Chapter 3
When we finally get to my house, Saskia stops in front of it with her mouth agape.
I halt alongside her, painfully in tune with each of her movements, the way her fingers rise to her mouth, and how her eyes skate along every feature I’ve never looked at twice.
A wooden porch wraps around the stone structure, every hole and crack repaired by me over the last few hundred years.
Wild creepers twine along the railing. Two wicker chairs sit by the front door, although I’ve never lounged in either one of them.
They used to belong to my parents, but my mother insisted I take them after my father died.
Saskia’s attention grazes the chairs, then raises up to my second floor, where my bedroom door leads out to a small, rounded balcony that looks out over the whole town.
“I can tear that down,” I say quickly, noting how pale her face looks, “if it bothers you…”
I have half a mind to leap upward and rip the balcony off my house here and now, on the chance that it will remind her of the Blood Moon Palace balconies she had to wave from. I told her she’s sleeping where I can monitor her, but if any part of my house triggers her…
“No.” She shakes her head, wrapping her arms around herself. “It’s just… what do you even use that balcony for?”
I blink at her, a twisting kind of heat coaxing out my inner beast at the question. But in this moment, I push it back, remaining calm for her.
“On clear nights, I lean over the railing to look at the stars.”
“The stars?” she asks, and glances up at the cloud-smeared night sky.
That’s when I remember her only experiences of the nighttime before now have been the Choosings and the catacombs, and my anger rears its head again. I swallow. Flex my fingers.
“I’ll show you how beautiful it can be the first cloudless night we get.
But for now, let’s get you warm.” I don’t dare touch her again.
Not yet. As soon as I do, I know I’ll lose every fraction of control I’ve managed to maintain since she opened her eyes, so I just lead the way up the porch and push open my front door.
Inside, Saskia once again takes her time on the first floor, observing every seemingly mundane thing. But to her, it’s not. When we pass through my kitchen, she trails her fingers along my wood-burning stove, gaping at it like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.
“Are you hungry?” I ask, my voice tight. Controlled. “I can make you something.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I just didn’t get a chance to look at these things when I was in the kitchen in the Blood Moon Palace.
Whoa.” Her head jerks up, her eyes widening at my living room beyond the kitchen, where the floor-to-ceiling windows stretch from one side of the house to the other. “What a view.”
I glance at the forest spreading beyond the windowpanes before fixing my attention back on her.
“Yes, it is.” My eyes skate over her body again, trying to unearth any clues that she’s in distress or pain, but she just hurries toward my spiral staircase as if wooden banisters are the most exciting thing she’s ever seen.
Which, considering the hellhole she’s been locked in all her life, maybe they are.
I flex my fingers again, trying to contain my irritation at everything and everyone who has kept this beautiful woman locked away from a world that could be equally as beautiful.
“Is your room up there?” Saskia asks, maybe a little eagerly as she traces the lower banister with a feather-light touch. “I mean…” She coughs, her cheeks flushing with the loveliest hue. “Not that I’m trying to intrude. I can sleep on the sofas down here if you want. I was just cur—”
“You’re not sleeping on any sofas, Saskia.” I nod at the stairs. “Go on up. My bed’s waiting for you if you want to go to sleep.”
“Oh, I’m not tired in the slightest.” She starts up the stairs, and I’m left staring after the sway of her hips for a moment, viciously trying to shove my desires way down, where they can’t touch me.
After such a long night and such a great fall, she should be hungry and fatigued, not practically bouncing on the balls of her feet, fracturing my restraint more and more with each passing second.
Cursing to myself, I follow her up the stairs, where her wide, hazel eyes scan around the room slowly, stopping on each and every thing that graces my walls.
My fireplace still simmering with red-hot coals.
The glass door that leads to that balcony we saw from below.
My bed, situated on a sprawling, four-post frame I made myself when I was twenty years old.
She smiles at everything as if she didn’t almost die a million times in the last twenty-four hours. As if the way she sacrificed herself—fully believing she would perish despite all my attempts to beg her to reconsider—means nothing.
And now my anger simmers, bubbling along my spine as I watch her take everything in, clad in that green dress that I want to rip off her body.
She’s fascinated with my things, and I’m fascinated by her. And we’re finally alone.
Together.
She’s alive, I repeat to myself for the hundredth time. A breathing, walking, talking, deliciously-sweet-smelling human right in front of me.
But I almost lost her so many times.
Saskia whips around like the fury in me lashed out and twisted her body to face me.
The chain around her neck snakes down to where the vial rests between her breasts. I have a hard time tearing my eyes away. They’re even better in person than the hazy images through our mind-to-mind connection. Her curves look like they were made for my hands, which flex in response.
For a second, I crave her voice in my head, but this? Having her in the flesh, wondering what she’s thinking, deciphering her feelings from the expression she wears? This is so much better, because I realize I still know her without having to read her mind.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, voice low, one eyebrow hitched. Almost like she senses my battle of pleasure and displeasure pressing in from all sides, and it exhilarates her.
“What’s wrong?” I repeat. “You almost died. You should be dead.”
“But I’m not,” she counters.
A growl rises in my throat. I take a step toward her, clenching my fists to stop myself from running my fingers along her smooth skin, from feeling her heartbeat thump under my palm.
I can hear it though—that uptick of excitement racing beneath her sternum, thanks to my exceptional hearing. I pause to take it in, listening closely to the flooding adrenaline rhythmically pumping through her heart.
With a sly smile, Saskia takes a half-step back like this is a game to her. Her back hits my dresser, sending a vibrating thud through the wall. Her hands wrap around the edge, her knuckles going white as she grips it hard.
“You didn’t listen,” I shoot back. “Running around that palace like you’re invincible.
You had me worried out of my goddamn mind.
And when that vampire had his hands on you, I didn’t know what he was going to do to you.
He was this close, Saskia.” I take another step into her, crowding around her and caging her with my arms. I drop my voice to a gravelly whisper next to her ear and watch goosebumps pebble along her neck where my words land.
“And that made me feel like a helpless fucking animal.”
When I pull back to look at her, Saskia’s eyes twinkle. Her pupils expand.
The warmth from her body curls around me like a trap, even though she’s the one who couldn’t squirm out of the position I have her in—if she wanted to.
I tip my head down, hovering my mouth over hers. Baring my canines only elicits a thrill, not fear, in her eyes.
She tilts her chin up. And after a sharp inhale that tugs at my lips, she breathes out, “So, punish me then.”