Chapter 25 #2
Valentin’s reaction is immediate.
Untethered.
His breath catches hard enough to sound almost human. His head drops. One hand hits the edge of the dresser behind him with enough force to make the wood groan.
His scent spikes. Heat. Hunger. Something metallic and electric all at once.
I feel the tremor move through his body under my hand.
Holy fucking— I should stop.
I do not stop.
My fingers drift, tracing the shape with reverent curiosity I pretend is clinical. Every pass makes the mark throb harder, makes his jaw tighten, makes the silver in his eyes burn brighter.
Later, he’ll likely kick himself for this. For letting me touch him. For not recognising what the mark is doing under my hand. Later, if he learns who I am, he’ll probably connect this moment to the truth sitting between us like a hidden blade.
Right now, I’m too mesmerised to think that far. Too stupid to step off this forbidden edge.
My hand slips lower, by accident or not entirely by accident, ghosting over hard muscle. Then I feel the rigid line of his erection through his trousers, and the air changes again.
He goes very still.
‘Do not stray where you should not,’ he says, voice low and dangerous in a whole different way, ‘if you do not wish to provoke a different reaction.’
My hand jerks sideways so fast I nearly laugh from nerves. ‘Right. Got it. Boundaries. Totally professional.’
‘Nothing about this is professional.’
Fair point.
I move around him instead, fingers trailing over his side, over skin that should be cool and isn’t, over old scars that make me pause.
‘How long have you had these?’
‘Too long.’
‘That one?’ I ask, touching the crescent at his ribs.
‘Naples, 1543.’
I blink. ‘That’s annoyingly specific.’
‘Indeed. There was a small matter of a war I was involved in, little hunter.’
Of course.
I reach his side and have to stop for a second because dear Gods. He is all hard muscle and elegant brutality from this angle, broad shoulders tapering to a lean waist, skin marked by battle and history in pale lines that crisscross where vampire healing couldn’t erase everything.
The sight is fascinating and arousing in equal measure. And at this point, I don’t bother pretending otherwise.
He knows.
I know he knows because he forcefully sniffs the air, nostrils flaring.
He can smell my arousal, the shameless wetness between my legs, the pulse pounding blood into my clit.
After what he did to me on his sofa, after I came apart in his hands and mouth and saw actual galaxies, playing coy now would be ridiculous.
So I keep touching him. Keep asking questions because questions are safer than admitting what my body is doing. ‘Does the mark spread all over your body?’
‘Not yet. Chest and back. For now.’ His voice is little more than a deep rumble.
‘Can you feel it before it changes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it wake you up?’
A pause. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Can the Glass track it? Measure it?’
‘It reveals. It does not calculate.’
I trail my fingers over the strong line of his spine, lower, then back up before I drift into another danger zone and need to be warned like a feral cat.
The silence thickens.
So does the heat.
I stop behind him once more, close enough to feel it radiating off his skin, and ask the thing that has been stalking the edges of my mind since he described immortality, blood and binding.
‘Describe the mating ritual to me.’
His head turns slightly, enough that I catch his profile in the Heartshard Glass. See his obscene, beautiful body in the magical mirror.
‘Again?’
‘In more detail. You gave me the Cliff Notes before.’
I feel, rather than see, the shift in him. Awareness. Calculation.
Maybe the same impossible pull that keeps grabbing me every time we circle this subject.
When he speaks, his voice is slow, deliberate, each word placed with care.
‘The time and place do not matter. But it begins and ends with consent,’ he says. ‘Without it, the bond will not take. It cannot be forced to completion by violence alone, regardless of what some would attempt.’
I release a breath I didn’t realise I was holding. ‘Verbal consent?’
A ripple in his jaw. ‘Yes. And physical.’
Consent.
The word should not steady me. Not when I’ve spent six years imagining Valentin Moretti as a locked door, a trap, a mouth at my throat and no way out. But this terrifying, impossible creature keeps giving me lines, rules, bargains.
No fangs. One question. One kiss.
Consent.
It doesn’t make him safe. Gods, it makes him something worse.
It makes him… possible.
Like a key turning in a lock, an idea sparks.
Hungry. Rabid. Impossibly insane. But also suddenly, dangerously clear.
He respected my no-fangs rule. Against every expectation and probably his own instincts, he held that line because I demanded it.
So can I go one better?
Can I sleep with this terrifying, charismatic, Netheris-hot vampire and still not reveal who I am? Can I keep the one thing that matters and give him enough of everything else to survive the closeness without confessing?
Can I—
Valentin spins so fast I barely register the movement.
One second I’m behind him with thoughts spiralling into reckless territory, the next his hand is at my collared throat, firm enough to bring me to the very verge of choking, enough to pin me in place and snap every nerve in my body to attention.
My back hits the bedpost with a sharp thud, and a thoroughly feminist, idiotic part of my brain revels in the fact that he does not treat me like a fragile flower.
He is definitely not a gentleman when he leans in, eyes black-shot silver, mouth a breath from mine.
‘There are consequences to touching me like this, little hunter,’ he says, voice velvet over steel, ‘and you’re about to find out what they are.’