Chapter 29 A Bond Completed #2
It was there in his eyes, the desperation he could no longer hide. He believed this with a certainty that left no room for doubt. And that was what frightened me most. Because Baird was not a man who believed in nonsense.
Still, I couldn't make myself believe it.
“I think you're making something out of nothing,” I snapped, the words coming faster now, edged with a conviction I wasn't entirely sure I believed.
“And I think this has more to do with you feeling everything I feel than anything actually happening.” I took a step toward him, hands slicing through the air.
“Because I don't feel what you feel, Baird.
I can't. And there is nothing—nothing—I can hide from you.”
“Ye cannae understand what it does to me—“ he started, his voice rough.
“No,” I cut in sharply. “I can't understand it.
And that's exactly the point.” Frustration flared, hot and unfiltered.
“I don't know what you feel unless you tell me.
I don't get warnings or instincts or whatever it is you do.” I thrust my arms out, the motion a human exclamation point.
“You feel everything I feel. Every doubt. Every fear. Every joy. Every stupid, transitory emotion that flits its way through my head. You took that from me when this—Sanguis Amantium bond, or whatever it is—formed.” My voice rose despite myself.
“Now I couldn't hide something like this from you if I tried.
You'd always know. Maybe not the reason—maybe not the details—but the aftermath.” I shook my head.
“You'd feel it. Every time. It's not fair.
You don't get to protect me by shutting me out,” I said. “Not from this. Not from you.”
His eyes flared—not with anger or rage, but with a hard, contained frustration, the kind that comes from hitting a wall you don't know how to break through.
Then his expression shifted, tension draining as something settled into place, a decision he'd clearly been fighting finally claiming him.
He nodded to himself. “I can make it fair, Mira. I should have done it that night…”
My stomach dropped. Fair meant something very different to him than it did to me.
Those familiar eyes, brilliant green and tinted with pain I didn't understand, slowly transitioned to the deepest black, any hint of resignation drained from him, leaving something raw in its wake.
It moved through him, reshaping his presence until my instincts screamed predator even as my pulse betrayed me.
It should have terrified me. Instead, it felt like leaning forward to meet what he was becoming.
“Baird…” I said quietly when my mind caught up to what my body had already acknowledged.
He let the thing he said caused the blood bond to form rise in him—the part of himself he still hated, still tried to push away. He couldn't see it clearly, couldn't separate it from what he feared it made him. But it was still a part of him that loved me.
Deeply. Possessively.
I clenched my hands at my sides, grounding myself, forcing my breath to stay even—not because I meant to stop him, but because part of me still knew I could. I wasn't ready to let desire cloud my thoughts. I couldn't—not with so much left unsaid.
He leaned closer—so slowly, as if giving me a chance to move away, and yet I didn't step back.
The monster he tried so hard to deny knew me too well.
Memory stirred against my will: the way he came to me after his hunts, all heat and barely leashed hunger, the way my body had answered his, even when my mind protested.
This was time for talking, not sex. Never—not once—had Baird used sex to avoid a conversation.
Me? Yes. I'd done it more times than I cared to admit.
Flip the switch. Let pleasure drown out the noise.
Obliterate everything I couldn't—or wouldn't—face in the moment.
I remembered doing exactly that after Baird had confessed the truth, of how Bastien had killed Agnes and turned him in a rage, overriding every rational thought I had screaming for caution, choosing skin and heat and connection to mute my doubts, if only temporarily.
Now desire crept in again, unwelcome, insistent—curling low and tight—a traitorous ache I fought to suppress. But beneath it, deeper and far harder to fight, the magic in my veins surged in answer to his, restless and hungry, wanting this…wanting him…wanting to make something together.
I fought to hold onto the fact that Baird, once again, had held something back from me. And yet my body betrayed me, trembling on the edge of a surrender I was not—would not be—ready to give.
“I can make this fair,” Baird said again, his voice dropping into that dangerous register that surfaced only when he was at the edge of himself—when he was fighting something that wanted him, and wanted me, to yield.
