Chapter 3 #2
The bond screamed between us—desire and rage and something desperate underneath both.
He wanted to cross the distance. Wanted to lick the honey from my skin himself, claim my mouth, claim everything.
I felt it like heat against my face, like pressure in my core, like the answer to an ache that had been building since the moment I woke.
"Good," he said roughly. The word seemed to cost him something. "You'll keep your strength."
I set the empty tray aside and watched him struggle to maintain his composure. "Why does it matter?"
"What?"
"If I'm your prisoner." I tilted my head, studying him the way he had been studying me. "Why do you care if I'm strong?"
He didn't answer. But his jaw worked, and his fists stayed clenched, and the silence between us crackled with everything he wasn't saying.
"You will sleep eight hours minimum," he said instead. "Your body is still recovering from the rebirth and transformation."
A rule. He was giving me rules.
"You will tell me immediately if you are cold, or hungry, or unwell in any way."
Another rule. My heart began to pound.
"You will not skip meals. You will not hide illness to seem strong. You will not touch yourself without permission. And I want to remind you, you will not—" His voice cracked, just slightly, before he mastered it again. "You will not harm yourself. In any way. For any reason."
This last rule—the repeated rule—came out fierce. Almost desperate. And I understood why it mattered so much.
He could feel me through the bond.
"Your pain is my pain," he said quietly, confirming what I had already realized. "Whatever you suffer, I suffer. So you will not suffer unnecessarily. Is that understood?"
These weren't a captor's rules.
A captor would want me weak, dependent, easy to control. A captor would limit my food, not ensure I ate every bite. A captor would want me sleep-deprived and vulnerable, not rested and strong.
These were a caretaker's rules.
The rules of someone who wanted to ensure the person in their charge was healthy, safe, and properly tended. Someone who couldn't bear the thought of their charge going hungry or cold or hurt.
Someone who had spent ten thousand years preparing a nursery for children who would never come.
"I understand," I whispered.
Something flickered across his perfect features—relief, maybe, or something softer that he buried before it could fully surface.
"Do you know what I've been planning for ten thousand years, Evara?"
His voice was soft. Almost contemplative. Like he was discussing the weather, or the movement of stars, or anything other than the destruction of everything we might have been.
"Tell me."
He stepped closer, and I felt the bond stretch and sing between us. Every inch he moved closer was an inch less of emptiness in my chest.
"To make you fall in love with me."
The words landed soft as falling snow. I felt them settle into my skin, felt them spark along nerve endings that were already too sensitized.
"To care for you so perfectly that you forget you ever ran. To bring you your favorite foods and dress you in silk and worship every inch of your body until you can't remember why you were ever afraid."
My breath caught. Heat flooded my core, sudden and devastating, and I felt my thighs slick with arousal I couldn't control.
He moved even closer. Close enough that I could smell him—something warm beneath the frost, something that reminded me of summer storms and wildflower meadows and the way his skin had tasted when I was brave enough to put my mouth on him.
"I'm going to map every sensitive place on your body with my tongue," he continued, his voice dropping lower.
"Find every spot that makes you shiver. Learn exactly what you need to come apart.
And then I'm going to give it to you—over and over—until you're screaming my name, desperate and willing and completely mine. "
I was soaking wet.
I could feel it spreading between my thighs, feel my core clenching around nothing, feel every cell in my body reaching toward the man who was promising to worship me. The shift had become unbearable against my nipples. My hands gripped the velvet dragon like an anchor against the tide of need.
"And then," he said, very softly, "at the moment of your climax—when the bond is open, when your soul is bare to me—"
He paused.
Something cold crept into his voice.
"I'm going to kill you."
Ice water.
That's what it felt like—ice water poured over the fire he had been building, shocking me out of the arousal he had deliberately cultivated.
But the bond didn't stop. Couldn't stop.
Even as horror bloomed in my chest, my body stayed wet, stayed wanting, stayed desperately reaching toward the man who had just announced my death.
The contrast was maddening.
