Page 54 of Disillusioned (A Lay of Ruinous Reign #2)

GARIN

H e should make them pay. Bastion. Casmir. Myrddin. He thought he’d get drunk on a couple of pretty girls and forget the woman for whom even the darkest parts of his soul bent the knee. Now, he was just drunk on blood and scotch. And Dragondew Mead, apparently.

And he was still ravenous, his cock now annoyingly stiff in his trousers.

He did not want to harm this girl for merely looking like Lilac. His idiot friends had probably offered her a hefty coin bag since it didn’t seem they’d entranced or spelled her. Even Bastion should have known this was a step too far.

What did they think would happen? That he wouldn’t figure them out? That he’d be tricked into somehow believing Lilac had managed to escape her gates and travel so far from her castle after her prolonged absence? What were they intending, besides solidifying this courtesan’s certain death?

He could snap her neck like he said he would.

Then, and only then, would her glamor dissolve.

He could slip undetected onto the balcony.

The staff would find his mess, the bodies, and then, and only then might the establishment seek to ban vampires, as they should have long ago.

His kind didn’t belong here. Not with drinks like this Dragondew Mead floating between unsuspecting hands and mouths.

Feeding from the vein was more ethical under Lorietta’s strict watch.

And if it were her, if the girl before him was the queen… it meant that Lilac had somehow belied his entrancement. How?

The night was cruel, the darkness crushing, and Garin would do almost anything for solace. To crawl into the light, bloodied and barren, where the vast forest and reason awaited him. Where he’d be held accountable for his actions.

But he was stuck here, cornered by a hunger and lust he’d never before experienced.

Garin swallowed, throat burning. A glamor of Lilac felt exceptionally personal, because in the split second it took for her to cut herself, understanding flooded his senses.

The girl shoved the wet scalpel against his hand, clumsily pushing it against his palm. He finally fumbled with it, an unwelcome chill rolling off his back when her fingers brushed his.

Garin brought it to his nose and inhaled, and several images flashed through his mind—a steaming loaf of speckled bread. A vase of dried Cornish lavender on a clean mantle. Sunlight streaming through a window, and a green armchair before a crackling fire.

He was going to kill her.

Garin’s stomach painfully lurched as she watched from the settee—he, transfixed on the blooming splotch of red on her skirts, and her, on him.

Slowly, her fingers tiptoed, bunching the fabric of her kirtle and revealing the gash just above her garter sheath.

A rivulet of blood trailed down, toward her inner thigh.

He’d lost her dagger and scalpel at some point, barely able to cling to his sanity. His restraint.

“What have you done?” The words escaped from a desolate place. From the husk of the person he was, the monster within already rejoicing for what he’d do next.

Her breath trembled, her words floating on air. “Perhaps it isn’t just blood you hunger for.”

Garin swallowed the saliva flooding his mouth as she shifted her skirts the rest of the way. Her pussy was glistening beautifully for him. His throat went dry as she trailed a trembling hand inward, past the hem of her skirts .

“Lilac,” he groaned in warning.

Her bright eyes danced at the sound of her name on his tongue, surprise flitting across her face and relieving that expectant, curated look of Lilac’s that this girl had replicated with uncanny precision.

Her cheeks still deepened in the most delicious shade of currants as he unabashedly took her in.

How he’d missed that look.

But her expression faltered as he rose to his feet, took a step back and braced himself against the mantle.

“This is impossible.” This couldn’t be his queen. Lilac could not be here, because if she was, it meant everything he’d feared as his thirst had grown in his cellar room, was true. That their time apart hadn’t dissolved whatever this connection was, like the witches said it would.

Before he realized what he was doing, Garin dropped to his knees.

The look on her face was hungry, none of the fearful hesitation that had been there before when he’d refused to entertain the possibility.

Her demanding smile was the last thing he saw before he slid his arms under her, dragging her forward.

She whimpered at the sudden movement, as if she had the right to be shocked at all after baring herself to him—letting blood for him. A daring offering.

He flattened his tongue against the soft skin of her inner thigh and dragged it upward, lapping the rivulet of blood along the self-inflicted stab wound.