It threaded through me, rough— stripped of softness, more instinct than language.
Less human, more animal. And the way he held it back—made the struggle far more intoxicating than if he'd let it loose.
“What do you mean you can make this fair?” I asked, breathless with a need that was confusing—and deeply inconvenient.
Baird opened his mouth just enough. Relaxed his lips. Fangs gleamed—snow-white against the shadow. Not a warning. An admission.
He closed his eyes and drew a slow, deliberate breath. When he caught my scent, that smirk curved his mouth, darker now—knowing. He already knew the battle raging inside me. And in the most dangerous, morally gray way possible, he believed that letting me lose was how he made this fair.
I braced myself, a silent challenge. Baird answered.
The air stirred, and then he was simply there, a sweeping force of motion that slammed my hips against the cool, unyielding edge of the kitchen counter.
My why here? died in my throat, met by a deep, rumbling growl that vibrated through his chest and into mine.
He slotted himself between my thighs, his grip proprietary.
He pulled my shirt over my head, but it was the sharp snap of delicate silk that made me gasp.
I stared at the ruined wisp of a pair of Eres panties on the stone floor and swore.
His smirk was a wicked, sharp-edged thing, savoring every flicker of my irritation.
This was him unchained, the past and all its ghosts banished from the room.
He existed only in this moment, and I was desperate to live in it with him.
The second my skin was bared, his mouth descended—a brand against my lips, a trail of fire down my throat, until he found that sensitive hollow.
The touch was electric, a current that shot straight down, pooling in my core as a tight, throbbing knot of need.
When I pressed myself against him, chasing the impossible urge to merge, to erase the space between us entirely, the sound he made was less laugh, more resonant rumble—dark with approval, vibrating as if my body alone had drawn it out of him.
His hand went to my pussy, tracing an index finger through my wetness before plunging two into my depths.
I gasped at the sudden intrusion, the sound torn from me before I could stop it, then dissolved into a helpless moan when he found that place—the one he knew too well.
His touch was precise, devastating, playing my body like an instrument tuned only to him, drawing sensation higher and higher until thought itself slipped out of reach.
I reached for his waistband, wanting him as bare as I was—but he caught my wrist and brushed my hand aside.
He watched me with eyes gone ink-black, coiled darkness, before lifting his fingers to his mouth.
Slow. Deliberate. He lingered there, as if savoring more than just my taste, the faintest curl of a smile playing at his lips as he licked them clean—an unspoken reminder that he was choosing when, and how, this would go.
He pushed me back, and lowered his face between my legs, tongue claiming me, every so often letting me feel the sharp tip of a fang, dragged ever so lightly against my labia, just so I didn't forget what I was dealing with. As if I could.
The sound of his zipper cutting the silence was a promise.
I rose onto my elbow as he shucked his jeans, my eyes tracing the lines of his body.
He stood before me, half-dressed and fully exposed.
Every muscle was pulled taut, and the smattering of hair on his chest narrowed, drawing my gaze down the ridges of his abdomen to the deep V to his groin.
He was a live wire of power, trembling with it yet perfectly controlled, and the sight made me throb with a desperate want.
A smirk touched his lips; he knew. His pupils were vast, swallowing the room's light, but just as suddenly, a terrifying brilliance burned in their black depths as he reached past me.
His fingers found the wood of the knife block. With a sharp tug, he freed the carving knife. A primal fear, cold and sharp, forced movement to my limbs. I scrambled backward, my spine hitting the counter, my brain screaming two conflicting commands: get away or intervene.
“Stop!” The command tore from my throat.
He ignored me. He held the tip of the knife to a point just inches above his heart, his gaze pinning me in place as he pushed into flesh.
A sharp hiss of pain escaped him as he jerked the blade free, letting it fall with a deafening clatter against the stone.
For a moment, there was only the sound of our breathing.
Then, a bead of blood welled, swelling into a line that trickled down his sternum.
“What are you doing?” The question was a whisper, lost in the horror of it.
He stood before me, breath ragged, pain flickering across his features. Bloody—still stroking himself.