44 #2
I make it back to my room. Somehow. Somehow, I manage without falling headfirst into the meadow, staying there until someone finds me in the morning.
Darkness has long fallen, the stars are out, and the moon sheds her glittering, silvery light. Everything is untouched, although I had been so certain that, this time, I’d killed everything and everyone.
But Caryan, again, contained whatever devastating force slept within me now.
The campus awaits me with fresh soup and some mint tea when I enter.
Aris is still out and probably would be until late at night.
I know he is as far away as possible. Probably hunting at the border close to Caryan’s kingdom.
Far enough so our bond would be as mute as possible.
I’m glad he followed my instruction. Feeling my emotions, even if only a shard, would have made him feral.
I leave the light out, the moonlight shining in more than enough for me to see as I walk into the room. After that pristine darkness, everything seems bright.
I eat out of sheer instinct, sipping the soup straight out of the bowl, the broth slowly bringing me back to life. When I’m done, I mumble a quiet thank you to the house.
A single candle flickers to light in the bathroom, and I hear the bath running. I shrug off my clothes, and they glide down my body like shed skin. I leave them where I dropped them and pad barefoot into the bathroom. I brush my teeth and then sink into the hot water.
Only then do I allow myself to fall apart. It is so much like back at Lyrian’s, where I only ever cried in the shower. Or while I was running, the omnipresent rain a good disguise.
I stay until I can no longer bear it. Then I climb out. Loose, slate-gray, silken trousers and an oversized shirt await me already. I put them on and walk back outside.
And stop dead.
How long has he been sitting here? Watching me? Did he see me naked? Of course he did.
In one powerful movement, Caryan rises from the chair where he’s been sitting in the dark. I tear my gaze away from him and walk over to the nightstand, where my tea is still waiting. I want to keep the bed between me and him. I want to hide.
He has changed his outfit. Changed his black, scaled battle suit and boots to loose linen trousers and a simple black shirt. His wings are gone.
He moves silently over the floor, his bare feet making no sound at all as he walks.
I retreat until I feel the wall in my back.
“You’ve been crying,” he states, his voice deep, low.
I turn my head to the side. I no longer have it in me to fight. Not after he shredded every last bit of my will, once again tore down all the walls of my defenses, leaving me utterly bare.
“You are…still crying,” he observes, as another treacherous tear runs down my cheek. A dark, very foolish part of me remembers that he once said I’m even more beautiful when I cry.
I don’t want him to see me like this. But I can’t stop, just as with my magic before. More tears well in my eyes, and I hate myself for it.
I lift my hands to my face to hide myself from him.
“Don’t,” he murmurs. There is nothing I can do when he grabs my wrists and pries my hands away, holding me like a vise. Exposing me.
Before I know what happens he leans in, his teeth far too close to my throat.
I think that he will bite me. Drink me.
Take what’s left of me.
I flinch as I feel his tongue running over the delicate skin right under my eyes instead. First left. Then right. Licking away my tears. His tongue slides down, and I hold my breath as it grazes the area just above my upper lip.
He has his eyes closed but opens them now. And finds me staring at him. At the twilight mauve of his eyelids. His absurdly long lashes. His eyes the color of the sea now, waltzing under a star-struck night sky.
He lets them close again, as if in concession.
I still dare to breathe as he leans in further, his tongue running along my jaw and down my neck. I hate how my heartbeat flutters like a trapped bird. How I arch my neck. How he’s still holding my wrists as he gently pushes me toward the bed behind me.
How I let him.
My heart races in my chest, but for an entirely different reason. He is over me, his hard body pushing me down. He is still holding my wrists over my head as he kisses my collarbone. The hollow where it meets my throat.
I shiver. His gaze flicks to my eyes when he notices. He shifts over me, holding both of my wrists with one hand now. His magic runs along my skin, soft like silk, so different from before. He is terrifyingly gentle.
And then his face is directly over mine, his eyes still on me. The irises still blue, but darker. Again streaked with molten gold leaking in.
So beautiful.
I want to turn away, but he holds my face, his thumb just below my lower lip. I feel him gently pushing against my mental walls. Like someone leaning against a door.
“Let me,” he murmurs, his voice scraping over me, my restless skin, his magic twining around my bare arms and ankles. “Let me in.”
A request. Yet.
