Page 37 of The Crimson Princess (The Ravengale Chronicles #1)

Chapter twenty-six

K ing Toren. King Killian. A fight to the death .

That nightmare haunts me for hours upon hours, and I wake to a sitting position, my breathing ragged.

My gaze sweeps around the room to find Toren nowhere in sight, my fingers curling around the blankets that have somehow found their way on top of me.

Outside the window there is nothing but a thick heavy darkness, but for a splinter of sunlight promising a new day.

My heart is racing and I have no idea why other than I feel as if time is sliding away, as if I’m supposed to be doing something other than sleeping.

As if I’m about to lose everything and I have no idea how to stop it from happening.

The sounds of water running tugs my gaze to the right, where an archway leads into the bathroom which I already know from earlier visits to be magnificent.

Throwing away the blankets, I push to my feet and pad that direction.

Stepping through the archway, I bring the double black sinks into view where they sit atop of a long pedestal, a cluster of dangling gold hued lights aglow overhead.

The egg-shaped black tub is luxury waiting where it sits in front of another floor-to-ceiling window that seems to actually hug a hillside, a fireplace ready to burn warm beside it.

Another time, I’d be tempted.

The shower spray smashes steadily behind a black stone to my right, where I can feel Toren’s presence, and I walk that direction, lexing away my gown.

There is no hesitation in me as I step behind the wall and though I know he feels me too, he knows I’m here, I find him standing with his hands pressed to the stone, his chin dipped low.

Water runs over his warrior body, torment carves in every hard line of his existence, and it guts me to know that I’m at least a portion of the source.

Him saving me did not come without sacrifice of more than his blood. No matter how he downplays the risks he took by bringing me to Bloodstone, those dangers exist, some of which are most likely native to his own world, and impossible for me to understand.

I close the space between us, and duck beneath his arm, placing myself between him and the wall, my hand finding his chest where his heart thunders beneath my touch.

I don’t ask what’s wrong or what I can do to help.

I know what’s wrong, and I have no answers to solve our problems. War is coming.

It all but bleeds from the universe, and it feels as if at any moment we will transform from lovers to enemies, and neither of us knows how to stop it from happening.

And for now, we don’t have to try.

The darkness of the worlds around us transforms into the darkness of our need.

Toren drags me to him and cups my head, his mouth seeking out mine, kiss rough with demand, the gentleness of before gone.

Eager to show him that the delicate state of my injured body is no more, my hand closes around his thick erection where it presses to my hip.

He groans into my mouth and rotates me, pressing me into the corner of the shower.

His hands are all over me, and I’m drowning not in the water flowing from overhead, but in lust for this man.

He lifts my leg, his fingers stroking into the slick heat of my arousal, my sex clenching around his fingers that he gives and then destroys me as he takes them away.

In answer to my frustrated moan, he cups my neck and drags my mouth to his, tasting me with the hunger of a wild animal even as he answers the emptiness inside me he alone has created.

He slides his cock along the seam of my body and finally, finally, presses inside me. I gasp against his mouth as he fills me, as he drives deep, his teeth scraping against the side of my neck that was never injured, and I can feel the hunger in him, feel the thirst.

“Do it,” I pant out. “Do it, Toren.”

His teeth sink into my neck, and sensation roars through my body, pleasure, so much pleasure, as if his bite is an aphrodisiac.

He drinks deeply and I have no sense of time, or even space, but when his mouth finds mine, the blood between us stirs a deeper hunger in me.

I kiss him as if I’m starving for the taste of him and it on our lips and our bodies respond, rocking, grinding with as much desperation as our kisses.

Somehow, we end up on the floor with me on top of him, his eyes raking over my breasts as they bounce.

His hands travel all over me, his fingers rough on my nipples, and I’m coming to know it must be the vampire in me, but I like it this way.

I like it his way. When my sex clenches, when I absolutely shatter, when we shatter, the rough sound that escapes his lips and look of primal release on his face are the sexiest things I’ve known in my short life.

I collapse on top of him, my face buried in his neck, my heart trying to slow, but still racing wildly.

My mind goes to the moment his teeth had sunk into my neck and my skin heats, and my nipples pucker with full arousal.

