Page 36 of Inked & Bloodbound

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks me in the eye, pulls the corner of her lips between her teeth, and reaches her hand out towards me. I’m not sure what to do, so I silently offer my own in return. She grasps it, threads her fingers through mine, and steadies herself. Then she shocks me by easing onto the couch and climbing on top of me.

I say nothing. I don’t want to break the spell. I had assumed the venom would have started to wear off by now. The amount I passed her from my lips would have yielded little more than a mild infatuation, maybe an erotic dream at best, but this feels like something else.

This feels real.

She hovers in the air for a moment, her knees pressing into my hips, then she lowers herself onto me. Pelvis to pelvis. I’m instantly hard as she pushes her palms into my chest and holds her face inches from mine.

We share breath for a few agonizing seconds, then she leans down and kisses me. It’s soft at first, but it quickly escalates to more. I rake my fingers up her back and into her hair, grabbing a fistful of the soft bundle at the base of her neck and pulling her closer to me.

The kiss is different from last time—way more urgent, like she’s trying to consume me.

When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard. Her eyes are dark with desire, pupils dilated as she stares down at me. The scent of her warm skin mingles with that intoxicating sunshine smell of her hair, and it’s driving me to the edge.

She still hasn’t said a word. Instead, she lets her body do the talking as she rocks her hips against me, and I bite back a groan. My hands find her waist, fingers digging into the soft cotton of her T-shirt and trying to hold her still as I try to maintain some semblance of restraint.

But when she leans down to kiss me again, deeper this time, her tongue sliding against mine, something inside me snaps. I need her. I’m dying of thirst, and I need to taste her. Not just her blood, but every part of her. To run my tongue along her thighs until I find the place where she’s sweetest.

Dio, you’re perfect,I think, lost in the sensation of her moving her body against me.

Her breath catches, and her thoughts flow into my mind like warm honey.I heard him againshe thinks.

She shouldn’t be able to?—

But I can.Her mental voice is breathy, amazed.How is this even happening?

I don’t know.I think as my hands tighten on her waist,I guess when you talk to the dead, the dead talk back?

The thought slips out before I can stop it, and her mind goes still.

The dead?There’s confusion in her mental voice, then a creeping realization.Cassini… How can you be…dead?

I try to pull back from the connection, but it’s too late. She’s already reaching deeper, and what she finds there makes her gasp aloud.

You’re so cold.The terror in her thoughts is sharp and panicked.You’re?—

She jolts back and stares down at me, my hair messed from her hands pulling at it, my wet, bitten lips still tasting of her. She squints, like she’s trying to let her eyes adjust in the dark, then her hand flies across her face as she stifles a scream, eyes bulging in horror.

Then she sees them. Two glistening fangs fully extended, sharp points gleaming though the darkness.

She stares at them before asking me the question I’ve been dreading since the moment I met her.

“What the fuck are you?”

12

LILY

The words hang in the air between us like an anvil dangling from a string, and I can’t take them back. Can’t unsee what I just saw—those gleaming white points that came from nowhere and caught the light like polished ivory. Sharp, predatory and absolutely terrifying.

Cassini hasn’t said a single word in at least a minute, so I ask him again, “What the fuck are you?”

His face is expressionless. His hands, which had been gripping my waist with ferocity a few moments ago, fall away like I’ve slapped him. His dark green eyes I’ve come to obsess over replaced by two rings of glowing amber.

“Lily—”

“Don’t.” I scramble backward on the couch, nearly falling off in my haste to put space between us. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, and every instinct is screaming at me to run. “Don’t you dare say my name. I don’t even know you. Who the fuck are you?Whatare you?”

He sits up slowly, like he’s trying not to spook a wild animal, and silently weighs his words. I don’t know how it’s possible, but thesharp points of his fangs have disappeared, and if I hadn’t just seen them with my own eyes, I might think I’d imagined the whole thing.