Chapter 18
VALENTIN
My first, deeply vexing instinct is to cover it.
As if I, a centuries-old being with more power in my little finger than this maddeningly sexy human will ever wield in her lifetime, need to hide.
From her.
I wrench my thoughts from the memory of her fighting the feeding thrall. Of how fiercely she pushed through it. How, captivated, I lost myself enough to let slip a word I rarely use for lesser beings.
Extraordinary.
The word pulses through me again, almost as powerfully as the mark throbbing beneath my skin.
I need not look down to feel the faint edge of it revealed where my shirt has shifted, the thing I have kept buried beneath cloth and ruthless discipline.
A flaw I have battled with centuries of indifference, despite knowing concealment would not make it less real, less insistent, less capable of betraying me.
And now it has.
At the worst possible moment.
My hand nearly rises of its own accord, protective and possessive, an ancient reflex to shield what cannot be explained without surrendering power.
I do not allow it.
I pivot instead, a small shift of my shoulders that breaks her line of sight without the panic of being caught out. I angle my body so my open collar is no longer an invitation for her curious gaze, so the question hangs unanswered.
If I remain composed, she will not realise how close she has come to pulling a thread that might unravel everything.
But she has already pulled it.
My jaw clenches tight enough to turn bone to dust.
She used neither blade nor cunning nor the brutal competence she wears like armour.
She used her mouth.
Her moans.
The kiss still lingers, etched hard on my senses. The pressure of her lips. The way she tasted of defiance and something dangerously clean beneath it. Something that should not belong in a woman trained to hunt creatures like me.
I have kissed countless women.
Not once did it do this… cut through my control with such quiet violence.
In spite of her wrong scent. Or perhaps because of it.
Fuck no.
Nothing about this is right.
I ended it because I had to. Because for one vicious moment, the temptation to take more stopped being temptation and became certainty in my blood.
My body is still paying for it.
Arousal is too civilised a word for the pressure coiling in me.
Every predatory instinct urges me to close the space between us, to taste her until her clever mouth forgets how to bargain and learns how to plead.
To part those creamy thighs and drive my aching cock into her until the sound of her defiance becomes something far more satisfying.
It is an ugly vulnerability. One I have always considered beneath me.
And yet here I stand, struggling not to watch her tongue slip over her lips, that absent-minded intimacy striking my nerves like a command.
I should not be here.
The thought arrives belatedly, a reprimand from the part of me that still remembers purpose, duty, the centuries of discipline built on blood and consequence.
I should be in my city, in my Tower, surrounded by my Twelve, directing the hunt that has consumed too many nights and too much patience.
Lyra Hannigan.
My missing piece. My fated mate. The woman who should be my hunger, my singular pursuit, my inevitable claim.
And yet the moment Malachi told me where Eira Cross had fled, I moved.
I could have sent the Twelve.
Should have sent the Twelve.
Instead, I used Aaron, the only one of them gifted with transposition, and had him deliver me to South Carolina before reason could be restored.
And every second I scoured the city, moving through streets, rooftops and shadows with a predator’s patience that felt nothing like patience without her scent, was a prickle beneath my skin.
Then I caught it.
Her wrong scent.
Threaded through the air like a blade sliding beneath ribs.
My body reacted before my mind had fully processed it, hunger and fury and something dangerously close to relief colliding in a single brutal pulse. I followed it to this cottage, past her surprisingly robust wards, to her defiant eyes and clever mouth.
A mouth now branded into my memory.
I am bewildered by myself.
Worse, I am aware of the betrayal lodged beneath that bewilderment.
Not betrayal of a lover or an oath, but betrayal of the ghost occupying my blood.
Lyra should be my focus. Instead, I have crossed state lines for a hunter who smells wrong, bargained for a kiss like a mortal man with no power, and exposed the one thing I cannot afford anyone to see.
What in Netheris am I thinking?
I am not… at least not with the correct head.
When Eira’s gaze returns to my throat, searching again, I feel the echo of her question like a hook beneath my skin.
The mark is not for her.
Not for any mortal to interpret.
It is a symbol of something she does not understand.
And something I cannot allow her to know.
‘I asked you a question,’ her husky voice pushes, and the sound of it does something deeply inconvenient to me.
‘One I will not be answering,’ I reply, and my tone is steadier than I deserve. ‘Unless that is the one at the top of your mountain-high list?’
It is a risky bluff.
At this rate, I am turning as reckless as my bounty hunter, tossing challenges back at her as if we are equals in a game rather than predator and prey, sovereign and intruder.
But the centuries-old instincts that have served me well, telling me when to redirect, to offer a choice that is not truly a choice, move through me now, sharpening my calm even as my body screams for contact.
Her eyes narrow and, for a moment, I think she might take it, might burn her single question on something petty and demand to know the nature of my mark simply because she can, because she refuses to leave curiosity unindulged.
Then she shakes her head slowly, and something like respect stirs unpleasantly in me.
No. It seems she will not waste her question on things she does not know will rock the very foundations of her existence should she poke that particular wound.
She licks her lips again, and I stifle a roar, forcing my control to hold. Ruthlessly ignoring the pre-cum leaking from my shaft as I force myself not to finish what I started. Keep going until she’s a mindless puddle of spent lust in my arms.
She looks me straight in the eye, and there’s a clarity to her that lands like a strike.
‘Why are you so desperate to find Lyra Hannigan?’