Chapter 1 Astraea—Past #2
“We can’t keep letting him pick off our people like this,” Auster snarled.
Astraea’s spine stiffened. Though Nyte’s father was the leader of the vampire uprising, Auster and his brothers knew it was another that kept the enemy armies in line.
“Nightsdeath has to be killed.”
She’d heard it a hundred times. Shit, she’d harbored that prime goal herself for a long time. But now they were bonded … and everything had changed.
She cried in her soul at imagining him dead, but she remembered one crucial thing.
“He can’t be killed,” Astraea mumbled.
The intense impression of Auster’s eyes broke a shiver over her skin while her attention bored into the pools of blood soaking into the wood around the quaint cottage home.
“Of course he can,” Auster said.
“He’s … a god, technically. He can only be killed by something he’s made of.”
Acid burned in her throat to expose Nyte’s weakness to Auster. Her heart was soothed over the fact that Nyte wasn’t from this realm, and so nothing could kill him, even if Auster had this information.
“How do you know this?” he inquired.
“I’ve been hunting him, I told you. I figured it out.”
Astraea’s skin flushed with her white lies.
Auster assessed her, and she couldn’t get rid of the itching guilt over her body that if he stared long enough he would see the bond she’d forged with the realm’s villain.
Would he brand her a traitor? She liked to believe Auster would let her explain.
After all they’d been through together, he would consider her heart, regardless of its dark choices.
Auster sighed. “Let’s go; there’s nothing to save here.”
They spent the day cleaning up the savagery, rescuing the survivors, and implementing stricter measures of protection around Vesitire.
The longer Astraea was left to ponder her own conclusions about the attack and watch them wash the blood of innocents off her streets, the uglier her resentment grew.
It didn’t help that she hadn’t a moment away from the High Celestials and their ramblings of disgust for the vampires and Nyte. Always him in particular. Her fists flexed each time they assumed every barbaric act had been perpetrated by him.
“You seem tense,” Zephyr observed, creeping closer to her side. The others were talking among themselves in the castle’s throne room.
“It’s been a long day,” she said.
Zephyr turned, blocking her view of his brothers like a shield for privacy.
“What do you know?” he edged carefully.
“What about?”
“The attack.”
“No more than any of you.”
That was the truth, but Zephyr was aware of her more illicit activities when she slipped out of these walls.
She trusted him. When Astraea had found out Auster and the others were casting out their own people for having their wings poached, she’d made quite a protest. But though she might be the star-maiden, she was overruled where the celestials were concerned as the four brothers were god-blessed to preside over them. Brothers not by blood, but duty.
“You’ve been absent recently. Auster is beginning to grow suspicious,” he warned.
“I don’t need to be watched,” she groused.
Zephyr winced, his face creased in apology.
“You have to reject the bond with him,” he said, barely a whisper.
She knew this. When she’d first faced Auster after bonding with Nyte, she’d never felt foreboding fear like that, but to her relief Auster didn’t sense her mating tie to Nyte.
“I know. I just don’t want to hurt him.”
“You’re hurting him more the longer he thinks there’s a chance.”
Astraea’s eyes pleaded silently with Zephyr. She wanted to tell him about Nyte so badly the confession strained in her chest. He would keep her secret, but she feared he might judge her harshly despite their close friendship.
Zephyr read her deliberation, taking hold of her upper arms.
“You can tell me anything,” he said.
She nodded, but her lips remained sealed. She would find the courage to tell him soon. Right now, she only had one person on her mind as she discreetly left the castle.
Astraea waited for Nyte in the bell tower—a place that had become their secret home above the world.
She sensed him near, but he was being stealthy, trying to catch her from behind unawares as she watched the city spilled with moonlight.
Astraea spun, thrusting a hand to his chest with a surge of magick.
Nyte tensed but held firm against buckling, grabbing hold of her wrist and yanking her against him.
“Always so violent,” he said with a low lilt.
They shared breath through their heated stare.
“Why did the vampires attack?” she demanded.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, reaching to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear.
She pulled her arm free and tried an attack with her magick again. Her flare was swallowed by starry darkness. Nyte’s wicked smile curved through the dissipating shadows.
“Tell me you had nothing to do with it,” she said, pinning him with a glare.
The amusement dropped from his face.
