Page 3 of The Night Is Defying (Nytefall Trilogy #2)

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N yte

Balancing on the stone rail of Astraea’s balcony while she slept inside unawares might be considered immoral. Wrong. I didn’t give a fuck.

My wings shielded me from the worst of the bitter winter air but I didn’t plan to stay long. I’d come here with the intention of soothing the need to see her. Even though I had been with her a few hours ago.

I couldn’t sleep. Not with the torment that made me believe if I did I could awaken back in that wretched cave below the library. Demons plaguing my mind turned the sight of her to a vision, the feel of her to a torturous whisper. I had to come here for the reminder that I didn’t need to look up and search the sky anymore, only forward to where my fallen star lay.

I’d thought just seeing her sleeping peacefully, safely, would be enough.

It wasn’t.

Shadows crept toward the lock as I dropped soundlessly onto the balcony. I opened her door. I didn’t bother to conceal my wings as I welcomed myself in; I really wouldn’t be here long and she wouldn’t know I’d come.

Astraea was still angry with me, rightfully so, and it was sadistic of me to find thrill in it. Every dark and dangerous thing living inside her I wanted unleashed on me. Then together, on our enemies.

Circling around her bed, she was a goddess against the moonlight that glittered her silver hair. Fucking exquisite.

Mine.

I was obsessed. Incapable of letting her go even when death and time joined forces to try separate us. It wasn’t enough. Nothing ever would be.

The dark and withered thing in my chest came to life in her presence. It became terrifying yet beautiful—a vulnerable reminder every day of what was at stake. I couldn’t lose her again. I wouldn’t. My search for the one who’d taken her from me for three hundred years began the second the light faded in her silver-blue eyes.

Pain clenched like a fist around my heart and I had to block out the past. She was here. Right here. Impulse won with the need to feel her.

Astraea slept on her side, hands tucked under her cheek. My fingers brushed the hair at her temple, and the way it eased centuries of torment from my mind, even if just for a second, was bliss.

Her eyes flickered with a deeper inhale. Lips parting sleepily, she said, “Nyte?”

Fuck, I wanted to get on my knees for that quiet murmur that asked for me.

“Starlight,” I whispered.

The hint of blue in her irises came out more in the shadows. They trailed high over my shoulders before following the curve of my wing.

“They’re… beautiful,” she said, her consciousness not fully there.

I couldn’t help myself. Leaning down, I pressed my mouth to hers. The soft sigh she gave invoked peace in me, pulling at a yearning to be lying beside her.

“Sleep, love.”

Astraea attempted to shake her head but I’d already lulled her mind and her lids slipped closed. She wouldn’t wake to remember this as real. A flicker of a dream, maybe.

It took everything in me to straighten away from her when I should be holding the only reminder of why I wanted to live. Astraea was born unafraid of monsters and when the worst of them came to her, she bent my will to hers without even knowing it.

There was only one thing keeping this world safe from me.

Her.

I would find her killer, and for every year they took from us, I would make them suffer to stretch a day as a month, a year as a century. They wouldn’t remember their existence without pain.

When because of them, torture and terror only had one meaning to me now: being without her again.

I crouched by her. “Another truth for you, Astraea. Letting you go… I’m not capable of it. You offered your hand to walk through worlds with me and I haven’t been able to suppress the most selfish thoughts. It makes me no better than my parents when I want our time in this realm to expire, only to walk with you to the next and condemn it too eventually. I wouldn’t care about the destruction we left in our wake, and I don’t know what that makes me. If you would be horrified by what I would do to keep you.” Before I could stop myself, I leaned in, pressing lips to her head and breathing in the only scent that could bring peace to restless darkness. “There are many treasures across many lands, but you’re mine.”