Heat mixed with a shiver of cold runs through my whole body until I’m trembling more than before. But I can feel his leashed fury through the bond, a flame burning somewhere deep below the ocean of darkness and emptiness in him I’d once waded through. Almost drowned in.
His hand wanders down to my throat, and I wonder what he would do if I don’t obey. Again, I almost flinch when he presses a kiss to my fluttering pulse, as if he wants to show me that he can stop it anytime.
“Let me,” he says again, his hand traveling down my body. To my hips. Pushing them down.
Again, I arch against him. I close my eyes as my shirt shifts, and he presses a kiss to my naked shoulder.
“Let me, Melody.” His voice is colder. An order. No room for negotiation. I know he’s running out of patience with me.
And in a heartbeat, I’m suddenly too aware of him. Of what he is. Who he is. What he just did to me. What he did to me before.
What he is capable of doing without so much as blinking. I’ve seen it. How he maimed. Tortured. Killed. As easily as breathing.
I open the shields between our souls, and it’s too much.
Like a deluge, washing into an ocean, pouring out in a torrent.
All my emotions flood wildly into a sea of blackness, floating lost like driftwood.
His face hardens, but his touch stays gentle as he strokes my jaw, his thumb flicking over my lips.
My breath hitches as he kisses my throat again…then his teeth sink into me, so careful that I barely feel them penetrating my skin.
I hate how I close my eyes as he lets out a low sound, half growl, half sigh. A raw sound, traveling down my belly and hips, pooling there.
It takes everything not to dig my nails into his chest. Not to spread my legs and arch against him even further, desperate for friction between us. The sensation is too much. Having the bond open while he’s inside me—
“Please stop,” I whisper almost soundlessly.
I think he’ll just ignore me, but he doesn’t. He pulls back, his eyes gleaming with my blood and…hunger of an entirely different kind. A second before it vanishes and his face turns cruel and cold again.
“I thought you’d changed,” he murmurs to himself, the words edged with mockery. “But here you are, still the same. The same frightened girl, however tough you look on the outside.”
His eyes rove over my face, as if he wants to take in every inch of me. Searching for something. I want to know what he saw there, in my blood. But I also don’t want to see whatever images flare up in his mind like matches. Scraps and scenes from my life, from my memory…as I saw scenes of his once.
He snarls suddenly—an inhuman sound. His hand goes to my collarbone, shoving my shirt down and exposing it.
Suddenly, I know what he glimpsed. Meanara healed my shattered bone, but because of my half-human blood, I don’t heal as fast, and a blue bruise remained as proof.
Caryan’s hands goes to my belly, pushing my shirt up to my ribs, where similar bruises bloom. His gaze turns feral.
This time, I yank up the walls to our bond, at least halfway, because his anger threatens to burn me like a wildfire.
“You could have told me Kyrith hurts you,” he seethes, teeth clenched, snapping right in my face.
“ You sent him.”
“I sent him to train you,” he growls right into me. “I never would have allowed him to touch you. You should have called me.”
My stomach twists. I know it should make no difference, but for some absurd, irrational reason it does—that Caryan didn’t know what Kyrith did. His hand goes to my throat, the skin already healed there. But the gesture is enough to make me meet his gaze.
I could have used that bond to call him. He would have answered. Would have come. I don’t know why this matters. It shouldn’t. I know it shouldn’t.
“Would it have made a difference?” I whisper. It is a tired question, an evasive one. What I really wanted to say is— would it? Wouldn’t you have hurt me if I had? Would things really have turned out differently between us?
But I have no fire left in me. No courage.
I know he can read it in my face. In my eyes. His irises flicker. The crimson bleeds into a darker shade, like the sky of the apocalypse. I briefly regret what I said, dread what he will do, a flash of his fury lashing through me.
But one moment he’s over me, and the next, he’s standing with his back to me.
He moved so fast I couldn’t detect it.
I only feel the cold where his body has set mine free.
I turn on my side, watching his powerful back until he turns and sits in the chair opposite me.
His hands rest on its armrests in a regal fashion, his long fingers splayed.
His eyes, scrutinize me, the blue still there.
The blue that tells me every time he is in a rare, mild mood.
I feel it over our bond too. When he is like this, he is almost…
almost like a normal fae. Not human —because no fae would ever be human—but not so… inhuman either.