Chapter Twenty #3
Legend catches it. His stare tracks the smoke then snaps to my face when my body gives me away. For a moment, his fury fractures.
Rage slams back in and lights his eyes white-hot.
He lunges for Creed.
Instinct yanks me forward before thought can catch up, my boots planting between the brothers.
Heat climbs my throat when I realize how close I’ve stepped. My chest nearly brushes his, and I’m about two seconds away from throwing restraint out.
Legend scrutinizes me, and in all my fucking life I’ve never wanted a single thing more than I do him.
“Move,” he demands.
“No.”
“Haide.” He bares his teeth. “Move. Now.”
“He was apologizing to me.” Being this close is not helping. Fuck. “Not fucking me.”
His pupils blow wide, his chest hitching on an inhale that doesn’t fully land.
Creed rears back. “What the fuck?”
Legend knows this, of course. But I wanted to see this right here. This unrestrained animal standing in front of me who has spent the better half of our time together making my life fucking torture. And I know torture. I’m a fucking artist at it.
“Go,” I tell Creed without breaking Legend’s stare.
Legend doesn’t shift, either, and Creed’s footsteps die as seconds pass.
Then it’s just us and the bond that’s been starved of us both for too long.
I’ve been looked at by this man before. In the cave on Exile, when he first found me. In the palace, when he dressed me up and paraded me around like a prize. In the ballroom, when he threw me away in front of everyone who already thought I was less than shit.
This is different.
This is the look of someone who’s had their sight restored, and the first thing they see is the very thing they destroyed.
“You left,” he calls me out.
“You were unconscious.”
“You left.”
“What was I supposed to do?” Rage snaps up so fast it catches me in the throat. I spit the words like they’re poison. “Plant myself at your bedside? Hold your hand? After everything you– ”
“Yes.” He takes another step and his smoke comes with him, cold and oily, sliding over my skin and tightening my lungs. “Yes. That’s what you were supposed to do.”
“Fuck you.”
Another step. “You think I can’t feel what the fuck I did to you? What they made me do? It’s in me now, every second of it, every word I said to you in that ballroom. I can taste it.”
“Good. Hope it chokes you.”
“I threw you into a wall.” The Nightkin shifts inside my chest at Legend’s self-punishing tone. “I watched them come for you and I did nothing.”
“I remember.” I hiss, glaring. “I was there.”
The Nightkin fucking purrs like a kitten.
“I think I hate you,” I tell him. “Truly fucking hate you.”
Regret cracks his expression for a blink, then a dark smirk spreads over his face. “Mmm. You said that already.”
I laugh, a sarcastic dying tone. “Actually, I fucking—” I stop. Wait. I didn’t say that out loud. There’s no way he can hear my thoughts—
The Nightkin cackles enough to rattle my ribs.
Legend fists my collar and pulls me close, stopping when his lips brush mine. “There is a way, and yeah, Hellpet.” He drags my bottom lip between his teeth before whispering, “I fucking can.”
There’s no tenderness in his kiss, no softness, just teeth and heat and the taste of the blood still coating his lips.
I bite down, drawing a groan from his mouth. His hands lock on my waist hard, yanking me flush against him, and heat detonates through the bond until my vision whites out.
For one heartbeat, exactly one, it feels right.
His mouth opens against mine and he breathes me in like he’s been suffocating for months. The Nightkin surges inside my chest, thrashing with recognition of his owner.
One heartbeat.
Then my hand finds the hilt.
My dagger. The one I carried from Exile and lost at the ball. The blade that’s drawn more blood than I can account for is tucked into the back of his jeans.
Because I didn’t lose it. He took it.
He kept it.
Kept me with him. All this time.
Creed’s words come back to me, and my heart fucking hurts with longing. But the bond? The bond damn near purrs. Proud of our mate.
I void my head of all coherent thought, replacing it with noise, numbers, iron on my tongue, grit in my teeth, until all he hears is static and heat.
My fingers close around the hilt of the dagger, and the weight of it settles into my palm like a homecoming.
I drive it into the back of his skull without breaking the kiss.
Bone pops under steel and heat floods my mouth.
He smirks against me before stumbling backward, blood spilling from his lips as his knees start to give.
I just buried three inches of steel into the man I’d die for. Kill for.
His eyes turn bone-white, and the bond refuses to break , writhing through me like a living wire.
Shadows prowl through my chest, leaving their owner’s talon prints all through it. The Nightkin.
Good girl.
I don’t feel like a good girl. I’ve killed thousands, but this… My throat tightens as Legend begins to fall.
I catch him just in time and he takes us both down, landing in the pool of his blood.
Now the mating bond is almost complete.