Page 28
Story: Bitten By Prophecy
ELIAS
T he floorboards dig into my spine. Papers rustle as Kaia shifts beside me, her leg brushing mine where we lie sprawled between empty coffee mugs and maps marked with tomorrow’s suicide route to Graymoor. Her curls fan across a blueprint of the prison facility, black ink swallowing blacker strands.
“You’re vibrating.” Her fingertip taps my clavicle—three sharp bursts. “Like a pissed-off hornet’s nest.”
“Shifter metabolism,” I lie, staring at the water-stained ceiling. “Happens when I skip meals.”
She rolls onto her side, propping her head on her palm.
“You’ve gnawed that thumbnail down to the quick.” She catches my wrist. “Talk.”
I pull free. “Habit.”
“Bullshit.” She snorts. “I’ve seen you fight, Elias. You’re particular about your hands—kept those claws sheathed when during fights unless needed. Now you’re acting like you’ve got termites under your skin.”
My jaw clenches. A memory slams in uninvited—mother’s cold fingers prying my teeth open after the first change, counting incisors with clinical detachment. Every bite leaves a scar, little wolf. Even the accidental ones.
Kaia’s scent shifts, amphetamines and iron giving way to bergamot irritation. She sits up, knees knocking mine. “If we’re walking into a death trap tomorrow, I need to know what breaks you before?—”
“I killed someone.”
"We've all killed, Elias?—"
"No. Not like this. I don't know why, but it's been bothering me. Thinking about what a monster I am when you sit here wanting to risk your life to save my own father." The words drop like stones. “First blood I ever drank wasn’t from a glass.”
Her breath hitches. Suddenly the room’s too small, the musk of her pulse too loud.
I press the heel of my hand against my sternum. “Her name was Lira. Vampire—full-blooded. Found me after my parents were gone. Mom in hiding and Dad… supposably dead. Taught me control. Or tried to.”
Kaia’s thumbnail digs into the old rug. “What happened?”
“My first lunar cycle. Wolf surged while she was... tending me.” Bile coats my tongue. I don’t mention how her nightgown had slipped, how I’d memorized the vein beneath her ear. “She smelled like moonflower tea. Thought she’d feed me synthetic blood vials. Instead offered her wrist.”
Lightning crackles outside. Shadows warp the scars on my knuckles.
“I tore her throat out.”
Kaia goes preternaturally still.
“Woke up soaked in her.” I mimic her earlier tap against my collarbone. “Found molar fragments here. Burial was... messy.” My chuckle tastes like rot. “Let’s just say funeral pyres aren’t romantic when fueled by guilt. I was fifteen.”
Silence festers.
Then her fingers find my jaw, forcing eye contact. "You were an adolescent."
“Doesn’t erase the stain.”
“No.” Her thumb traces the scar under my ear—Lira’s last gift, a defensive swipe that nearly decapitated me. “But you carry it. Every day. That’s your penance, isn’t it? Letting the memory eat you alive so you don’t...”
Her pupils dilate. She smells like epiphany and salt.
“Kaia—”
Her mouth crashes into mine.
It’s not gentle. Her teeth clip my lower lip, hands fisting my shirt like I’m smoke she can’t catch. I grab her hips to steady us, but she pushes harder, all wildfire conviction and trembling fingers. When I pull back, breath ragged, she chases me.
“Don’t.” Her forehead meets mine. “I’m not her. I won’t splinter.”
My claws breach, pricking her waist. “You don’t know what I am.”
“Moody half-breed with a martyr complex? Yeah, Elias. I’m fucking terrified. But running?” She presses closer, lips brushing mine with each word. “Not this time.”
This kiss ignites slower—embers catching dry tinder. Her palm slides under my shirt, tracing the ridge where ribcage meets scar tissue. Every touch brands, purges, rebuilds. She gasps when I nip her neck, my thumb finding the rabbit-quick pulse beneath her ear.
“Still think I’m a monster?” I murmur against her skin.
Her laugh reverberates through me. “You’re worse.” She threads fingers through my hair, tugging harsh enough to bare my throat. “A chronic over-thinker who needs?—”
I silence her with another kiss. Tomorrow’s hell can wait.
Her fingers tangle in my hair, pulling just shy of pain. “Still thinking?” Her breath scalds my throat. “Or finally feeling ?”
I catch her wrist, the pulse beneath her skin thrumming against my palm. “Kaia, the hybrid side—if I lose control?—”
“You won’t.” She straddles my hips, knees pinning me to the floorboards. Papers crinkle beneath us, the scent of ink and her sweat mingling. “But if you do?” Her teeth graze my earlobe. “I’ll stab you with that letter opener.” She nods toward the desk, all sharp edges and steel.
I choked on a laugh. “Romantic.”
“Practical.” She yanks my shirt over my head, her thumbs skimming the lattice of scars across my ribs—a roadmap of every fight I’d barely survived. Her gaze lingers on the jagged line where a werewolf’s claw had nearly gutted me at seventeen. “You’re still here,” she murmurs. “Still here , Elias.”
