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I traced her lips as she slept , and my heart swooped as a dreamy grin graced her pretty little mouth.

It would have been so easy to live in that moment for the rest of my life.

With my claws gingerly grazing her skin and a flicker of happiness appearing on her face.

Such an astoundingly tender and simple moment, yet it sharpened into pure perfection. Like her. A perfect, sweet creature.

Caught in the threshold between dreams and reality, I didn’t think of myself as such a depraved monster in the way I wanted her.

Especially now that she’d given in—now that she was mine.

I felt almost worthy of the light she carried.

If she could smile in her sleep for me, then perhaps one day I might truly earn it.

A low fire purred in the hearth, casting a golden glow on my bedroom walls and Astoria’s sleeping figure beside me.

My fingertip chased the border of light and shadow dancing over the creamy skin of her shoulder.

Minor scratches and love-bites from the night marked her flesh; wounds that echoed my name.

She had always been a melodious beacon of light in this dreary place, but marked as mine made her shine brighter. Glowing like a star drowning in a void.

I wanted that light for myself. To keep her by my side until the end of the world as my own personal sun against the dark of the night. And I would keep her. Not as one keeps a bird in a cage, but like a god on a pedestal.

Astoria sighed in her sleep, lashes fluttering with whatever dreams occupied her.

My hand continued stroking over her skin and admiring the evidence on her body that I’d had her.

All of her. Touching her was an obsession, and I couldn’t stop now that I had permission.

Feeling her supple, warm, and alive in my hands might be one of the few things left to live for.

That and feeling her unbelievably tight cunt on my knot every night.

After rutting her in the garden like an animal last night, she’d succumbed to the exhaustion of the entire ordeal.

The hunt, the fucking, being knotted. All firsts for her that had been agonizing to wait for.

Stretching her pussy and making her come each night had taken more self-discipline than I knew I had.

I should be congratulated for my restraint.

Once my knot subsided and my cock finally slipped from her swollen, drenched cunt I’d done the gentlemanly thing and carried her back inside.

Astoria remained in a fatigued daze as I washed her, then treated the minor injuries on her body.

The bite marks on her neck, the scratches on her ribs down to her hips, and not to mention her feet and back ravaged by the rough surface of the garden floor.

And now she was in my bed, where she’d always belonged.

With me.

As mine.

If only I could have stayed in bed with her forever.

Not only to fuck her again, because as much as she was made for me to pleasure and worship, she was beyond that primal act.

She was magical and celestial, an entrancing woman who drew me in as gravity pulls apples to Earth.

The simple pleasure of lying next to her, of rolling over and embracing her, astounded me.

It was an easy thing to enfold her into my arms and hold her tight.

To guard her against the nightmares that followed her from a past she refused to speak of.

As much as I wanted to dig those truths from the vault in her chest, I was content to steal this moment.

To feel her heart beating against me, to feel her little puffs of air, to soak in the warmth from our bodies entwined in the most vulnerable state imaginable.

A rustle on the side table interrupted the fleeting peace. The additional light from the glowing candles bounced across the opposite wall and heavy red drapes. Obstinance rose within me, and I tensed around Astoria, pretending that if I ignored the intrusion, it might go away.

“Master.”

I huffed and released the treasure in my bed. A potent, life-threatening glower skewered Domovoy. He flicked the tip of his tail and glanced away, as if unbothered by my seething rage.

“What is the meaning of this?” I rose from the bed, delicately extricating myself from Astoria.

She sighed and curled deeper into my blankets but remained asleep.

The air deflated from my lungs in an extended exhale as I shrugged on a robe.

Domovoy followed me to the sitting parlor adjoining my bedroom.

We only spoke once the door was secured behind me.

Domovoy leapt on the back of a red velvet couch. The candles on his head sputtered and blinked until he sat, curling his tail around his paws. His gaze cut to my bedroom door and back and his eye twitched. I wouldn’t give the frustrating imp the satisfaction of an explanation.

I held my stance, arms across the chest and unmoving save for the slight curling of my tail.

