73
Mornon
“Stop thinking of me so intensely,” I said, my delivery flat, as I appeared in the center of the chamber, hands clasped behind my back. “It’s impossible for me to stay away from you if you do. And it’s quite annoying,” I added as she leaped off the mattress in a feline sprint.
I lingered with my gaze on the unmade bed, the sheets still stained with our arousal fluids and the blood from the elf’s virginity.
The bed where I had slept for the first time since I had devoted my existence to the dark arts, welcoming evil into myself.
I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Still couldn’t understand how sleep had found me. How I had given in to it so naturally.
Nauriel stared at me with a look so murderous it bordered on madness. She seemed to want to tear my face off with her nails like a beast, almost as if she couldn’t bear the sight of it.
Her eyes darted to the door, and for a moment, I thought she would bolt for it, calling for help at the top of her lungs. Instead, she suppressed the instinct to reveal my presence.
Because she wanted to be alone with me.
“I saw your body turn to ashes before my eyes,” she said, her voice hoarse from crying and shouting, almost animal-like.
I slightly canted my head to the side and looked at her from head to toe, admiring the web of darkness that branched through her body, unchallenged. “My magic makes me immortal.”
But unfortunately, it still had taken me over a hundred years to regain my human form.
At that revelation, Nauriel’s heartbeat quickened, and her eyes widened in shock. “Why did you never try to take the Crystal back all these centuries?”
That question struck an annoyingly raw nerve.
“Because it’s not the Crystal I’ve been thinking about for all these centuries,” I replied stiffly.
“And you can’t understand how much it irritated me.
” I couldn’t help but look her up and down again, recalling what it was like to have her cling to me as I thrusted myself into her with such force to punish her.
To punish myself for the immoderate way I wanted her. “How I tried to resist you.”
However, my mind had done nothing but fixate on a single image: the golden-haired, blue-eyed elf trying to fight me in my unholy darkness like a white, blazing star.
Over and over and over again.
Until I’d managed to regain control over my elven side, channeling my wicked rage against the Spirits and my overwhelming need to claim that female, and focusing on developing a plan to reach her.
To make her the instrument with which to get the Crystal back.
“But in the end, you came to me,” Nauriel said, taking a tiny step forward.
I wore a small, smug smile. She wasn’t capable of staying away from me, even though she knew who I really was. She was so mine.
“In the end,” I agreed in a subtly cunning tone.
Once every pawn had positioned itself exactly as I wanted, I’d started my game.
The elf began putting the pieces together, her face growing more distressed. “It was you,” she whispered in disbelief. “You caused the Lake Caran dam to collapse.”
“The first move on my board,” I confirmed.
Her brows drew together in barely contained anger. “What else?”
“ Everything, Nauriel,” I said in a sinister and emphatic and brimming-with-pride tone. I took a step toward her. “I invoked the storm to prompt you to protect me.” Another step. “Commanded the tides to get us to the archipelago.”
Nauriel didn’t move, her gaze dominated by mine. “You wanted to stay there. With me,” she shot back in a breathless rage.
I shortened the distance between us a bit more. “One of my many lies to get you closer.”
A mask of wrath and shame settled on her face. “So even our capture by pirates was your doing?”
The scent of her smooth skin forced its way into my nostrils, challenging my self-control. “I had to take you beyond the borders of the Lands of the East.”
Her memory recalled my hands running over her body in the tub of the thermal baths. “So that I didn’t feel what you had in mind to do to me.”
“So that you were vulnerable,” I corrected her, loading the last word with perfidy.
I began to circle her, staying so close that I kept brushing against her.
“So that I was your only point of reference in a world you didn’t understand.
” I stopped behind her; she was so small compared to me that I could shatter her skull with one hand.
“So that you had the illusion that we were equal.” She flinched as I ran my black fingers along the curve of her slender neck and then into her silky hair at her nape.
“Oh, and how you let yourself be fooled by everything that was happening around you at my hands, Nauriel.” I slightly pulled her hair, making her shiver as I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “By everything you were told . . .”
I calmly withdrew my hand and repositioned myself before her, even more composed, as her brain connected the dots.