Her shirt joins mine somewhere near the overturned inkwell. Moonlight catches the ridges of old knife scars across her abdomen—Order training, she’d called them once. My fingers traced a particularly vicious one curving under her left breast. “Who gave you this?”
“Lieutenant Veyra. Lesson three: never drop your guard during a ceasefire.” She arches into my touch, a shiver betraying her steady voice. “Your turn. That burn mark on your shoulder?—”
“Molten silver. Hunters in Prague.” I flinch as her tongue followed the scar’s path. “Kaia, wait. Let me?—”
“No.” She unbuttons my jeans with ruthless efficiency. “Tonight’s not about your guilt. Or your body count.” Cool air hits my thighs as she strips me bare, her gaze raking down. A sharp inhale. “Fuck. You’re… engineered .”
I cover myself, heat flooding my face. “It’s the hybrid blood. The…proportions are…”
Her laugh punches the dark. “Proportions.” She peels my hand away, her grip unyielding. “You’re a fucking cathedral, Elias. Now stop blushing.”
Her pants slide off, a whisper of fabric on skin. I reach for her, but she catches my wrists, pinning them above my head. “Let me work.”
Every scar, every callus, she maps them with her mouth. My hips jerked when her teeth find the sensitive hollow of my thigh. “Kaia?—”
“Say it again.”
“What?”
She rises over me, backlit by the flickering bulb, curls wild as brambles. “My name. When you’re undone.” Her hand slides down her stomach, fingers glistening.
She sinks onto me with a gasp, heat and pressure and rightness that steal my breath—like molten silver pouring through every vein.
My claws shred the rug’s fibers, splinters of oak floorboard cracking beneath them as her hips roll in a serpent’s rhythm.
The drag of her body against mine wrings a growl from my chest, my fangs slicing my tongue as her muscles clench.
Copper blood and her salt-kissed sweat bloom on my palate.
“Look at me,” she demands, nails scoring my collarbones.
My vision flares gold, pupils slitting—the werewolf’s hunger and the vampire’s hunger tangling, a tempest thrumming beneath my skin.
Her grin sharpens, all predator, her own hips pistoning faster now.
Her scars press warm against my thumbs—ridged battle marks from Order blades—as I dig into her waist. She arches, tendrils of her sweat-damped hair clinging to my chest like ink spilled across parchment.
“There you are,” she breathes, and I realize I’m snarling, my cock swelling thicker as the shift claws at my bones.
Her rhythm fractures into something desperate, our skin slapping wet and primal.
The bulb overhead swings, throwing her shadow across the wall—a writhing chimera.
Every snap of her hips punches the breath from me, her inner walls fluttering like a trapped bird’s heartbeat.
I feel the riptide building—that terrible, glorious edge where my control frays.
“Kaia, I’m not—” My hips buck upward, feral, as my spine bows off the floor. Her nails rake down my sternum, drawing twin lines of fire. “— can’t hold ?—”
The warning dissolves into a roar as she slams down hard, her cry splitting the air. Her back arches like a drawn bow, her throat bared—an offering and a challenge.
“Then don’t.” She leans down, sweat-damp curls brushing my chest—a thousand electric points of contact burning through the cold dead places in my marrow. “Come for me. Let me feel you break .”
Her rhythm turns erratic, nails scoring my pecs deep enough to make my cursed blood bead black in the creases.
I arch, a growl ripping free as she clenches around me—wet velvet vise tightening against the howling thing in my gut.
My canines lengthen before I can stop them, tearing my lower lip as I choke on her name. “Kaia?—!”
“ Again. ”
Her command isn’t words now—it’s a vibration in the hollow of my throat where her teeth rest. The part of me that’s feral recognizes prey turned predator. The part that’s vampire tastes her pulse fluttering against my tongue like a sacrifice.
“Kaia!”
The third cry does it.
Her back arches as she shatters, muscles fluttering like moth wings against glass.
My hips snap upward—no longer flesh but a force of nature, claws erupting to gouge the concrete floor.
Our mingled scents flood my nostrils—ozone and iron and strange wildflowers blooming where she should taste human.
Her scream harmonizes with mine, two predators caught in the same snare.
The world narrows to pulsebeats and the salt-tang of her skin, to the dark realization that her storm has scoured me down to raw nerve endings—no monster left, just a man trembling beneath a creature far more dangerous than my dual-blooded curse.
When she collapses onto my chest, her laughter vibrates through me. “Monsters don’t whisper apologies mid-climax, Elias.”
My arms lock around her. The papers beneath us stuck to our sweat-slicked skin, plans for tomorrow’s suicide mission forgotten as I hold her there making sure she doesn't run and that I don't hide. Not from her.
Table of Contents
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- Page 28 (Reading here)
- Page 29
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