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Chapter Fifty-Four

LUNA

There’s a click, a scrape, a whisper in a language too ancient for modern tongues.

I know it’s him before I even open my eyes. He is a bird, massive and powerful, with feathers reflecting blue in the streetlights. He pecks the window. When he closes his wings, he diminishes to a single point and unfolds into a man.

I sit up and whisper his name.

I am just a human woman. I am not a paragon of strength or a warrior of the mind. I am just a woman who needs to give her very life to the darkness of one man.

“Luna.” The sound travels right into my body, as if there’s no glass or space between us. “Will you invite me in?”

He phrases it as a question, not a command. The thrall sleeps, leaving me to choose. Though I, me, the Luna who had her own mind before he entered my life, wants to obey, I am not absolutely compelled. It’s as if he knows what he’s doing.

“It’s still not my house.” I am only half-joking.

“I still don’t care.” He puts his fingertips to the glass, pressing them into four white ovals.

I go to him in my borrowed nightgown and bare feet. Only his very toe-tips are on the edge of the ledge. He’s floating.

“I don’t think you can come in anyway.” I match my fingertips to his, barely able to stretch to his size. “This is some kind of protected space.” I’m so close to the window, the glass clouds with my breath.

“It is. I know.” He breathes on the glass intentionally, expanding the fog on his side.

“You know?”

“Would you invite me in?” He moves his hand to his cloud, and my fingertips follow as if they’re magnetized, streaking on both sides. “If you could, would you invite me in?”

“I’m in thrall. Can I ever refuse?”

“I’m not commanding you.” He puts his forehead on the glass. “I’m asking. Say yes. Or refuse so that I can ask you again and again.”

“Do you think I’d ever refuse you?”

“You could. It might not be the same for you. I want to be on the other side of this glass—I want it more than anything I have ever wanted in five centuries of wanting. Is it possible that you could want me there as much as I want to be there? Does this feeling live inside you? Is it too big to fit in the cage of your chest? Is it eating you and feeding you? That’s what it’s doing to me.

I don’t know how to live with it. I am happy when I think of you.

I don’t understand it, because it’s miserable…

so fucking miserable. I cannot accept your invitation, but if you want me the way I want you—with the whole of your body—then tell me.

Give me a reason to breathe, so that I can say ‘yes’ over and over. ”

“Oh, Carmine. You stupid nightwalker.”

“Would you invite me in?”

“I haven’t built it, paid for it, or slept in it.” In the window’s reflection, I see the bed. My bed. Maybe that counts. “I invite you in right now.” I push back a few inches to see if those words are enough to get him past the glass, but he stays on the other side. “That doesn’t actually work.”

“No. The goddess’s will is more powerful than your invitation. But you can come out to me.”

“And then what? You’ll show me a good time?”

“A very good time.”

“I’d like that.”

“Come out to me.”

“They gave Serafina the room with the terrace and she can’t even use it. She’s right next door though. Just a quick walk.” I back away from the window, holding up a finger. “Hang on a minute.”

He lets go of the window and floats away from the ledge before turning into a bird.