If the blasted cat was an unstoppable force, I was an immovable object.

His curiosity would get him killed. Though he wouldn’t voice the question, the change in my status with the mortal woman in our realm was obvious.

Our silent showdown lasted a mere moment before the shadow cat huffed and rolled his eyes. “If you must know—”

“Don’t drag this out,” I snarled. He wrinkled his nose as I began pacing in front of the parlor fireplace. “You wouldn’t have entered my bedroom if it wasn’t important. I have no patience for your games.”

“Testy, are we, master? I suspected you’d be rather relaxed after your nightly… activities.” The cat snicked while contorting into a long stretch. His needle-thin claws ripped into the velvet, and my upper lip curled at his abominable disregard.

“Spit it out!”

His silence froze me. The teasing glint faded from his eyes, and, for the first time, the house cat sighed. “A wizard was spotted.”

My jaw snapped shut as his statement punched through my gut.

An affliction spreading through Infernus in the shape of a man.

I swallowed down bitter denial, forced to face the calling of my responsibilities.

If I didn’t cleanse the source of dark magic corroding my realm, my father’s bones might climb from the grave to torment me worse than he did in life.

Duty clung to my neck and shoulders, but I refused to crumble under the weight of the expectations of the dead.

It was my realm, my home, after all. I had the influence to take a stand.

I cast one last lingering glance at my bedroom door.

And I had something brilliant and new worth fighting for.

“Give me the coordinates and prepare a small troop,” I ordered Domovoy. He leapt to the floor and scurried for the parlor door. “And when I’m gone,” he paused, ear twitching, “keep an eye on her.”

His candles briefly brightened as he nodded his head.

Astoria would be safe as long as she remained within the palace, but I didn’t know what to expect of her reaction after last night.

She would awaken to find me gone, and that made my stomach queasy.

More so than the possibility of facing dark magic.

A tender part of me wanted to sneak back into the room and kiss her goodbye.

I wouldn’t leave if I did.

I turned away from my private chamber and left.

A ruddy dawn breached the craggy ruins of the Astrid Valley.

Floating isles hovered over the lip of the valley, leashed to the land by ancient roots and vines breaking through the isle’s base.

Eroded monuments to fallen gods jutted out between colossal trees, marking the land with worn down evidence of demon history.

Time and nature chipped away at these fragments of Inferni ancestors until nothing but massive, ravaged ruins remained in fractured pieces, peeking through the ruining embrace of nature as it reclaimed the land .

Five scouts rode behind me on shadowy aether mares.

Hooves on dirt and broken remnants of stone roads interspersed with the scratchy rustling of branches in a silent wind.

A thin plume of smoke spiraled in the distance, pointing us in the right direction.

It wasn’t enough to distract my wandering mind.

We had a hefty distance before we reached the allegedly razed village.

Decades of my youth were spent exploring every nook and cranny of this valley and their ruins.

Even now I heard the echo of my father’s rough voice guiding me through the unseen paths and remarking on the history of our kind.

The rise and fall of kings and lords, the wars for power and glory, the magic infused in every plant and creature, and his favorite story; the tale of when he found a lost beauty in a world unlike her own—and claimed her.

Like father, like son.

Would he approve of me making the same mistake as him?

Astoria was an undeniable beauty. Lost and trapped in Infernus as my mother had been.

The endless cycle of history rose to repeat itself.

Though prickling doubts niggled at the soft tissue of my mind, whispering that the beauty in my castle wasn’t as mortal as my maternal half.

I had experience with a human for many years of my childhood where I learned their manners and habits.

I’d read reports of other humans who had fallen through a rift into Infernus in generations past. I’d scoured every page, every word in my mother’s notebook.

The woman I’d left in my bed wore a human mask, but I had to face the truth that there was something divergent about her.

If I had a lifetime to list all her adorable oddities, it still wouldn’t be enough time.

Not only her mannerisms, but also the fact she didn’t have a name.

Pair those contrasts with her reticence to speak of her past, and I had an unsolvable puzzle in my hands.