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??Blood of my Blood

Dorian

She watched me kill him.

Watched as I gripped Lyle Vesterbute by the throat, my claws splitting through skin like wet parchment, his body thrashing as I lifted him high into the air.

Watched as the shadows poured from my veins and wrapped around him like sentient chains, dragging him down to the ground as I whispered the old tongue, the one that summoned damnation.

His screams echoed through the warehouse, shrill and pathetic, but Ember didn’t flinch.

Not once.

When his spine cracked and his chest split open like a sacrificial bloom, she didn’t run. She stared. Breathless. And I smelled it.

Her arousal hit me harder than the blood, thick and warm on my skin, sticky across my chest and knuckles. She was trembling not with fear, but with need . A dark, wicked part of her wanted this.

Wanted me .

The beast in me rose.

I turned to her, and before she could speak, I had her against the wall, lips crashing into hers with the force of everything I’d held back.

Her fingers fisted in my shirt, yanking me closer like she’d snap in half if I let her go.

She whimpered when I bit her neck, not enough to draw blood. Not yet. Just enough to make her gasp.

“Say it,” I ordered, my breath hot against her ear.

“I liked it,” she whispered, a shiver racing through her. “God help me, I liked it.”

That was all I needed.

I threw her over my shoulder, shadows coiling at my heels, and vanished us from the warehouse in a blink. The night cracked around us. When we landed inside the estate, I didn’t wait.

I claimed .

Clothes were torn. Not removed.

Torn.

My hands mapped every inch of her, memorizing the slope of her spine, the curve of her hips, the way her breath caught every time I sucked a bruise into her skin. Her body writhed beneath mine like it was made to be taken .

And I did.

I sank my teeth into her breast, just enough to taste the copper bloom of her blood. She arched into me, moaning my name like a spell.

“You’re mine,” I whispered as I licked the wound closed. “Every part of you.”

Her fingers tangled in my hair, yanking me down as she gasped, “Then prove it.”

So I did.

I gripped her throat, not hard, not cruel, just enough.

Enough to make her breath shallow and her eyes flutter half-shut as I drove into her, again and again, worshiping her like she was the altar and I was the sacrifice.

The blood on her breasts, her pulse against my tongue, the way she whispered my name like a curse, I was unraveling.

“Marry me.” I begged against her skin, breathless. “Say you’ll be mine, Ember.”

She didn’t answer. Not right away.

So I made her answer.

I slowed the rhythm, grinding deep as my hand slid from her throat to her jaw, forcing her to look at me, into me. “Say. It.”

“I—” She moaned, her body tightening. “I’ll marry you, Dorian.”

I growled, the sound low and feral, and when I came, it was with her name on my lips like a vow.

She slept in my arms, breath soft, her cheek pressed to my chest, and for the first time in centuries, I let myself believe

I could have something good .

Something mine.

But that peace didn’t last.

A sharp pain stabbed behind my eyes. A flash of heat seared down my spine. And then, darkness.

A vision.

Flames licking the sky. Screams echoing through the woods. Ember, my Ember , on her knees, blood pouring from her mouth, her body shaking as hands dragged her back into the shadows.

A face loomed behind her. Familiar. Wrong .

Kreed.

His grin split wide. “You took her from me,” he whispered. “Now I’ll take her from you.”

I jolted upright, heart pounding, shadows clawing at the walls like they sensed the breach.

Ember stirred beside me, still dreaming.

But I wasn’t.

I’d just seen what came next.

And I would burn the world before I let it happen.