Page 70 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Melody

I slowly walk to Caryan’s quarters, Ronin silently accompanying me.

“My lady,” the door greets me as it swings open.

Ronin waits until I step in, then walks away. The door closes behind me with a thud. I can’t help the feeling of being locked in.

I pause there, my ears and my instinct straining for Caryan. My gaze falls on a huge, black sword leaning against the wall. The very same sword Blair held to my throat on the mountain. So similar to the one my mother tried to split Caryan in half with. Next to it on the floor, still huge but so much smaller than the sword, is the black arrowhead the Nefarian woman threatened Caryan with.

I tear my gaze away from them and venture deeper into his apartment.

I find Caryan in the room to my left, standing with his back to me in front of the window, hidden by darkness.

“Come here,” he says without turning.

I slowly cross the distance. When he finally turns to me, his expression holds the same bleak coldness I found in his mind, mirrored in his eyes. His aura is unreadable.

Something about him is wrong, I know. I feel it, in me.

“I want you to take off your clothes,” he says.

My blood ices over. My heartbeat suddenly thunders in my ears. I step away from him .

He follows.

I bite my lips, not daring to make a sound as his power enshrouds me. Not that gentle kind hum that caressed my skin the previous times, but bristling and prickling, biting my flesh and underneath it like a writhing, raging creature. As if it wants to crawl into me.

I can feel my magic flaring, trying to push it away, silver light running under my skin. But his magic just closes its fangs around it, biting deep into my magic’s flesh until my magic succumbs, holding very, very still.

“Do I have to say it again?” His voice is laced with impatience. Coldness. His power, a merciless prickling that licks up to my wrists, harsh and scolding. A mixture of lightning and dark fire. He has been angry before, but I have never seen him like this. So cold . So inhuman.

My throat tightens as I say very quietly, “I… I don’t know how to… how to do this . I’ve never done it before.” I barely force the words out.

He lets out a derisive snort, almost a snarl, that slithers over my raw skin and makes me want to curl up in shame.

I flinch when he grabs my chin again, tilting my head back.

“No, you do not. Apparently,” he says, though his voice is not mocking, but tender. Tender like a bruise.

I try to rein in my thundering heartbeat, my trembling, but fail when he runs his hand along my collarbone, pushing my wide shirt off my shoulder. “Now, take that off.”

I do. And just like the night after he saved me from that worm, I hold it in front of me, as if it could shield me. Protect me.

“All your clothes,” he says.

My pants. My underwear.

I can’t. I shake my head. “Please, Caryan—”

“That was an order.” His words are relentless.

He will keep me in his bedroom . Caryan’s whore, they called me. I didn’t want to listen. No, I didn’t dare to.

I whisper before I can think, “Please. Please don’t do this. Not tonight. Please give me some time,” I beg with all I have .

I press my hands against his chest, more reflex than anything as he steps up to me, his power engulfing me once more. His hand finds my cheek, his fingers caressing me so tenderly I close my eyes, suppressing tears. He leans in and I shudder when I feel his breath on my neck, right over my pulse. My heartbeat flutters under his lips.

His voice is impossibly gentle when he murmurs, “This is not about sex.”

My eyes fly open, up to his, simmering clear and bright like a hellish flame; bottomless. I’m not sure what I find in his face. But I know I don’t like it. He looks almost pained, and my heartbeat stutters into an even faster, violent beat.

Instinctively, I try to wrench free, but he just yanks me close, between his legs. His shadows pushing me against the wall, twining around my limbs, my ribs, my throat.

“Do not fight me. You’re a liability like this.” He spits the words at me, like an insult.

“Like what?” I manage to snap at him.

“Weak. Defenseless.”

My throat tightens. I had it all wrong. He’s not going to make me stay for the night. He’s going to do what Gatilla did to him, over and over. What I saw in his mind. The pain I felt like my own.

“You’re going to chain me to an altar and rape me?” My voice comes out all wrong, my breathing too fast, matching my galloping heartbeat.

He looks like I’ve slapped him. “I would never do any of those things.”

“But I saw what—”

“What you saw was me chained to an altar and her inking the tattoos in my flesh,” he cuts me off. “And sequences of me and her in the bedroom. Those were two entirely different things.”

“And you’re not going to do that ?” I’m proud to manage to speak the words, to deliver them with some sarcasm, although a part of me is falling apart.

