said against her mouth.
“Nyte, you can’t just—” this time she was cut off by her own squeal as he flipped the two of them over. She giggled as his mouth trailed down her neck. “Stop.”
Her protest was a breathless sound, and contrary to the word, her hand slipped into his hair, tightening with the slow pass of his lips down her chest.
“Can I ask you something?” he murmured over her skin.
She gave something of a yes in a moan and he smiled with satisfaction.
“Why did you never bond with Auster?”
Astraea drew a long sigh. “You really know how to kill the mood.”
He chuckled, kissing her once before settling beside her again.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. It may have been a burning wonder, if only to know why she’d reject someone who was far better for her than he.
“Auster wanted more than just a bond—for us to be romantic and intimate. Most pairings do. For the longest time I thought there had to be something wrong with me to not want it. Our match was favorable to the gods who created me, and of course to our people. Everyone told me I was just being stubborn and rebellious not to want him.”
“You are stubborn and rebellious,” he said, reaching to hook her glittering hair that fascinated him.
“Clearly, to be lying here with the enemy. The scandal that would erupt.”
“I think it would incite far more than a scandal, Starlight.”
He didn’t care, but he was trying to be civil for her.
She sighed again, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. “I tried to love him how he wanted. We tried intimacy and a relationship for all intents and purposes.”
Nyte changed his fucking mind. He didn’t want to know about her tie to Auster when the mere thought of him riled a possessive madness.
“He couldn’t satisfy you,” Nyte murmured.
“And you think you can?” she taunted.
His hand hooked under her knee, lifting slowly to act on the dare she was inciting in those seductive silver eyes. Discovering Astraea’s incredible flexibility had him wondering how in all hells he came to be bonded to something so exquisite. Divinely perfect.
“I know I can,” he said. When her leg lifted over his shoulder, Nyte eased his aching cock into her slowly, devouring the pinch of pleasure over her face. “You tell me in every sound you make. And how perfectly you take me into your body. Don’t make me remind you because I won’t return you tonight, perhaps not tomorrow, and it’ll be your job to explain your absence.”
“Arrogant of you,” she breathed, slipping a hand around his nape for purchase.
Astraea cried out sweetly with his next sudden plunge deep into her.
“I have an ambition,” he said, pained and losing himself in the heat of her. “That you’re never going to remember another inside you but me. Or hands on you that aren’t mine. It’s only fair. When you’ve utterly ruined me.”
“Best do better then, Nightsdeath.”
He growled low, adjusting his position and wrapping a hand around her throat. He let that dark side of him surface, enough to shift his appearance. To frighten her. Yet Astraea only followed the dark vines growing across his skin, reaching her fingers to them, and her tight heat squeezed his cock tighter.
She was going to be the end of him.
“I don’t think you’re ready for me to ruin you, ” he said, voice thick with lust.
He thrust forward suddenly, earning a sweet cry from her that he craved more of, setting a pace that had them exerting themselves in their pleasure.
Nyte would never get enough of this. The endless ways he could fuck her, feel her. Every time felt like a gift he’d done nothing right in his life to deserve, but he would never let go of it now.
Shifting, he held himself over her, drinking in every crease of desire over her face before watching where they joined. He slowed his pace, basking in the delirious sight and envelope of heat each time he sank into her.
Astraea’s hand reached between them, and Nyte fucking lost it watching her excel at her own pleasure.
“So fucking perfect,” he growled, kissing her deeply.
“Don’t stop,” she rasped, focused on her climax. “Just like that.”
“Give it to me. In my name. Let me feel you come around my cock.”
It only took a couple more plunges before she gripped him like a vise and her other hand scored his back with the impact of her orgasm. He could watch this infinite times, and it would still feel like he was a nightmare mistakenly sent to a dream. When he wanted to be everything for her yet feared she would one day wake up and realize he was wrong for her.
But this felt so fucking right.
Nyte followed her, fucking them both through the tremors of ecstasy, and even though this wasn’t the first time they’d become entangled and sweat-slicked tonight, it wouldn’t be the last either.