She tasted like an oasis of all things absent: the week he and Bastion had spent in Roscoff trying to process the vampirism that plagued them, breathing in the ocean air for the first time, knowing that this was the seaside trading town his mother had intended to make their new life in.

Carts of cloth, salt, and wood.

She tasted like trips to the long-gone Paimpont bakery, whose owning family was killed in the Raid; warm nights in front of the fire, before memories of that mantle were stained in blood; drifting off in Aimee’s lap with a piece of warm bread in his hand.

She tasted like emerging from the Trecésson dungeon and feeling sunlight upon his face for the first time in two hundred years.

Lilac jerked, as if to shift herself against his mouth, but he wrapped his arms around the outsides of her thighs and secured her in place.

It was her .

It was her.

It was her .

Her blood was a lone beacon shone upon his sinking raft, his only options to drown in it or be swept away, forever lost by the tide.

He would not let her go. Not until he was finished with her.

First, he needed to heal her. She yelped as he sank his teeth into her without warning, right over her wound, her skin and flesh giving way like butter. He was close enough to her pussy that she could have ridden his face anyway. But he held her down.

“ Garin ,” she growled at the shock of pain, taking a fistful of his hair in her grasp; she tried to push him off at first, but after his first swallow, she let out a gasp and pulled him closer.

The relief he felt was immense. Her blood rushed into his mouth and down his parched throat, like warm milk on a harsh winter’s night.

Swallow after swallow, there was a shift in the atmosphere, and the world went quiet.

His ears were no longer ringing and his other senses were immediately relieved of her, no longer tainted in her essence; he could smell the embers of the fire crackling away behind them, the overpowering aroma that most certainly belonged to the bud and leaves of the Sea Holly.

The room was no longer stifling, and he could even feel a cooling breeze coming through the crack under the balcony door.

He swallowed once more, then carefully unsheathed his fangs before he could get carried away.

They both stared, panting, at the marks his teeth left; the slice she’d made with the scalpel was still there, but blood dripped more noticeably from the deep puncture holes he’d left.

His bite wound was messy, the skin around them already bruising.

He could wipe it all away in an instant, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the pooling red.

He wanted every last bit to himself.

Guilt ate at him. He was already feeling better, and she was feeding him from her thigh.

But there was no trace of fear or hesitation there, nor could he smell it on her.

Only encouragement and a dangerous excitement.

Quickly, Garin bent and ran his tongue over the marks, her curious gaze burning him.

He straightened, embarrassed, attempting to wipe his face off and ready to utter what semblance of an apology he could string together .

“Lilac,” he said, his face burning. Garin took her hands in his. “I’m not myself. Nothing has been right. I?—”

She hooked a finger beneath his chin, and forced it up. He finally looked at her, and she locked eyes with him. Her pupils swallowed him whole.

Her blood had quelled his need to feed, sobered him.

But another want surged within him—an effect of the Sea Holly, no doubt.

The plant’s effects should not have been this strong; he cleared his throat at the sudden urge to lift her from the chair and place her upon the four poster bed.

Pound her into the mattress. He forced his breathing to slow, silently reasoning with himself as he gently grasped her hand and lowered it from his face.

It didn’t matter, he thought, attempting to smother his worry with the fact that Lilac was safe.

She was here, in front of him. It didn’t matter how, they’d figure that out later.

She’d offered her blood to him in full transparency and he had taken it.

She was safe. He could finally think, breathe without tasting her at the back of his throat upon every tortuous inhale.

She is safe with me , he told himself again, his stomach knotting as the very nature of him, both man and monster, yearned to covet her for himself—the woman who belonged to the kingdom.

Bride. Eternal muse. Gilded pawn .

He might not have kingdoms or armies for her, but she had not yet seen an ounce of what his strategy or sanguine magic looked like at full power. It might frighten her. Whether kingdoms apart or with her in his grasp, Garin would never be released from the kind of torment she inflicted on him.

He cleared his throat, desperate to dislodge those thoughts. Both their minds were clouded with the Sea Holly. Enchantments and flora mixed together often fostered dangerous consequences.