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Somehow, from her tone, I can tell it’s going to be about Priest. “You may,” I say warily.

“Did you really love him?”

I sigh and look away from her searching eyes. “I don’t know.”

“You do know, though. I can see it in you. I know what that looks like.”

My head whips back around as I glare at her. “Well, I don’t still love him,” I say testily. “That’s absurd. After what he did?”

“Love is a strange creature,” she says. “It doesn’t follow logic or reason. It just exists, and we can either make friends with it or become its enemy, but it doesn’t stop what it is.”

I clamp my mouth together, not about to say anything in retort, just as a knock sounds at the door.

“Come in,” Maren calls.

“It’s me,” Ramsay says from the other side. “I have Aragon with me. He’s ready to do the spell.”

My pulse skips, and I sit up straight in the tub, adjusting my hair over my breasts in a strange display of modesty.

Maren looks to me for consent before she gets up and opens the door.

They join us, Priest wearing all black, a jar in one hand. Like in the church, it’s filled with various items suspended in water.

He meets my eyes and gives me a faint nod.

I nod back, suddenly terrified. The sight of him scares my fragile heart, while the idea of the spell fills me with dread. What if it all goes wrong?

“I want them here for this,” I quickly say.

“Of course,” Priest says. “If only I can have you alone afterward.”

A thrill runs through me, though it shouldn’t, and I do my best to hide it. I exhale harshly through my nose. “Yes. That was part of the deal.”

“Should she get out of the tub?” Maren asks. “Ramsay could hold her up.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he says. “It’s probably best for her to stay where she is.”

He comes closer, his tall, large frame looming over me, his presence seeming to take up all the air and all the space in the room until all I can focus on is him.

The predator and the prey.

For a moment, I let the fear go, the bad kind of fear, and let the good kind in. I imagine that we’re alone in the room together, that I’m naked in this tub before him and helpless at his feet. I ignore where my mind wants to go, how it keeps wanting to remember him as a flying beast who made me hurt, and instead, I think of the man who made me bleed. The one who drank from me, couldn’t get his fill, who made pain and anticipation as sweet as a kiss.

“This might hurt,” he says to me in a gruff voice as he reaches into the water.

Before I realize what he’s doing, he plucks a scale off my tail.

“Ow!” I cry out, jerking out of his grasp.

The corner of his mouth lifts ever so slightly. Oh, he enjoyed causing that pain. Some things don’t change.

“Bastard,” I swear.

He raises a brow, and I know that look. He always gets it when I curse. I think it gets his blood running hot.

“Anything else you need?” Maren asks. “Fingernails and eyelashes, perhaps?”

Priest gives her a tepid glance. “Just some of her blood.” He looks back to me. “Now, I can feed on you, or I draw blood some other way. It’s up to you.”