Page 3 of Hunger in His Blood (Brides of the Kylorr #3)

CHAPTER 3

KALDUR

W hen I stepped inside the room, I heard a sharp sniffle though I didn’t see her.

“Erina,” I called out, my eyes zeroed in the high-backed chair that was hiding her from view.

I heard the catch in her throat and what sounded like her patting her cheeks. I frowned.

A crown of dark red hair popped out behind the chair, plaited into a messy braid that hung over her shoulder, though it couldn’t contain a few wild, wavy tendrils that had escaped it. Her eyes—glassy brown now—were wide with disbelief and her face was a bright pink, mottled with splotches across her round cheeks and down her neck.

She’d been… crying . I rubbed at my chest again, my wings going a little restless behind me with that knowledge.

“Kaldur,” she greeted breathlessly, though she seemed too shocked to stand from her kneeling position. I paused, the sound of my name jarring and surprising falling from her lips. Her face flamed a deeper red, and she quickly corrected, “ Kyzaire . My—my apologies. I—I didn’t mean…”

Kyzaire was a word in the Krynn language meaning “High Lord.” A respectful term that I heard more than I heard my own true name.

Truthfully, I preferred hearing the shock of my own name from her. It was refreshing. Something I didn’t expect. Something that wasn’t quite forbidden but that toed the line of it…and that piqued my interest.

Yet I couldn’t quite ignore the way my nostrils burned as I drew nearer.

“May I ask you something?” I asked.

She nodded, though she didn’t seem like she was quite present . Like she couldn’t understand how I could suddenly appear in this room or how we could be in this room together.

“Why do you wear that awful perfume, Erina?” I asked, flashing her a small smile to take the sting out of my words.

She blinked her glassy eyes. She really was quite pretty, I realized with a start, in that innocent kind of way, which had never been my type. And her being a keeper most certainly made her off limits, despite what my brothers believed I did with their keepers when I visited the different provinces.

It was a High Lord’s responsibility to care for the people under their employ. I would never involve myself with a keeper—at my own home or at my brothers’—for that reason alone. Though I had certainly fucked my way through some of the noble Houses in the last couple years and had my fair share of dalliances in different provinces, they’d always been outside my own keep.

“My…my perfume?” she repeated, slowly seeming like she was returning to herself. “It was a gift. One I promised to wear every day. I didn’t realize it was so…so overwhelming to the Kylorr. I should have known better—you have much better senses than we do. It’s just cheap, you see. He couldn’t afford anything else. And I never minded it.”

Ah . A lover of her own, then .

“And the smell, it reminds me of what I imagine the garden forests of Noxily would smell like.”

My brow furrowed as I watched her. Noxily? Was that off planet? I’d never heard of it, and I’d heard of a lot of places, had studied a lot of places.

“Noxily?”

The keeper’s face went brighter, and I got the sense that she hadn’t meant to say that. “Noxily is, um, a world of mine.”

My brows rose, and I slid my arms across my chest, a flicker of amusement building in my chest. “A world of yours? Do you have many?”

“No, I write stories. Illustrated stories. With my own drawings. I’ve done it since I was a child. Noxily is a world I created. Me and Luc did actually. We would dream up all these things, and it grew and grew. And it became something more. And suddenly it became everything, how we got through. And…”

She trailed off, and I found my gaze rapt on her, watching the way her mouth formed words, the way her eyelashes swept down, how the flush grew and grew down her neck. I studied her again…and then again, trying to find something I didn’t know I was even looking for. I frowned.

“Sorry, Kyzaire ,” she said, throwing me a smile that was both disarmingly bright and mildly desperate, as if she would do anything to disappear, to get away from me. My lips parted, having never seen a smile quite like it.

And suddenly my mind caught on Erina, this keeper under my employ, and it held. I feared when that happened because when my attention was caught on something, I didn’t let it go.

“I’m almost finished cleaning the glass, but I’ll come back later to?—”

“No,” I said quickly. “Stay.” I smiled when she looked startled. “Please.”

Her eyes flickered back and forth between my own before they dropped away, as if remembering herself. “Of course, Kyzaire .”

I remembered why I was there.

“Erina. Look at me,” I asked. Slowly, her gaze rose, though it was quizzical. “I wanted to apologize to you for what happened earlier this afternoon.”

Her cheeks blushed harder, redder than I thought was possible for a human. “There’s no need to?—”

“But there is,” I said. There would be some who believed it wasn’t my place to need to apologize to keepers. But I was my mother’s son, and I believed otherwise. “I didn’t know anyone was in this section of the keep. We should have been more discreet, and I’m sorry that I put you in an uncomfortable position, one you never should’ve been put in as one of my keepers. The…well, the proverbial fog has cleared, and I’m ashamed of how I handled that.”

