Page 46

My first impulse is to go to him, but I hesitate. Something in the set of Kiaran’s shoulders, the tilt of his head, stops me cold. The shadows cling to him, undulating tendrils wrapping around his legs and torso as if to pull him under. To claim him as one of their own.

But it’s his hands that make dread crystallise in my veins.

Blood slicks his fingers, weaving scarlet ribbons that drip onto the stone floor with a steady plink, plink, plink .

Our eyes lock, and a shudder wracks through me. Kiaran’s nostrils flare, scenting the tang of my blood.

For a single, suspended moment, his expression ripples. A war between the male I know and the monster wearing his skin. Between control and the base impulse to rend, to break, to feast.

The monster loses. Barely.

“Stay back,” he grits out, voice strained.

I lift my hands, palms out. “Are you all right?”

A laugh scrapes out of him, harsh as broken glass. “No. You’re bleeding.” His attention snags on the darkening fabric at my shoulder, my side.

“Courtesy of the Morrigan.” I nod toward his gorestreaked hands, steeling myself. “Is that . . . yours?”

Kiaran’s fists clench. “I don’t know. She made me—” He swallows.

Shakes his head like he’s trying to dislodge the memory.

“I killed you. At least, I thought I did. I’m not sure what’s real anymore.

” His gaze darts to the mirrors hemming us in, and he drags a hand down his face. “Why are we in your damned cell?”

Because the Morrigan knows it’s the one place guaranteed to unravel me, where I was broken open. Where all my soft, secret parts were hauled out and left to rot, to fester. To make me desperate enough to take her deal.

With a sick lurch, I realise she’s been doing the same to Kiaran. She’s dismantling his control.

“How long?” I ask. “How long has she had you?”

Time is fluid in the Morrigan’s realm. She could have had him for days. Weeks. Each second an eternity, an unmaking—

Kiaran lunges. There’s no other word for it—for the way he devours the space between us in two long strides, shadows billowing in his wake.

I scramble back on instinct, shoulder blades slamming into cool glass. Trapped.

He braces his hands on either side of my head. This close, I can see the threads of violet in his silver irises. Smell the rain and ruin on his skin.

“Kiaran,” I breathe. “It’s me.”

His head dips. Nostrils flaring as he drags in a breath. “Prove it,” he snarls. “Prove you’re real. Prove I haven’t finally lost my fucking mind.”

I swallow past the sudden tightness in my throat. Slowly, I reach up to brush his hair off his brow. He shudders but allows the touch. Allows me to skim my fingers down his cheek, the pale column of his neck. To press my palm flat over his thundering heart.

“Seven months after we met,” I begin, fighting to keep my voice steady, “we got caught in a downpour outside Old Town. It was mid-autumn, unusually warm. The Meadows were more lake than field.”

Kiaran goes still. Hardly even breathing.

“I was giddy on the hunt and the rain. Kicked off my boots to dance through the puddles like a mad thing.” I inch forward. “When I looked back, you were watching me. And the expression on your face . . .”

I trail off. Let the silence stretch taut between us, heavy with memory. With all the unspoken things carved into who we are, the secret language that needs no words.

“I used to lay awake for hours trying to decipher that look.” Softer now, intimate. As if the world has narrowed to this stolen pocket of time. “Never quite managed it, though.”

“Probably for the best,” Kiaran says, voice a dark rasp. “I’m not sure your virginal sensibilities at the time could have handled the truth.”

My laugh shivers out of me. “Bastard.”

His eyes are still fever-bright, but some terrible blankness has thawed. Eased a degree.

I lean up to press my mouth to his. Light. Fleeting.

“Stay with me,” I breathe into the aching space between our mouths.

Something in him—breaks.

A noise tears out of his throat, and then he’s twisting a hand in my hair. Angling my head back to slant his lips over mine, hard and hot and desperate. It’s bruising. Devastating. A brutal claiming and a plea.

His other hand maps the terrain of my body, seeking skin. Nails catching, fingers digging deep enough to leave marks. “I love you,” he growls between sweeps of his tongue.

Over and over, like a benediction. Like the only vow he knows.

“I love you, I love you, I love—”

I feel the rumble building low in his chest, vibrating against my sternum. Feel the change in him, the rising tide of hunger.

“Need you,” he rasps. Punctuates it with a nip to my jaw, my neck. Soothing each sting with lips and tongue and the barest edge of teeth. “Need to feel all of you. I need to be inside you.”

His fingers wander down my nape, mapping vertebrae through my shirt. I let him take and take until there’s nothing left.

