ALICE #3
I nodded. "Yes. Okay."
He looked at me like he wasn't hearing me correctly.
"I understand what you're saying. We're fated to be together, right? Like the others?"
He didn't answer, but he didn't have to. And honestly, it frightened me, too. A little. This thing that was bigger than either of us playing with both of our lives.
But I was a witch. I knew better than most that you couldn't fight what the fates had already woven.
You could rage against it, run from it, pretend it wasn't there humming under your skin — but it would have its way, eventually.
It always did. So I let the fear settle into something quieter.
I'd just have to figure out another way to protect him from the darkness inside of me.
It wasn't impossible. My twin brother has the same evil inside of him, and Kenya wasn't afraid of him. She always seemed very happy.
"Dae, I don't think there's much we can do to stop it now."
"You don't know what you're—"
"I'm a grown woman. I know exactly what I want."
"Maybe it's not what I want."
His words slammed into the center of my chest so hard I took a step back, fighting for my next breath. But no, he didn't mean it. He couldn't mean it. "Say it out loud then."
"Alice."
"Say you don't want me and I'll walk out of this club and you'll never have to worry about being locked in that cell again."
He stared at me for a long time, and when he finally spoke, I barely heard him. "I can't."
"Say it," I demanded.
"I can't say it because it isn't true!" he snapped. "And I don't lie to you."
There was maybe a foot of air left between us, and he had nowhere else to go. I took the last step and closed the gap.
That was all it took for him to break.
His hands came up and caught my face, and then his mouth was on mine, and the helpless sound he made was one I'd been hearing in my dreams since the first time he kissed me.
His hands were everywhere. One fisting in my hair, the other fisting in my coat at the small of my back, dragging me up into him until there was no space left to breathe in.
He tasted like bourbon, and he kissed me the way he'd kissed me before, ruinous and starving, and when I rose up on my toes and pressed into him he groaned into my mouth.
The room spun around us and suddenly my back was against a wall. My coat slid off my shoulders and hit the carpet. I don't even know which of us did it.
His hand gripped my thigh and lifted, my knee coming up around his hip like it had never forgotten the shape of him, and the noise I made when he pressed his hard length between my legs wasn't something I couldn't control.
With a deep growl that vibrated through my blood, he dragged his mouth from mine and down under my jaw, and I felt his fangs at my pulse. Hard and sharp and not remotely human. I cried out, waiting for the bite. Wanting it.
He went completely still.
"Dae…"
"NO." He was shaking in my arms. "No."
"Dae, look at me."
Slowly, he lifted his head.
His eyes were glowing. The dark brown gone all bright and molten, pupils blown, fangs down, lips parted and wet as he dragged in air through his mouth. His cheekbones seemed sharper. Jawline more pronounced. Even the muscles beneath my hands seeming to grow and harden as he prepared to hunt.
He was the most beautiful, frightening thing I'd ever seen in my life, and my heart was hammering hard enough that I felt it against my ribcage. My eyes dropped to his fangs, and everything inside me tightened with the most painful pleasure.
He moaned my name and ducked his head again. I felt his lips and tongue on the side of my throat and tilted my head away to give him more room…
And remembered where we were as my eyes darted around the room.
I put my hand flat on his chest and pushed.
He was off me instantly. Two full steps back, hands up and open, chest heaving. Fangs bared.
I straightened my dress with fingers that wouldn't work right and he growled low as he watched me, the sound coming from his chest as he took an involuntary step forward.
"No," I said.
He froze and stared at me.
"Not here." My voice came out ragged and I cleared my throat. "Not in the room where you feed on…." I couldn't finish the thought. I felt sick thinking of him sharing such an intimate thing with someone else.
Gods. Did he have sex with them too?
I shook my head slightly. No. I didn't want to know.
As he visibly fought for control, something moved over his face that took me a second to name, and when I did, pain exploded in my chest and made my eyes tear.
Relief.
He was relieved I pushed him away. Still. After everything.
Fighting the feeling of rejection, I punched my arms into my coat sleeves and pulled my hair out of the collar. Then I walked away. I couldn't do this again. I made it almost to the curtain before he said my name.
"Alice."
I stopped.
"Your aura."
Everything in me went cold. Slowly, I turned around.
He stood where I'd left him, button-down shirt half off one powerful shoulder, his eyes still lit from within and slightly unfocused, the way he does when he's reading someone.
"What about it?" I asked.
"It's brighter." His voice had gone soft. Almost reverent. "Changing. The gold is spreading." His mouth curved as his eyes roved over me. "It's so beautiful I can hardly look at you."
I stared back, the taste of him still in my mouth, and I thought about the book hidden at the bottom of my bag, buried under a pile of clothes in my aunt's guest room. Rust-red letters lying quiet on a page. Waiting for me to be ready.
Blood calls to blood.
Tell him. Tell him right now. Tell him the words are getting clearer and you don't know why and you're too scared to sleep.
But I couldn't. I pushed through the curtain and walked back through the club, ignoring Elias when he called out to me, out onto Bourbon Street, into the cold and the noise.
It's spreading.
He'd said it like he was describing a sunrise.
I walked all the way back to The Garden District with my arms wrapped around myself, wanting so badly to believe it his way that I nearly did.