His expression darkens. “No. Because of the bond between us, I can give you some of my power without having to mend it with your flesh. This process is going to hurt, but you will get used to it,” he says. Cold, dead horror slices through me, splitting me in half. Consuming me.

“No. Please, no! I don’t want that,” I bare my teeth as his magic again comes for me.

“I will not allow you to die on me!” His voice is suddenly a primal growl that comes from somewhere deep in his throat.

And I know he has long made the decision. There is nothing I can do as the shackles pull tighter, his magic swamping me, invading every part of me. Bristling and biting, searing me from the inside. A burning like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

I shake my head as tears well in my eyes. “I fucking trusted you!”I scream as he steps up to me once again, the magic a thousand times worse when our bodies touch, amplified as if I’m a wildfire and he is gasoline. “I don’t want your evil magic!”

“Do not fight me, Melody. I have to,” he snarls into me.

But hells, I am fighting him, his damn, dark magic. Kicking and biting and clawing at him, my teeth finding flesh and ripping until I taste blood. My magic desperately scratching and straining against his magic, but he’s too much. His magic is too much. Way too powerful. I sensed it the first time in the desert. He is endless.

My vision blurs as his power shoots and runs through me so wildly that I become pain. Just pain, as everything disintegrates.

My body turns numb.

Silent tears stream down my face. I can no longer hold them back, no matter how hard I’m trying.

My body, my very soul, are aching from this . From what he’s doing to me, the crack deepens every second it goes on. A pain beyond something physical but so deep I don’t know where it starts and where it ends. Shadows and crackling lightning flaring under my skin, becoming so painful, so elemental as it tears my innermost being apart.

I will survive. I survived Lyrian, I will survive this too .

It’s those thoughts I cling to that tether me, that don’t make me lose my mind. My sanity.

It’s all-consuming, the pain, breaking more than just my heart. Shredding everything in their path.

My senses barely remember how I ended up on his bed—the bed I slept in, feeling so safe, his scent lingering like a callous mocking. But when the pain finally subsides, he’s above me. His body is so heavy and huge over mine. Only hard muscles, pressing me deep into the sheets, his hand holding my wrists over my head.

Somewhere I register that I’m shivering under him like mad, worse than I did on that mountain when I was fighting the cold. Now I’m sweat-slicked and feverish.

Eventually, he lets go of me and sets my body free.

I curl up on my side, my fingers digging so hard into the sheets they turn bone white.

I know he’s watching me, standing in the dark at the foot of the bed. Looking down on me. But I don’t dare glance at him.

My heart is still beating, despite the fact that it feels like it’s been shattered so thoroughly, and I almost wonder if magic alone makes it beat on.

My whole body aches from what he has done. Every part of me feels sore, every inch ravished, violated, broken.

And empty.

I watch his white, powerful body when he turns his back to me and walks out of the room. I must have torn his shirt, because it lies next to me on the bed, discarded, shredded.

The silence that follows closes in on me. The emptiness as soon as he left me.

I get up, the ground under my feet unreliable. I look down at myself, still in my pants and my bra, yet I couldn’t feel more naked. More bare. More alien. As if this isn’t me I’m looking at, but someone else. It’s only then that my eyes rest on my wrist—there’s still the tattoo of my bargain, but it looks different. Ornaments and runes spread around it now, rimmed with black and gold tendrils, shifting.

Runes . Those are runes from his body. I touch them, and as if on cue, a wave of darkness shudders through me, rattling me so deeply I pull my hand back from my skin, eyes wide. But the new, dark force keeps undulating along my bones, filling the emptiness in me.

What the hell?

Slowly, so slowly, I follow him to the living room.

Caryan stands in front of the open window. His back is still to me. He’s watching the stars.

My gaze goes to my shirt on the floor. Like an article that belongs to another person. How long did his magic run through me like a wildfire? Burn me from the inside out? It felt like months, years, but it might only have been moments.

I snatch up my shirt and wriggle it over my head. Then, before he can turn to me, I run. Toward the door, toward the carved head I’ve spoken to so many times.

The blueish flames in its eye sockets jump to life.

“Please, please let me go.”

The flames are smaller, as if muted. As if sad, it says quietly, “I cannot, my lady.”

Tears start to stream down my face again. I sink onto the ground, my fingers splayed against the door. “Please… he will hurt me.” Hurt me even more.

I know he won’t stop until he’s done. Not when he made his decision.

“I cannot disobey the wishes of my lord, my lady.” I swear the words are tinged with regret as the flames die.

