Page 99 of Lord of Bones

She released the breath she’d been holding.

I watched her face with an uneasy feeling hooking in my gut, but as the seconds passed the feeling was replaced with something warmer.

The mask slipped from her fingers, falling to the grass at her feet. Her stunned lips parted on the tiniest little“Oh…”

“Say something,” I urged.

Her eyes frantically flitted over scars that ran deep into my flesh. The deepest one was the gash that ran diagonally across my face from my temple, over my nose, down to the edge of my jaw. I couldn’t remember how I got the wound exactly, but I vaguely recalled that it involved a halberd.

“You’re fucking beautiful,” she said, her thunderstruck expression making my faint heartbeat thrum harder than it had since I was mortal.

Beautiful.How could she say that, when these same scars had driven Catherine to madness?

“Can I touch them?”

I gave a nod and her fingertips ghosted over my face, tracing the jagged flesh, stunned by the way she looked at me. Like my face was better than whatever image she’d formed in her mind.

The pad of her index finger stroked down the hooked ridged of my nose. “This is sexy.”

I grabbed her head in my hands and I brought my lips crashing down over hers in a bruising kiss. I poured myself into her, her lips softening against mine.

When I pulled back, a glowing silhouette of her visage—her soul in its purest form—emerged from her body like a shining ghost, still kissing me.

After a beat, I broke the kiss and all the color drained from Rayven’s face when she noticed the brand of my lips upon her soul’s. When the ghostly silhouette slipped back inside her, her eyelids drifted shut and I caught her in my arms as she fainted.

For several minutes, I stood there on the cliffside holding my raven-haired human close to my chest. Her body was limp in my embrace, her head slumped against my shoulder and her hair whipping against my cheek in the breeze.

I could feel her pulse against my skin and I tapped its beat between her shoulder blades as I stared out over the ocean—the first traces of the blood moon peeking over the horizon and staining the sea red.

Tonight was the All Hallow’s Eve ball, and at the stroke of midnight, she’d discover my twisted secret. Then every part of her would belong to me.

I hauled her up into my arms, cradling her close and reveling in the feel of her body against mine.

I stamped a kiss to her forehead, gazing down at her with dark reverence.

“You’ll be mine forever. Even as the world falls down, little human.”