“You are my ruination, Astraea,” he said in a gravelly murmur.
“Then maybe I didn’t fail in my task to end you after all.”
Her fingers combed through his hair as he slipped out of her and kissed her chest.
“You win,” he said. “I’m on my knees for you. I might never be the hero, but I am the villain for you.”
“My villain,” she mused with a pleased smile.
“Always.”
An hour later they reclined in the bath together. Night had fallen and the full moon they watched was serene as they bathed in a silence without words, but there was more to be spoken in the touches they shared.
He didn’t want to think of the daylight when she would leave him again when the first sun rays broke.
Every time they parted, the villainous side of him contemplating ways to end Auster, then take reign of Vesitire himself, but Astraea would never forgive him. He could be patient for her. Though he didn’t know what for. How they would ever make this last and the perfect fantasy being in this tower had become would perhaps only make the shattering of it that much more devastating to face.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
She gave him a reason to find want in the things he’d once despised. The rise of a new dawn. The scent of honey and lavender. The sickly craving she had for things like a spice called cinnamon he’d never sampled before.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“The lying, the secrecy. The fact that this would never be accepted.”
“I’m happy in each moment I’m with you; that must count for something against all that’s out there,” she said. “Even before you bonded with me. The times we traveled. It was like freedom from a cage I never knew had been crafted around me.”
“You’re free with me. On my life.” He leaned his mouth to her damp shoulder.
He didn’t want to think about to what end. There was no end to this. She couldn’t go anywhere he wouldn’t follow her. There was no one he wouldn’t kill to keep her. No realm he wouldn’t break apart to find her.
Auster wasn’t the biggest problem. Nor was it getting the people to accept them together. Nyte had been reeling in torment with the quakes growing worse. It affected solar magick, which meant it was harming her.
Their perfect pairing was a devastating existence.
“There’s somewhere I have to go for a while,” he murmured.
He didn’t want to leave her, but he’d been putting it off too long. It was time for him to try to go back to where he came from and find a way to break this curse. Drystan was adamant that he join him on the journey. It had been his plan, in fact.
“Where?” Astraea pushed up, twisting to look at him in concern.
“I’m going to find a way to stop the quakes.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Not this time, love,” he said gently, lifting a hand to her face.
“This is very un villainous of you, and it doesn’t suit you.”
His mouth curled tenderly. “I’m trying to be good for you.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“Where are you going that I can’t come with you?”
He tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear.
“Somewhere very far from here, and I can’t risk anything happening to you.”
“I won’t risk anything happening to you either.”
Her stubborn defiance was one of his favorite things about her.
“Can you just trust me for once?”
“No.”
Nyte chuckled. It was all he could do. The thought of leaving, not knowing how long it might take, and potentially coming back with no answers at all, it killed him in more ways than she’d know.
Drystan would be waiting for him at dawn. It was time to try.
Astraea’s mouth leaned to his, coming shy of meeting…
Sudden distant screams tore her back, her head whipping around to the archway windows.
She didn’t miss a beat in climbing out of the bath, slinging on a black silk robe and rushing to see what caused the distress.
“What is it?” Nyte asked, drying off and beginning to change.
“I don’t know,” she said vacantly. Then she spun, seeming to tunnel away in a focused calm as she changed.
Nyte’s teeth ground. It better be something fucking catastrophic to have ended their final night far too soon. That might have been a villainous enough thought for her but she didn’t appear receptive to humor right now. He admired her fierce will, her unhesitating response to any action. It also terrified the damned life out of him how unquestioningly she would run into the target of any threat or danger.
The thought of leaving now when something was wrong was unfathomable. Not if she could be in danger. He would follow her, just to be sure.
When they approached the archway Nyte pulled on her arm. He looked over every inch of her face; he’d done so a thousand times yet it was never enough. He took her in like each time could be the last—that’s how fragile she made him. How precious time felt around her.
She waited for him to speak but words abandoned him in a need to kiss her, pull her tightly to him for one more heartbeat of pretend.
“It’s you and me, Starlight. Nothing can change that.”