Written in the Stars #2
“His name was Cassiel,” Draco said. “He was brave in the way of someone who had thought it through and decided that fear was less useful than action. He was infuriating. He did not kneel to me, which was unusual at the time. He looked at me like the word monster was not the only word that applied.” He stopped.
The city glowed below us. “I gave him the necklace the night before a battle because I wanted him to carry a piece of me with him.”
“Did it?”
“No. He died wearing it.”
I was very quiet.
“Then you walked into my house with his necklace around your throat.”
“I've been having these dreams for years. Fields. Smoke. A man I can never—” I pressed my fingers to the necklace. “I could never see the face.”
Draco turned to look at me, and the look on his face was the most unprotected expression I had ever seen on him.
“I don't know what you are. I do not want to tell you a slight truth that ties you to a dead man's story without your consent.” He held my eyes. “But I know that the pull between us has been getting worse since the night you arrived. I know it doubled when you put the necklace on.”
I was aware that the correct response to being told you might be the reincarnation of a dead man's lost lover was to take several large steps backward and ask for significantly more information before doing anything irreversible.
I was also aware that Draco was looking at me like a man who had stopped expecting to be looked back at and had not yet rebuilt the wall he used when he remembered why.
That’s when I decided to close the distance and kissed him.
He did not move back. His breath came out slow through his nose and his hand came up to the side of my face, and I felt the restraint in it.
I kissed him harder and got my hand into the front of his coat because I needed something to hold onto, and his mouth opened against mine and the restraint came apart.
He walked me backward until the railing caught at my lower back and then his weight was against me and I pulled him in by the lapels because the half-inch of air between our chests was suddenly intolerable.
His thigh pressed between mine and I felt how hard he was against my hip and made a sound against his mouth that I had absolutely no intention of making.
His hands moved. He pulled me flush against him and the grind that followed was slow and devastating and performed with the same controlled attention he brought to everything, which was somehow worse than if he'd been frantic about it.
“Fuck,” I said, into the side of his jaw.
His answer was to do it again, slower, his grip on my hips holding me exactly where he wanted me, and my head went back against the cold air and my hands fisted in his coat and I stopped pretending I was in any way managing this situation.
I got my hand between us and found his cock through the fabric and I felt him go still against me.
His mouth found my neck and his hips rolled forward and my grip tightened and we stopped being two people on a balcony making reasonable decisions.
His hand slid down the front of my trousers, and I sucked in a breath.
I pushed into his palm before I could think better of it.
His mouth curved against my throat. “There you are.”
Like he had been waiting for me to admit it.
“Don’t sound so smug,” I said, but my voice had gone thin.
“I am being very restrained.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Yes.” His teeth grazed the place below my ear, and my knees almost forgot their purpose. “And yet.”
My hands went into his hair, then to the back of his neck and his hand slowed.
He lifted his head enough to look at me.
“Stubborn,” he murmured.
“Controlling.”
“Alive.”
That shut me up.
“You scared me,” he said.
The words hit harder than his hand.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
The bloodstone pulsed between us.
I felt it through my chest first, then through him, a slow answering heat that made his breath catch against my skin. For a second, neither of us moved.
Then his grip tightened.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
“Do not hide from me now.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“You are always hiding.”
I would have argued, but his hand moved again, and the argument left me in pieces. My forehead dropped to his shoulder. His name slipped out of me once, rough and helpless, and I felt him go still around it.
“Again,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Nico.”
There was command in it. Worse, there was want.
I pressed my face to his throat and gave him the only answer I had left.
“Draco.”
That was enough.
I came against his hand with his name in my mouth and his body holding mine against the cold stone, three floors above the ballroom, with the city burning gold around us and no room left in me for embarrassment.
He followed less than a minute behind, shuddering once, controlled even in that, his forehead dropping to mine and his breath coming out ragged in a way that was deeply satisfying.
We stood against the balcony railing breathing each other's air, wrecked in expensive suits, and the night sat around us quiet and cold and unbothered.
My hand was still twisted in his coat.
For the first time since I had signed my name in blood, I did not feel like a debt.
Then his phone rang.
We both went still.
Draco let out one slow breath, reached into his coat, and pulled the phone free. He checked the screen.
His expression changed.
He put the call on speaker, but he did not step away. His forehead stayed close to mine, his body still blocking out the cold.
“Amara.” His voice was not quite steady.
“There is a situation and you need to be here.”
He was already moving. The mask went back onto his face between one breath and the next and he offered me his arm and I took it and we went back through the glass doors into the corridor's warmth.
The music had stopped.
The ballroom guests had gathered at the edge of the corridor. Mateo and Rowan had pushed them back from the entrance, forming a perimeter around them. Amara stood inside the perimeter and looked at Draco when we reached her.
Then I saw the body.
He was lying on the marble floor of the corridor, arranged with too much care for it to have been an accident. His back was flat against the stone. His hands rested at his sides. A mask had been placed over his face, pale and smooth and wrong in the cold light from the sconces.
It was not his mask.
He was young, or he had been young before death had taken the shape out of him. He was a vampire. I knew it by the stillness of him, by the way his body seemed less dead than emptied, as if whatever had made him present in the room had been pulled out all at once.
There was no blood on the marble.
That was the first wrong thing.
The second was the circle around him. A ring of sigils had been burned into the floor, each mark thin and black and precise.
They were not decoration. Even I could tell that.
The air above them had a scorched, bitter smell, and the stone around the body looked slightly warped, as if the corridor itself had flinched.
Amara stood beside the body with her face carefully still. She held a folded card between two fingers and offered it to Draco without a word.
He took it.
He read it.
Nothing in his expression changed, but the room seemed to understand anyway. Mateo went still. Rowan’s gaze moved once to the far end of the corridor. Amara lowered her hand.
I looked at the card before Draco could fold it closed.
YOU ARE NEXT.