65 #2
He’s suddenly furious. As if he has any right.
“Not too bad for me? Do you know what it is like to be shackled to a half-mortal? Do you know how it is to be shackled to a creature? You are a weakness. Something I have to protect because the bond forces me to. I can’t stand you hurting because it hurts me too.
With war coming, do you know what happens if anyone finds out what you and I are?
You will not only be hunted because of your talents and your heritage, Melody.
You will be hunted because you are the one thing that could bring me to my knees. ”
He breathes heavily, fangs bared, his words so cruel it feels like they’re flaying the skin from my bones.
“You don’t want me—” I breathe, and those stupid, fucked-up human tears run down my cheeks again.
I can’t hold them back. And that might be the most humiliating thing ever.
I just stand there, shivering, wrapping my arms around myself so as not to shatter.
Because I feel that, if I don’t hold on to myself, I will break entirely from what he just said.
He reaches out a hand, but I snarl so viciously I almost sound like a fae, baring my teeth at him like an animal. Gods, if I were a wolf, I would bite his hand off and throw it to his feet.
Suddenly, I wish that I could be a wolf. Could lose myself in my instincts and escape my flesh and mind for a while. Because sometimes it feels like a prison. My body like a cage. So similar to the one Lyrian locked me in so many times. A cell. Maybe I really did become what he made me.
A monstrosity.
“Did you even listen to the last two minutes of your own self-centered monologue, or did you just let your mouth run?” I spit. “Because it sure as hells sounded like that to me. All that poor Caryan self-pity—being shackled to something as offensively average as me.”
His pupils flare in warning.
Fuck him.
Rage is all I have left to hold onto. Without it, I’ll break.
This man—this creature my soul is bound to—just told me he loathes me.
He snarls, but reins himself in before he snaps. “As I said, I might hate the bond. Not you .” His jaw tightens. “I hate what it represents. Angels are not meant to belong to anyone. We are not creatures who are bound.”
“So how did it happen then?” I ask coldly. “That terrible affliction fate so cruelly and unfairly bestowed on you, oh glorious, winged, angelic highness. Enlighten me.”
“A cruel joke played by fate,” he growls.
His wings flare wide at my mockery, shadows thickening around him, gathering like a storm about to break. For a heartbeat, I think he might truly discipline me.
Then he pulls them back. Only for me. Because he knows I hate the dark.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Melody,” he says at last. The admission sounds torn out of him. “I’ve never felt this drawn to anyone. At first…yes, I planned to claim you. But then I realized—”
He swallows. “When I brought you to my kingdom, you weren’t that child anymore.
You didn’t recognize me. And you’d changed so much I barely recognized you.
But then I got to know you.” His voice roughens.
“And I understood that the life I imagined for you isn’t what you want.
It would become a prison. You would feel shackled to me. ”
His jaw tightens. “And believe me—it killed something inside me to see that. It still does.”
For a moment, his face is stripped bare. Raw. Vulnerable in a way I’ve never seen before.
The fury is gone.
He comes for me, and this time, I let him.
I let him cage my chin. Let him grab my belly, fingers gripping my ribs as if I’m the only solid thing in his collapsing world.
His eyes are a mixture of silver and black and blue, all three colors running like streaks through his irises.
The fingers of his other hand splay over my cheek.
“My instinct is to claim you. To take you. To own you. Again and again and again. To make you mine. To kill everyone and everything that so much as looks at you twice.”
I shudder when his thumb grazes my bottom lip. Shudder at his words, at the truth I see in his face. I know he’s one step away from doing exactly that—from claiming me.
Instinct takes over.
I go deathly still, breath caught, like prey pretending not to exist.
Because if he decided to do that, to give in to that strange pull of the bond, I could do nothing against it. He would be cruel with me, the way he was once when he forged his magic with mine. And I might survive that only because he’s an angel and I’m not even a full fae.
But when he finally drops his hand and takes a step back from me, I know that he’s himself again and not acting on the insane bond that’s driving us together.
His gaze sweeps the woods, and the lilac trees catch in his eyes, turning his irises the deep, hazy shade of twilight. “On that mountaintop, Melody, where you almost died…I had to give you my blood so you could survive. But, in doing so, I forged that bond between us. I made this mistake.”