I turn and spot Caryan in the doorway, his eyes crimson with my blood. I drop my gaze to the floor. I didn’t realize that he bit me. I bring my hands to my lips, finding blood there. I have the vague memory of sinking my teeth into his shoulder to stifle my cry as his magic shot and ran wild through me.

I wish I could recoil into myself, melt into the wall.

Instead, I get up and turn to him. Still avoiding looking into his eyes, I repeat the same words I’ve just said to the door, my voice sounding foreign to me.“Please let me go. ”

I watch him come closer, his bare feet moving soundlessly over the ashy wood. He pauses a yard away from me. “I’m not yet done.”

I flinch at the sound of his voice. So deep. So raw.

The truth resonates within me, in every fiber, writhing along my bones and curling around my soul. I can feel his mind again, his decision as if it was my own. Feel this dark… bond, as he called it. This dark thing between us. Stronger than it has ever been. He will do this again and again. He only survived because he was an angel. I can’t get through this again. I’m only a half-elf. I won’t survive.

Or maybe I will, but it will be a broken survival. Shattered.

“Let. Me. Go.”

“I cannot.”

Fear renders me speechless. Fear so deep it is bottomless. It paralyzes me.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t think as he comes for me again.

And somehow, this is far worse than with Lyrian. Because Caryan is a force of nature. Nothing can stop him. I didn’t understand it fully, not really. But I do now, having learned it the hard way.

My gaze goes to the runes on his body, to the tattoo shifting over his chiseled, hard muscles that pressed against me just moments ago.

The runes on his chest, shifting, moving. Alive .

And I suddenly know their meaning. I can make out every individual character within the ornaments they’re embedded in. I can read the power they hold. The deep, raw, ancient magic that has been formed into symbols and bound by ink and blood. Almost as powerful as the flute I did not find.

I can make out those my mother tried to destroy. She picked the most powerful of them. The sad irony doesn’t escape me. I wonder whether she felt the same before she tried to kill him. Whether she felt so helpless, so lost, as desperate as I?

“Do not—”

The words die in my throat as Caryan stretches out his hand, running his knuckles over my cheek, his magic curling around him like dark flames made of smoke. Tender, gentle, as it had been in so many other moments.

“I cannot let you die, do you understand?”

I shake my head, unable to find my voice.

He clenches his teeth, his eyes flickering. “You almost died on me on that mountain because you’re so weak. So fragile. I cannot allow this. I cannot let you live in a world as dangerous and cruel as this one, defenseless as you are.”

“You said my magic showed. That I would learn. That it would become stronger. We can wait.” My voice sounds strained, shaky. Pleading. Desperate.

“It can take a century for a fae to fully develop their power. War is coming. I do not have the luxury of time. Forgive me.”

His hand runs along my neck, down to my collarbone. So gentle I feel sick.

Then, without a warning, it starts again. I clench my teeth as his magic again laces with my bones. Shatters me from the inside, just to create me anew.

Again, I fight him. I try to kick him, to push him. His magic only drives me into the wall once again, his body against mine again. I bite him again, sink my teeth into his throat until I taste blood, my nails shredding his skin as his unholy power eats me from within.

Something in me opens its eyes then. My magic, but no longer. My magic, laced with his, woven together, streaks of silver and black. I can feel it, his magic running along mine, interlaced, melded together, but mine now. I can feel the runes on my wrist, powerful, and my new magic drawing from them.

It surges in answer through my veins, through my blood. Flaring through my fingers right into his chest. Undiluted, silvery light laced with his blackness and lightning. Stronger than ever. A monstrosity.

His eyes widen. He staggers back from me, clenching his teeth, flashing them at me in pain. Then he looks down at my hands still on his chest, burning away his skin. I can see his ribcage opening, his bones shining through. His beating heart.

The sight almost tears me apart. Makes me sick to my stomach. The expression on his face is even worse.

No anger. No hate. No fury.

No. For a second, I think the corners of his mouth lift into the faintest hint of a smile.

I pull my hands back. Horrified at myself. By what I just did.

I never wanted that.

But just like that, his skin, his bones, everything starts to knit itself back together. Slowly, but healing already.

I won’t have long.

My fingers close around the hilt of the black sword.

With a last glance at him, I run. But not towards the door, but toward the window.

I spread my arms and—

Jump.

Falling, I swallow the pearl Arbor gave me.