Page 56 of Storm of Shadows

As usual, she says nothing.

“So tell me, who did this to your face?” I say.

She clams shut her mouth. The girl is fucking stubborn.

“You realize I will find out?”

She glares at me.

“Fine,” I say, unable to help but glide my thumb along her jawline. Then I’m closing my eyes and urging the shadows from my veins, along my hands and my fingers to her face. I shiver myself when my magic connects with her skin, a tingling manifesting along my flesh.

I swim the shadows up to the injured tissue, calming and soothing it, returning it to normal. It must feel good because the tension in her jaw lessens and a soft sigh issues from her lips, her breath whispering across my face.

When I’m done, I open my eyes and examine her face. The bruising and swelling have gone and the color has returned to her cheeks. I keep holding her face in my grip and she stares up into my eyes, her pupils blowing wide.

It would be so easy to kiss her now, to drag her onto my lap. To take everything from her. But for some crazy reason, I want her to want this. I want her to want me.

“Better,” I whisper. It’s only now that my gaze meanders its way from her face and down to the rest of her body. She’s wearing a thick winter’s coat that I don’t recognize from before.

With some reluctance, I let go of her face.

“Take off your coat.” Alarm radiates across her features. I huff. “I’m not asking you to undress, sweetheart. But it’s warm in here.”

She swallows and I watch as she undoes the large buttons and shrugs the heavy garment from her shoulders. It’s erotic, like she really is stripping.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I’m acting and thinking like some inexperienced virgin.

I’ve had girls strip for me.Reallystrip for me. This isn’t the same. And yet I’m fucking turned on. Even more so when I discover what’s under the coat.

No, not lacy underwear. No stockings or corsets.

Not even the fucking awful academy uniform or the clothes that were no better than rags that she showed up in five days ago.

No, just a plain blue dress. Nothing special, not like the slinky things the girls wore to the common room party.

But it still has my blood heating. It’s the way it hugs her frame, revealing curves I had no idea the girl possessed – fuck, tits I had no idea she possessed. I realize she’s not as skinny as I thought. She’s lean. Muscle and bone. An active girl.

The dress is also short: a strip of bare thigh flashing my way.

“You understand what’s required of a thrall, right?” I say, my voice heavy in my own ears, like it’s laden with lust.

Why the hell do I find this girl so fucking attractive? Is that part of it? The reason?

I wonder if that flash of a vision was even real – if I created it in my own head simply to give myself an excuse to lay my hands on her.

“No,” she says obnoxiously, making it clear any cooperation is going to be given reluctantly. Fine by me, I can play that way too.

“It’s pretty simple really. We give the orders and you follow them.”

“I don’t want to be a thrall.”

I sigh dramatically, pull out a chair and sit myself down, leaning forward with my forearms resting on my knees so I’m eye-level with her. “It doesn’t matter. You’re ours now. And you’re going to do as we say.”

“I’m not,” she says simply.

I decide to humor her. “Why not? Why are you so dead set against this?”