“Do you think I would lie to you?”
“I don’t know.”
But her heart did. It pushed against her ribs, at war with her mind’s uncertainty.
Nyte erased the small distance between them when he pressed her to the wall next to one of the open archways.
“Then I haven’t made myself transparent enough for you to know, without hesitation, that there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t kill, a realm I wouldn’t break, or a god I wouldn’t forsake for you.”
His hand wrapped around her neck as he stared her down with the intensity of the sun blazing in those amber irises.
“Blood will always run thicker than water,” she said.
“As my mate, you are my blood. Though I can’t bleed out my heritage, or for you I would. Tell me where this is coming from?”
His hand on her neck curved around her nape, angling her mouth perfectly to his.
“You are my damnation,” she whispered across his lips.
“Oh my Starlight, our collision may be a masterpiece crafted for the walls of Hell, but should that be next where we meet, you would rule the underworld triumphant.”
His lips slanted over hers and she was lost to him. Found in him. She was his eternally, and that’s what frightened her the most.
Planting hands on his chest, Nyte yielded to her push, and she slipped around him. All her life she’d only known duty. To the people. To Auster. Before Nyte she’d come to terms with being as good as betrothed to Auster.
Nyte said, “My father claimed the attack was merely a test of your resources and strategy. He had spies watching the slaughter.”
Astraea gauged the hesitation in his explanation. “You don’t believe him?”
“I’m not certain. I don’t know why he would lie to me, but he’s never called for an attack without my knowledge. He claimed it was because I’ve been absent in my diligent pursuit of your capture.”
“You can’t lose his trust.”
“Let me worry about my father.”
Astraea knew that wasn’t truly why her thoughts stormed and her heart raced.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Nyte coaxed, voice soft as a plea, which she rarely heard from him.
“I love you,” she blurted, with her back still to him.
The confession tumbled out of her. He’d given her those same beautiful words after their bonding, but she’d not been able to say them back.
They were there … in her chest, sometimes they clawed up her throat and had been suffocating her for months, but she was too afraid to let them out.
Now … she realized how much stronger she felt with him by her side, even when he couldn’t be physically there.
Now, more than anything, she wanted to prove to the world Nyte wasn’t terror, he was hope to bring an end to this war with his father.
Nyte’s advance from behind tightened her skin. When he pressed his front to her back, her body became pliable to him, and he wrapped around her like a shield from burden.
“Say that again,” he murmured over her neck. His lips trailed from the hollow spot behind her ear, and her eyes fluttered closed.
“I love you,” she repeated. Each word swelled more in her heart, convincing her mind it would all be okay. They could survive anything together.
Nyte groaned against her; the vibrations scattered across her chest like gentle sand and pebbled her breasts.
“As much as I’ve been longing to hear that, why does it trouble you?”
“Because I shouldn’t. Because I’m afraid it’s a choice I can’t make. That loving you means I can’t love my duty. The people will rebel before we can start convincing them to understand. It’s going to break Auster and perhaps start a different war.”
His hand on her waist turned her around, and he guided her until the back of her knees met the edge of the bed. He coaxed her down, and lust started to heat her skin with his slow, alluring movements hovering over her body, pressing her into the mattress.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked, so calm and ready to bend the world or break it for her. “Because you’re mine now no matter what I have to do to keep it so. I’m determined to see to it that you have anything you desire.”
Nyte was known as a nightmare in the minds of every species.
He was wicked and cold and cruel … but Astraea discovered that his darkness could be warm if one ventured far enough to feel it.
Nyte offered himself to her when he could have killed her.
His wants had never been his own until this—their bond.
He was willing to do or be whatever he had to for it, and that cleaved something inside her.
He deserved to be loved. To receive the devotion he offered.
“Be patient with me,” she said quietly. Her legs tightened around his hips when they lowered against her.
Nyte pulled back from trailing kisses along her collar. He claimed her mouth, and her fingers threaded through his dark hair. Only for one long, promising kiss.
“For you, I’m as patient as the night that awaits the full moon. As calm as the stars that await the night. For you, Astraea Lightborne, I would wait in every lifetime of infinity.” He smiled, and it was a treasure worth more than any diamond.
“Now,” he said in husky murmur. “I believe there’s begging to be done and making up to be had.”