Erina’s lips were parted as she stared at me.

“What is it?” I asked after a long moment of quiet.

“Nothing. It’s just that…no one has ever apologized to me before. It’s strange. I don’t…I don’t know what to say.”

My lips quirked, but a bloom of sadness followed. “You usually decide to accept the apology or to reject it.”

“Then I accept it,” she said slowly. “But there is no need for an apology. I was lost in thought and didn’t see anyone enter the room, so I didn’t think to knock. This is your home, Kyzaire . You are free to, um, enjoy it however you wish.”

A sweet sentiment and yet…

“That’s where you’re wrong. This might be my keep, but I do share it with many, including yourself. It won’t happen again,” I told her. My gaze went down to the floor, at the broken chunks of pottery from the green vase Lydrasa had purposefully broken. “Let me help you with this.”

I crouched and began to sweep the shards into a large pile with the sides of my palms .

“No, it’s all right, Kyzaire . I’ll do it,” Erina said quickly.

“I insist.”

“It’s just that I—I have a system,” she continued, sounding nervous as she crouched opposite of me. “I’m sorting the pieces, you see.”

My gaze flicked over to the small pile that was in fact grouped in a peculiar way. I leveraged her another look, brow furrowing. “You’re…sorting the pieces?”

“I’m going to try to repair it,” she answered, sniffling once more as she snagged a large piece away from my hand and placing it next to another piece in her collected grouping. My lips almost twitched.

“I’ll have Maudoric replace it with another—it’s no bother. No one even comes in here,” I dismissed.

“But I do,” she said quietly. “I… This was my favorite vase in the keep.”

The soft confession made me pause.

“This green,” she said, handing me a larger shard. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think? And I’ve never seen its likeness. It’s unique. A peculiar blend of indigo blue and soft gold, maybe a dab of maroon.”

My eyes observed the green, which to me looked like any other shade of green. But realization was dawning. “You want to keep the vase.”

Her cheeks flooded again. She rushed to say, “Not to steal it! It would remain in the keep. Besides…even if it’s a little broken, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful again.”

A little broken?

I laughed, a loud, booming laugh that felt like it was pulled from my core. When it tapered off, I heard her hard swallow.

“Then how would you like me to sort them?” I asked, gesturing to the pile I’d just swept with the shard she’d given me.

“I’ll do it,” she insisted.

“Don’t trust me? ”

She moved forward to sweep back some of the pile toward herself, as if that was answer enough. I realized this exchange was enjoyable . It was?—

I froze.

My skin wasn’t buzzing. That restless energy was calmed . Like those blissful moments after sex when my mind was quiet though alert and my body felt like my own again. Those were the moments I chased, and I felt it right then. In this room. With this human keeper.

Maybe her perfume has drugged my mind into a stupor, came the ridiculous thought.

If that was the case, I would smother myself in it for the rest of my life. Who needed to breathe when I would rather feel like I wasn’t coming out of my own skin day and night?

I heard her sharp hiss as she was collecting the shards up. Her hand jerked back quickly out of reflex, and then she peered down at it.

“You cut yourself?” I asked, though my blood began to rush, making my words seem muted even to my own ears.

A thin red line of dark blood appeared over the surface of her palm.

The scent of it hit me before the realization did.

Her blood smelled like everything I’d imagined it might. Like it was the very thing I’d been searching for my entire life. The overwhelming rightness of it was sublime. The scent tingled over my tongue, and I nearly groaned even as dread and dismay began to rise.

Raazos’s blood, I thought, my fangs elongating quickly enough that I cut my own damn lip, venom already dripping.

“ Fuck, ” I cursed, feeling the warmth of my blood bloom.

Suddenly I knew why the buzzing in me had calmed. Because of her .

The Kylorr discovered their blood mates—their kyranas —in different ways. Some were more sensitive to their mate’s calling than others. Azur, my eldest brother, hadn’t realized that Gemma, his wife, was his kyrana until he’d tasted her blood for the first time. Kythel had had his suspicions about Millie when he’d first met her in a blood-giver establishment based purely off her scent…though he hadn’t known for certain until the first feeding.

But me?

This human woman—a keeper in my employ—was mine . My blood mate. My kyrana .

I only needed a whiff of her blood to know that with the utmost certainty.

And I wished I had never stepped foot in this room because of it.