Chapter Forty-Five #2
“I didn’t even know! You knew before me.
You should have told me.” I’d made choices only in self-preservation.
Keeping secrets, planning my escape. Refusing to give in to my feelings for him—even fleeing this night because I’d accidentally used my powers on him.
But he could have told me! Could have told me he knew what I was and that he wasn’t going to kill me.
Before that, I’d thought I was a void, and he’d known otherwise. I’d studied the damn grimoire with no clue it was my birthright. And he’d let me, encouraged me, without ever letting on I had the magic I’d so desperately craved, power I’d been denied.
If I’d known—if he’d told me he knew I was the necromancer and had no plans to hurt me—would I have ever considered allying with Titus? Would I still be alive, a living, breathing witch instead of this?
“Perhaps,” he conceded. “I never meant to scare you.”
“Scare.” I scoffed. Like that single word could encompass what it meant to have lived the past months petrified with fear that someone would learn my true nature and end me.
I threw down my mental shields. Not fully, but enough. Enough to let him experience the crash of terror inside me even now. If I still had a heartbeat, it wouldn’t be racing. It would have stopped moments ago.
I watched it hit him. The sick feeling of an inevitable death closing in, the panic of a trapped animal desperately looking for a way out. The fear I had of him.
“Samara,” he breathed. His jaw softened, tightened, in sequence as my emotions rolled into him. “I’m so sorry.”
I locked the feelings behind my mental walls once again.
“You don’t have to hide it.” He ran a thumb over the tattoo on my wrist, a featherlight touch countering the harsh emotions I felt.
“Give me your fear, your pain. I deserve it. But don’t pretend there isn’t more there.
You’re not just afraid for your life. You’re afraid I wouldn’t want you, wouldn’t choose you, but Samara, I will always choose you. Let me choose you.”
I couldn’t help myself.
I kissed him.
It was an angry, furious kiss, and just like my strike before, Raphael bore it.
He took every scathing demand I made and kissed me back with fervent intensity that made my knees weak all over again.
My pinned hand finally released the blade to the forest floor, and Raphael’s grip shifted, too, lacing his fingers into mine as the kiss changed.
Still intense, but now with desperation.
I was horrifically eager to be a fool, to believe this kiss, to believe his words. To believe that the vampire king could ever be with the necromancer.
“I’m still angry,” I breathed against his lips.
“Samara.” My name was a plea, a prayer, as he kept kissing me. “Be angry. Cut me, hate me, rage at me, just don’t leave. Please don’t leave.”
The king of vampires, begging. Begging me to stay. I lost myself in him for a moment, then another. Each an intoxicating sip of poison.
“We can’t do this,” I finally said. “I know how your kind feels about me—about what I am. I was always planning to go. I still have to.”
He kissed me again, softly against my lips this time. “You can go, Samara. I won’t stop you. I could never truly make myself stop you.”
Something in me tightened at the words.
“But you don’t have to,” he continued, still pressing kisses against my jaw. “You have a place with me. You can choose to stay. Don’t you want that?”
It was a sweet, impossible offer. “Wanting isn’t enough.” It was never enough.
“But what if it was?” His other hand had moved now to my chest, kneading, as if he could soothe the frantic energy still inside me, chasing it away with pleasure. He tugged at my lip. “What if you asked me to lay the world at your feet, and that was enough for me to do it?”
“I don’t want the world.” I raised my hand to his face, tracing the dried track of blood with my fingers.
“I just want you.” This time, when I dropped my mental shields, I let us both feel how much that was true.
How much I wanted to be any other two people who weren’t us, who could just want and want and have.
“But I can’t have you. I can’t stay. You know they’d never tolerate this.
” I wasn’t even sure who I meant. His subjects? The other rulers? The gods themselves?
“Fuck them all,” Raphael growled, kissing again. “No one else matters.”
A feeling sliced through me, feral and needing. I thought I’d known hunger, thirst before. But nothing like this. This was more than animal hunger—it was thirst and desire and need all rolled together into an almost blistering intensity. My knees buckled, only Raphael’s grip holding me up.
“Shit,” he hissed against me.
The feeling disappeared, an icy wall slamming down between us.
I’d never noticed it, never let myself sense whatever else this bond had between us. But now that I had, I wondered how I’d ever missed it.
“I truly can sense you.” I sounded dazed to my own ears. His emotions had taken me off balance.