"The bond is the source of everything I became," he explained, and his voice had gone academic now, almost clinical. "The wound that made me. Your rejection didn't break the bond—it corrupted it. Twisted it into something that fed on grief instead of love."
He stepped closer still. Close enough to touch, if either of us had dared.
"But a bond can only be unmade at the point of maximum connection. Maximum openness. At the moment of consummation, when two souls are as close as they can possibly be—that's when the bridge is strongest. And that's when destroying it would give me the most power."
"Pain becomes power," I whispered. My voice came out rough, wrecked with desire and terror in equal measure. "Grief becomes godhood."
"Exactly." Something almost like approval flickered across his features. "You understand. You always did understand things too quickly for your own good."
"You'll become a monster forever."
The words escaped before I could stop them. Truth I couldn't keep contained, even knowing it might provoke him.
His jaw tightened. "Not a monster. I'll become free."
Free.
The word hung between us, and I felt through the bond what he couldn't say aloud: the weight of ten thousand years pressing down on him, the exhaustion of grief that never ended, the desperate longing for something—anything—that might make the pain stop.
He wanted to be free of me.
Free of the bond that still called him toward tenderness even as he plotted murder. Free of the love he couldn't kill no matter how hard he tried. Free of hoping, of wanting, of reaching toward a woman who had chosen death over his arms.
But underneath that—
I felt the fracture.
A tremor of doubt, buried deep beneath layers of frozen resolve.
He had convinced himself this was the only way.
Had spent millennia planning the perfect destruction of everything he still loved.
But some part of him—the part that built nurseries and prepared breakfasts and set rules for a bride's wellbeing—that part wasn't sure.
"You're not sure you can do it," I said quietly.
His stillness became absolute. Predator stillness, the kind that preceded violence.
"Your hands are shaking."
He looked down at his own hands—those beautiful, terrible hands that had tucked blankets around me, that had prepared my favorite foods, that now trembled almost imperceptibly at his sides.
For one moment, I saw his face crack.
Saw the man beneath the monster, the Daddy beneath the god he wanted to become, still reaching toward me through ten thousand years of learning to be cold.
Then the mask slammed back into place.
“One week, baby girl.” He turned and walked out of the nursery without answering.
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
I sat alone in the rocking chair, the velvet dragon pressed to my chest, my body still throbbing with denied need, and let myself hope.
The man who built this nursery was still in there.
I had six days to save him.
That evening, alone in the nursery with shadows gathering in the corners, I reached for Lena through the thread of our shared blood.
I hadn't known it would work. Hadn't known if the connection between us—cellular memory, inherited gift, a thousand generations of wound-walkers carrying my essence forward—could be used for something as deliberate as communication.
But I had felt her through the bond of origin and descent when we met in the grotto.
Had felt the recognition singing between us, blood calling to blood across the millennia.
Surely that connection went both ways.
I closed my eyes and pressed the velvet dragon against my chest, letting its softness anchor me while I reached.
The bond with Valdris pulsed its constant awareness—he was elsewhere in the palace, his attention turned away—but I pushed past that demanding thread to find something quieter. Something older.
Lena.
The call went out through channels I couldn't see, traveling through bloodline memory and inherited magic and the particular frequency that connected origin to descendant. I had never tried anything like this. Had never had the opportunity. But desperation made teachers of us all.
Lena. Can you hear me?
For a long moment, nothing.
Then—
Fragments. Sensation rather than words at first: panic crashing against relief, questions tumbling over each other like water over stones. I felt her presence suddenly, intimately, the way you feel someone enter a room even when your back is turned.
Evara? The thought came through clearer now. Gods, you're alive. You're—where are you? We've been searching, Morgrith has been frantic, Davoren wants to—
I focused, pushing past the tide of her concern. I'm in the Sunken Palace. His palace. I came willingly.
Willingly? Her shock rippled through the connection. You went to the monster who wants to destroy everything? To the—
He's caring for me.
Silence. Complete, stunned silence.