Page 27

27

DAIN

I should leave.

I should slip into the night and never look back.

Instead, I press my back against the crumbling wooden frame of the abandoned house, fists clenched so tight the knuckles crack. The wind howls through the gaps in the walls, carrying the smell of damp earth and the lingering trace of her.

Liora. She shouldn’t have said my name like that. Like she knew it.

Like she had always known it.

It wasn't just the way it rolled off her tongue, unthinking, unconscious, it was the way it settled inside me. Like something falling into place, like a puzzle piece I had been missing for centuries.

Her eyes.

The moment she looked at me after drinking my blood, they were not her eyes.

They were hers.

That damned woman from my past. The Purna who sealed me away, who betrayed me, who left me to rot in stone for gods-knows-how-long.

But it can't be. Liora is not her.

She can’t be.

Yet the way she moves, the way her body reacted to the binding, the way my blood took root inside her like it had been waiting for centuries to do so…

I exhale sharply, running my tongue over my teeth. My fangs ache.

This is dangerous.

I should leave.

I should kill her.

That would be the logical choice, wouldn’t it? End her now before she becomes something I can’t control, before she becomes something I can’t resist.

Right now, I want her.

Not just with my body, but with something deeper, something uglier.

Something that whispers mine.

That word should mean nothing. I am no longer bound to a people, to a clan, to a cause. My kind is nothing but fractured remnants, scattered in the ruins of time.

Yet, when I saw her take my blood, when I watched her accept it, absorb it, become something else entirely…

Something in me snapped.

I can still feel her presence inside me, the connection forged when she took my essence into her body. A tether that shouldn’t exist.

It burns through me like a sickness, a hunger I can’t sate.

My hands clench against my thighs as I tilt my head back, forcing in a deep breath. But it does nothing to calm the beast inside me.

I can still feel her in the other room, restless, confused, tossing in that broken excuse for a bed.

She should be weak from what happened. She should be resting, recovering.

But she’s not.

She is awake.

She’s thinking about me.

I can taste it, her pulse quickening every time she shifts beneath the thin sheets. I hear the hitch in her breath, the restless way she moves, the heat radiating from her skin as if the binding hasn’t just affected me but her as well.

I should leave.

But instead, I find myself walking toward her.

The house groans beneath my weight, but she doesn’t stir as I slip through the doorway.

She’s on her side, her body barely covered by the tattered sheet. Her breathing is uneven, lips slightly parted, skin flushed in the dim light filtering through the cracks in the wooden walls.

The smell of her blood, laced with mine, still lingers in the room.

I swallow against the tightness in my throat.

She shouldn’t look like this.

She shouldn’t feel like this.

I tell myself it’s the binding. That this pull is nothing but the effects of shared blood, of magic that should never have intertwined.

But it’s a lie.

Because even before the blood, before the magic, before any of it… I wanted her.

The realization is like a stone dropping into my gut.

I watch her shift, her body arching slightly as she turns onto her back, exposing the delicate line of her throat, the curve of her collarbone, the slope of her waist beneath the sheets.

My claws flex.

She’s clueless as to what she’s done to me.

She’s clueless about what she’s become.

What I’ve made her.

I should wake her.

I should shake her until she hates me, until she understands what a mistake this is.

But instead, I reach out.

My fingers graze the side of her face, just once. Just once.

But once is never enough.

The moment I touch her, something inside me breaks.

Heat.

Pure, consuming, wildfire heat erupts in my veins, spreading through every inch of me.

She shifts beneath my touch, her breath catching.

I should pull away.

I should stop.

But she leans into me.

Suddenly, it is no longer about logic, no longer about restraint. It is about need.

Mine .