“I apologize. Ignore that.” His voice was tight, his grip still on my body, letting me recover.
Ignore it? “Raphael, you’re starving.” The depth of his hunger was staggering. “How is it so terrible? Don’t you drink?”
“When the need calls for it.”
“But it doesn’t truly soothe you. Just like regular blood doesn’t slake mine?” I guessed.
I could read the confirmation in his silence.
“You tell me to let down my walls, but you keep yours up. Just like you wanted me to confide in you, but you never told me you knew I was the necromancer.” Our sins were mirrors. “What if we both tried, just once, to be open with our feelings?”
He wavered, then steeled again. “I’ve had practice bearing my feelings. I’ve no wish to subject you to them.”
“And I’ve no wish for you to hide your truths from me, Raphael. This is part of them. Part of you.”
“The truth?” His laugh was soft and dark. “The truth is, if you had a clue how much I wanted your blood, you would run screaming from this forest even faster than before. How can you ask me to chase you away when I’ve only just caught you?”
“I let you catch me,” I told him to an arched brow. Well, yes, he probably would’ve gotten me eventually, but I’d chosen to face him head-on. We could face this together. “If you ask me to choose you, then let me choose even the parts you want to hide, just as you do me.”
I thought he would argue again, but instead… I felt it.
It wasn’t like before, a sharp, staggering blow.
This was like wading into an ocean, the hunger slowly lapping at my feet, then working up my ankles, through my very bones until it surrounded me.
I remained standing, but my world shrank to him and this feeling.
A hunger so vast it was a living thing, a universe that pulsed and pounded.
My fangs ached, my grip tightening against him.
“Gods, Raphael.” It was all I could say.
His eyes burned like two bright coals. “I would starve for a thousand more years if you stayed by my side. Compared to the thought of losing you, there’s no choice.”
This male. The tender feeling in my chest was all my own. “Drink from me.”
His face hardened. “I don’t want a pity bite.”
“It’s not pity I feel. Can’t you tell?” No, the raw emotion I let across the bond was something so much stronger. Something I couldn’t yet voice.
His gaze flicked to my neck and back. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t remember it hurting, do you?” Still he held back.
To resist now, he had more self-control than I could fathom.
Even knowing it wasn’t my hunger, knowing I’d fed just earlier today, I wanted to slam my fangs into his neck.
“I asked you to bite me last night too. Raphael, I want this. You told me you wouldn’t take my blood until I craved it?
I do.” The memories of the first bite were still vivid in my mind. “Believe me. I can’t lie.”
He brushed his thumb over my neck, the spot where his fangs would sink in. “Maybe it’s not your desire I don’t trust, but my own. My ability to stop.”
“Then let this be the time I trust you.” Perhaps it was insanity to say that, when I could feel just how much of a beast the hunger was inside him.
He could end me in a moment. At once, memories of him holding countertops and walls and bedposts, all to physically keep the beast in check, ran through me.
When he had it leashed so tenuously, taunting it with something it thrashed for desperately against its chains could be a lethal mistake.
When I looked past my fear—and the years of prejudice that led me astray—there was a deep knowing in me that Raphael was the only one I could truly trust. For the first time, I wasn’t frantic, but steady.
He read it on my face. He read it in the bond I no longer hid from. And when I saw the decision on his face, I tilted my head to the side, in invitation.
Raphael’s grip shifted. He moved his hand from mine to caress my hair, his other hand around my waist. Blistering need radiated from him. Instead of scaring me, it just made me arch for him.
He bent his head over my exposed throat, his exhale hot against my cool skin. Almost hesitant. No, not hesitating. Restraining himself. A war raged inside him.
Slowly, his fangs slid against my skin.
Just like before, there was the slightest sting of pain as the skin broke, barely more than a needle prick.
Sensation immediately bloomed across my skin, a song of desire and hot need.
He drew with more restraint than I ever could have managed in his state.
I moaned at the contact, curling my arms around his shoulders.
In addition to my pleasure, Raphael’s radiated inside me.
The rebound of his own was nearly as potent as mine, and I whimpered.
His grip tightened to the edge of pain. Caught. The monster had caught me.
And I wanted him to.
We slid down to our knees, him holding me while I braced against him. Warm pleasure pooled inside me as I ached.
“Touch me,” I moaned.