I swallow hard, no longer knowing what to feel with his sudden absence.
With what he almost did just now. And didn’t do.
What to do with the regret in his voice.
No longer knowing whether I can still feel at all after what he did to me.
I know that mating bonds get forged by both parties drinking each other’s blood.
He drank mine before because he’s that sort of a vampire. But in giving me his….
Now it all makes sense. Since then, I crave his nearness all the more—crave him a hundredfold, like something starving.
“When you were gone, Melody—” His voice breaks off again. “When you went to the human world, you…hells. I thought you would die.”
“Then you would have been rid of the bond,” I say quietly. Our eyes meet. “Why not just kill me?” Abyss, I’ve lain awake at night wondering about that more times than I can count. My mother almost killed him. My magic and talents pose a threat to him.
“Do not say that,” he growls in a warning, suddenly looking more like a wild beast than a man.
“No. Why not? Really. There’s even a prophecy out there that suggests I’m gonna kill you one day. Why not just solve that problem? Nip it in the bud.”
Maybe it’s the stupidest thing to say to a wild creature like him, alone in the woods. But I’m hurting so much that the thought of dying at his hands almost feels like relief.
“Just get it over with. I mean, face it, I’m already aging. I’m not full fae. I’m gonna die in the blink of an eye. Maybe I’m not worth the trouble. You’re gonna lose me anyway. What are sixty or eighty years to you?”
Hells, I have no clue what my lifespan will be, but, to be fair, I’ve already spotted a gray hair on my head, so I can guess that I’m not going to reach a thousand years like a high elf.
I’ll probably count myself lucky if I even hit a hundred without being decrepit as fuck.
Ugh, I really shouldn’t think about that now, because it sounds awful.
I’ll be the only shrunken old fae in this world.
He looks at me as if he can’t decide what I am to him. A madwoman? A wild beast like him? A lilac-furred rat? The thing he desires and absolutely doesn’t want at the same time?
Maybe all of the above.
Oh hells. What a charming combination.
If he lets me live, I think I’m going to crawl away from here and cry my eyes out for at least two weeks straight. Maybe more. I’m not sure I’ll ever be whole again.
“Can’t you break the bond?” I ask quietly when he says nothing for far too long.
I ache for his touch. For him to make it right.
Gods, I want to step into him and just sink against his body, his warmth, his skin. Let him hold me while I bury my face in his neck. I want it with every inch of my twisted soul.
But I fight it with everything I have.
My mind drifts back to Riven. To the man I actually want. The one I want with my heart—not because of some cruel, wicked joke of fate or the stars.
He’s the man I choose. Deliberately. Of my own free will.
Even if he doesn’t want me.
Even if he’s too enamored with my hot potions professor to ever look my way.
Abyss, I feel sick. Tired. Desperate. Lost. Hurting. Like falling into a dark pit again and not knowing how to stop it. How to return to the light.
Caryan, as if he can sense my discomfort, steps up to me again, this time gently brushing back a strand of my hair, gazing at the lilac dye, as if he knew too well why I chose that color.
His hand slides down to my neck, and I know he could break it as easily as snapping a twig.
He must be thinking the same, because he stills there for a moment.
I close my eyes and offer him my life. Because honestly, why live on when he’s already broken me?
“Sometimes I want to be cruel to you. So cruel,” he murmurs, his fingers languidly trailing my throat. “And yes, sometimes I dream of hurting you. I dream that I kill you.”
Abyss…
I hold perfectly still, not even daring to breathe. Because he’s a predator and an angel and an immortal, and the most important truth in that book about a unicorn that he used to read to me is that you must never run from an immortal…because it only draws their attention.
But I did run from him.
Twice.
I wonder whether he read that book to me as a kid deliberately. To tell me this one truth about him.
I did everything wrong.
And yet….
He hasn’t crushed me. Hasn’t broken me or forced me to my knees. I might be the only person in the world who has ever stood up to him—again and again—and lived. Who turned her back on damn-fucking Caryan and still lived to tell the tale.
I don’t know where that leaves me…or what it’s supposed to mean.
“But I won’t.”
His voice—low, absolute, carved from eternity—drags me back to the moment, pins me there.
“Why? If you don’t want me?”