“Roxior,” she gasped, appalled. “When he offered me a life in Rubra with you . . . Those weren’t his words.” She pursed her lips in indignation. “They were yours.”
I grinned cruelly at the memory of how she had truly considered starting a family with me in the Red City. “Even your unjustified jealousy only increased my power over you.”
“What do you mean, unjustified?” she hissed.
“We are mates, Nauriel. Do you really think I can fuck anyone else besides you?” My eyes were drawn to the front slit I had created on her skirt, and my hand began to itch at the urge to slide between her thighs.
“When a Master or Mistress asked of me, I just had to cast a spell to convince them they had me in their bed. Exactly what I’ve done with the wives of the various Kings of Men I’ve played over the past nine centuries, making them believe they were pregnant and raising their child until I decided to perish as ruler, take the heir to the throne’s form, and start all over again. ”
Nauriel was so bewildered that her breathing grew uneven.
“You’ve manipulated everything from the beginning.
You’ve manipulated me,” she said, horror-stricken, stepping back as her mind replayed every moment, even by merely stroking her finger with mine, I had affected her actions and choices.
“Every feeling of mine, every emotion of mine . . .”
“And all the while,” I replied, my voice steeped in malice, following her so I would not let her put distance between us, “you looked at me as if I were your god and believed me.”
“I trusted you,” she growled, her voice trembling with all her excruciating suffering. “And you betrayed me.”
On impulse, I grabbed her jaw with one hand. “I destroyed you.”
Just like I was.
Angered by that unexpected and unwelcome thought, I focused on the elf’s mouth, tracing her lower lip with my thumb as I remembered how much she’d loved it when I sucked it between my teeth.
“And only I can put back together every single piece I’ve taken,” I added in a whisper brimming with dark longing.
I let her slap my hand away with a disgusted face. “Why deceive me? Why not kidnap me and force me to give you what you want?”
“Oh, I could have.” I looked down at her with a mocking half-smile. “But watching you slowly fall in love with me was really fun.” My gaze roamed over her chest, which was rising and falling at an ever-faster rhythm. “I don’t think torturing you would have given me the same pleasure.”
Her face crumpled with rage. “Then let me tell you one thing . . .”
I knew what she was about to do even before the idea had fully taken shape in her mind, but I didn’t bother stopping her.
“You will regret not choosing to torture me,” she declared in a deadly tone.
Then, using her elven speed, she rushed to the desk against the wall and brandished the stiletto over a pile of blank scrolls. A heartbeat later, the cold blade was at my jugular.
Still, the skin did not tear.
Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl, her arm shaking. “Stop using your power and face me like a true warrior!”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, visibly surprised.
I probed the desperation sailing full sail in her eyes.
“It’s you who can’t kill me.” She started to shake her head, so I pressed on, my tone thick with malice.
“And you know why? Because you are mine.” My roots had dug too deep for her to pull them out with her hatred.
“And apparently,” I added with a smile both perverse and ecstatic, “so is your will.”
Shocked and nauseated, the elf stared at the stiletto pressing against my throat, not a single microscopic vermilion drop dripping.
Little by little, as tears rolled down her cheeks, fury seized her.
Lightning-fast, she switched the hand holding the weapon and, with a desperate cry, aimed it at my heart.
Unimpressed, I raised one hand to block the thin blade, which pierced through bone, flesh, ligaments, and nerves.
Panting, Nauriel looked at my hand impaled on the blood-covered stiletto and at my fingers, which were closed around the short crossguard and touched the ones with which she was wrapping the hilt.
With a blank face, I began to push against the crossguard to make her recoil. The elf attempted to resist, even using her other hand to aid herself as she struggled fruitlessly to dig in her heels.
I guided her backward until the back of her legs hit the furniture with the mirror. Nauriel quickly sat on the top, cluttered with brushes, clasps, and other trinkets, to avoid being crushed against the cabinet by my body and to keep her legs free to move.
I gripped the wrist of her stiletto-wielding hand, squeezing until she groaned. Then, slowly, I began to withdraw my skewered hand.
She stared in shock at the blade sliding with a viscous noise through my fresh flesh without me reacting in the slightest, staining itself even more with thick, red liquid.