29. Violette
VIOLETTE
ONE WEEK LATER
After a night of tossing and turning—craving—this human male I’ve never even formally met, my mind keeps revisiting Arturo and his mate.
Already set to be married.
As happy as I am for Arturo, I can’t help but be jealous.
Surely, if that wretched female can make Arturo fall in love with her, I at least have a little hope?
Now that my scheme to unite Arturo and his mate has worked—and so swiftly—after all these years, I find I am no longer able to deny myself that same happiness.
To risk it.
Even if it’s only a sliver of a chance at it.
Even if I discover that what lies beneath my human’s masculine perfection is someone who would crush my heart, as my father did my mother, what’s a little more suffering when it’s all I’ve ever known? I have nothing left to lose.
Before I can decide against it, I’m stepping through a portal, again, to spy on my soulbound because...
Despite my many misfortunes, the hope inside me is a stubborn and rebellious thing.
I am fucking transfixed as I watch him tend to his bees, singing a melancholy tune in a resonant voice that I can only describe as devastatingly beautiful. Something that I would hazard a guess he wouldn’t reveal if he knew he had a voyeur.
The man is an enigma. If one were to judge him by his looks alone, they’d likely assume he were some kind of warrior-outlaw-thug.
Albeit a very handsome one, with his rippling muscles, dour demeanor, and innumerable tattoos that reach above his neck and pepper his face.
He wears a look of peace, taking care of his garden and apiary.
Akash almighty, I’m hopeless against this.
Is this what my mother felt?
Why she chose to stay with someone who chose his ambitions over her and the daughter they created?
Merely looking upon him feels divinely anointed—like two voices singing the same song in complementary octaves that perfectly blend to create the most illustrious harmony. Each rough, rugged, and punishing edge of him speaks to my soul in a way that I’ve experienced with no other.
My human’s syren song reaches its crescendo, and I swear I feel it reverberate in my soul.
The hairs on my arms rise at the phantom touch of his voice.
Tears swell in my eyes, making me grind my teeth against the heart-rending beauty.
Being part syrith means that half of me is evenly divided into syren, daemon, and fae.
The syren in my blood causes music to have a preternatural effect on me, and this male’s velvet baritone alone is able to, somehow, make me slick with arousal even as I am inspired to weep.
Everything inside me urges me to fold in front of him and bare myself to him so that he may claim me.
Yet, here I am. Stalking him. For the third time this week.
I’ve even snooped around his home.
Levi Graves is his name, or so I’d gleaned from a stack of neglected letters on his kitchen counter.
In a kitchen that is uncannily similar to my own, where every herb and oddity may be found neatly organized and treated with reverence.
A butterfly—just one of many that can be found dancing in this male’s lush and verdant gardens—flutters into view.
It lazily flaps its iridescent blue and black wings—not too dissimilar to my own—hovering only inches in front of me.
Gingerly, I lift my hand for it to perch on my index finger and study the creature with equal parts affection and fascination.
Levi’s singing stops, and I look up from where I’m hidden to see him striding towards his home. Sweat-slicked skin glistens over thick ropes of muscle, bunching and shifting as he grabs the hem of the thin, threadbare fabric of his shirt and pulls it over his head.
All the moisture in my mouth seems to dry up in an instant in favor of heading south to my now tingling and clenching core.
He climbs the porch steps and disappears inside. A squeaky screen door swings shut behind him. The butterfly on my finger alights and flutters in his direction as if to lead the way. Helpless to follow, I quickly glamour myself to camouflage with my surroundings.
At the screen door, I peer inside his home, heart hammering despite the fact that if he were to look in my direction, he’d see little more than a vague, translucent shadow.
His home is a mostly open floor plan that allows me to see the living room, kitchen, and dining area all at once.
With Levi nowhere in sight, I fold inside his house, tiptoeing like a bloody cat burglar across his wooden floorboards because, while he may not be able to see more than a scarce shadow of me, my glamour doesn’t mute the sounds I make.
From down a long hallway, I hear a shower turn on, and my heart leaps into my chest with perverse excitement.
It may be wrong, but this human is mine, and whatever morals I may have once had about allowing someone their dignity, their privacy, when it comes to nudity, were burned to ash a long time ago in a brothel.
With bated breath, I scurry down a hallway towards his open bedroom. With each forward step, my heart slams harder against my ribcage. Pausing outside his open bathroom door, I dare to peek inside.
No matter what I might have expected, there’s no way I could have been prepared.
Levi’s shower is a dark emerald tile affair with a built-in seat directly opposite the glass door.
He’s seated on it with his head tipped back against the wall.
Thickly muscled, tattooed thighs spread as one hand works his cock.
The appendage is long and girthy enough that his fingertips barely touch as he administers languorous strokes, paying special attention to the thickly flared crown.
My traitorous mind takes a note of this.
Eyes narrowing, my mouth dries to dust as I realize even his cock is tattooed.
Heat and need coil inside me as the tether between us pulls tight. In the same moment, his eyes seem to lift to mine. I freeze, praying that whatever shadow my glamour reveals doesn’t give him pause.
Instead, he groans a curse as he continues to work his magnificent length—an image that will forever be seared into my mind. A vision of such striking virility and masculine perfection that no other male will be able to compare.
My throat works around an uncomfortable ball of emotion as I begin to succumb to the idea that this male is my fate, and my mind begins to conjure how I might convince him to move his life to Bellorum.
To me.
Because I shan’t be spending my days in a magic-less realm surrounded by humans.
He has roots in this realm. In Terrenea.
Work, purpose, friends, perhaps family, although I haven’t seen any sign of them.
Well… that settles that.
A solution solidifies in my mind. One that he will likely hate, but I’m sure will eventually come to appreciate, even if it is a little heavy-handed.
Levi releases another deeply masculine groan, hips giving subtle thrusts in counter to the large hand milking his inked shaft and fat crown. My pussy clenches woefully around nothing when his cock gives pulsing spurts of cum that land on the tightly bunching muscles of his abdomen.
Soon, soulbound, I will tend to your every desire.
As soon as I steal you away.