Until he rips a moan from my throat and kisses me again. Licking into me, a fang snagging my bottom lip—

Copper bursts across my tongue. I jerk away with a sharp hiss, hand pressing to my mouth.

When I look up, Kiaran is frozen. Gaze fixed on the blood welling between my fingers, flooding the cracks of my lips. There’s a wildness in his eyes that wasn’t there a moment ago. Ravenous.

He won’t be able to help me like this. One more nudge from the Morrigan and no amount of kisses or pretty words will bring him back.

What he needs is the one thing guaranteed to cut through the madness.

If I become someone you don’t recognise on the other side of this, don’t let me hurt you. Kill me if you have to. Promise me, Kameron.

I lied when I agreed. I always knew it would come to this in the end. That I’d shatter myself apart to keep him whole.

Before I can second-guess myself, I grasp the neck of my shirt and yank. Buttons skitter across the floor as I bare my throat to him. An offering.

“I won’t lose you,” I rasp. “Take what you need.”

His eyes are fathomless. Deep as the ocean. As the yawning abyss between stars. For an eternity, he just looks at me, some unnameable emotion flickering over his face.

And then he’s moving, crowding me against the glass. One hand cups my nape, the other gripping my hip. His thumb drags over my pulse.

“Are you sure?” His voice cracks on the last word. Splinters like he’s the one about to break apart.

“I’m sure,” I say.

His lips meet my skin, a butterfly-soft pressure. I shut my eyes. Brace for the sting of teeth—

He bites.

A gasp tears from my lungs, and I fist my hands in his hair. Not to push him away. Never that. But to hold him close, even as he takes me apart, ruins me, unmakes me.

Distantly, I register the cold press of the mirror at my back. The solid weight of him bearing me down, down. I feel the moment his control snaps, his jaws clamping tight. Drawing hard, greedy pulls that light me up from the inside, turn my veins to quicksilver.

I grit my teeth against the scream building in my throat. Try to breathe through the sudden, dizzying sense of freefall as he drinks and drinks —

“Kiaran,” I gasp. “Kiaran, you have to stop. You’re taking too much.”

He makes a low, wrecked sound against my skin. Bites deeper, and the edges of the world smear grey. My heartbeat grows more sluggish by the second.

The hungry roar of my magic strains against the cage of my ribs. Demanding release before he drains me. Before he rips out the spark holding me together and leaves me cold, empty, nothing.

But I shove it down, down. Muzzle it behind my teeth even as black eats up my vision and the air thickens in my lungs. Because if I let that snarling, fathomless power off its leash now, thrashing in a blind panic—

I can’t muster words anymore. Can barely shape his name, a whisper lost to the thunder of his pulse.

He’s killing me.

And some cracked-open part of me wants to laugh. To let the hysteria claw out of my throat as he takes and takes and takes . Because of course it would end like this. Devoured by the only male I’ve ever loved. The only one I’ve let close enough to rip out my heart.

I’m slipping, consciousness fraying. Until the darkness reaches up with gentle hands to cradle me under. Away from the pain, the ugly rasp of my dying breaths.

But through the narrowing tunnel of my vision, something catches my eye beyond Kiaran’s shoulder. A flash of movement in the mirrors.

I blink. Blink again, trying to focus.

It’s the female fae with the tattooed arms, standing just inside the glass like she’s not sure if she’s allowed. Her dark amber eyes find mine.

Help , I try to mouth.

She must understand. I swear I feel her connect with my mind.

A tentative touch, a searching caress—and then a voice whispering across my thoughts in a light breeze: I wish I had known that you weren’t like those who came before.

Your memories showed a safe place. I hope you find something like that again.

Then she presses a palm to the mirror, and she vanishes. And in her place—a portal. Shimmering like a heat mirage. She opened a portal for me.

Derrick is fluttering through the blackened woods—I’d know him anywhere, even as my vision smears at the edges.

The fae opened a doorway to the outside .

“Derrick,” I try. Barely a rasp.

His head whips up, eyes fixing on the portal—on me.

Shock crashes over his features, quickly chased by alarm. Confusion. He clearly can’t process the macabre tableau—me pinned beneath Kiaran.

Me dying by degrees.

I scrabble for the frayed tether of our connection. Fling out a single, desperate thought before the black swallows me down.

I need you.

“Bloody hell.”

Derrick’s voice cracks through the haze of pain. He immediately streaks through the portal before it winks shut—a blur of gossamer wings and murderous intent.

“Get the hell away from her—”

The rest of Derrick’s snarled demand dissolves into a shriek as he dives, his blade yanking free. He slashes across Kiaran’s shoulder.