Toren seems to know, his hand sliding up and down my back, and settling between my shoulder blades. “You okay, princess?”

Am I okay?

I’m something.

We’re something.

We’re different now. I can feel it and I don’t really understand it. I push to a sitting position, bracing myself on his shoulders, and the moment my eyes meet his eyes, there’s a pump of awareness between us. He feels the shift between us, too. It’s a deeper connection, a deeper intimacy.

Another flash of him biting me, and my hand instinctively finds my neck where I find no wound. “How am I healed?” I whisper .

“Magic, of course,” he says and somehow, from a full sitting position, in a display of his extreme strength, he manages to stand and take me with him.

He sets me on my feet and I’m still not over my fully healed neck. “What magic? How?”

“Not actually magic, but just body chemistry. My saliva carries the ability to heal the wounds I open.”

We’re naked. Fully naked and I feel nothing but right with Toren. I am ridiculously comfortable and fully exposed with the king I’ve dreamed will kill my father. It’s a horrible thought I shove aside and focus on the little time I have left with Toren.

“I can’t bite you like you can me so I suppose I can’t heal you, either.”

“You’d be surprised what you can do for me.” His voice is low and raspy. “We don’t have the time I wish we did. I want to take you to the city and show you something before daylight.”

“It’s later than you think,” I say. “I could tell the sun was rising when I woke up.”

“Sunrise lasts three hours in Bloodstone.” He lexes a fluffy towel he wraps around me while another appears around his waist.

“That’s unique.”

“Not to us, but there are differences between worlds,” he explains, leading me out of the shower and turning to face me. “Just as is the case with Ravengale, there’s a great deal of cultural crossover between our realm and the human realm.”

“I know how that happened for us. We’re their protection. How did it happen for Bloodstone? Did you hunt there?”

“Yes, that happened, years ago, during my father’s time.”

I can sense he waits for me to react in some horrid way, but there are horrors in the history of every race. “I assumed or they wouldn’t have tales of vampires and vampire hunters.”

There’s a flare of approval in him, but he says no more on the topic. “Dress like you’re on Earth and you’ll fit in.” A moment later, he’s fully dry and dressed in black jeans, a snug black T-shirt, and combat boots .

I follow his lead, and dress to mimic his attire, eager to blend in when I’m already the outsider in Bloodstone. Toren captures my hand and walks me to him. “Ready?”

“Where are we going?”

“My home in the city.”

“I haven’t even seen this home.”

“I know, but I really need you to understand my world before you leave and that happens in the city.”

The way he wanted my father to understand years before. I’m the future queen and this morning is all about preventing me from ever thinking I would attack his world. “I’m not him, Toren.”

He strokes his hand down my hair. “I know that, Satima.”

“Do you?”

“How else can you influence your father to avoid war if you don’t understand who you’d be fighting?”

There is truth to his words I wish didn’t exist. “Will there be anyone else there?”

“Not yet, but you will meet some of those closest to me before the day is over.”

I offer a small nod of acceptance and Toren blinks us out of the bathroom.

We reappear inside a living room with soaring ceilings and leather furnishings, the dim glow of warm lights illuminating a wall with a fireplace.

But just like in the bedroom in his mountain home, the front wall is a window, this one arched and towering fifty feet high.

Beyond it is a city of lights and sky-high buildings, the tallest of all in the center, a steepled point at the top.

“It’s one of our military training facilities,” Toren explains.

I glance up at him. “There are more?”

“Many more.”

Stunned and spellbound by this revelation and the vast city before me, I close the space between me and the window and press my hands to the glass. Toren appears beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

“We’re like an ancient village compared to you. ”

“We have villages that look as ancient as yours. Some of our kind prefer that way of life. Think of it like the human realm you lived in for ten years. There are towns that look nothing like the big cities.”

I rotate to face him, and he leads me to the loveseat that faces the window where we sit down. “What do you want to ask?”

“My father wants all of this for himself.”

“He wants to call it his, yes, but I’d never submit to a king who rules as differently than I do, nor to one who tried to kill me after I saved him and his gales.”

“Explain that. Tell me more.”