Page 26 of Wicked Vows (Cursed Darkness (DarkHallow Academy) #1)

Dathan

F ollowing her slowly, trying to make my presence as invisible as possible, I watch her enter Supernatural Botany class.

The air that wafts out of the glasshouse is thick and cloying, smelling of damp earth and sweet decay. I find a spot in the shadows of an archway opposite, a perfect vantage point.

Through the panes of glass, I see her move between the rows of carnivorous flora.

She runs a delicate hand over the pulsating leaves of a Bloodvine, and the plant doesn’t recoil.

It unfurls for her, its thorns retracting.

She smiles. A genuine, unguarded smile that hits me in the gut harder than any punch.

Professor Narcissus glides between the tables. He pauses by her table, offering her a cutting from a Midnight Orchid, its petals the colour of a starless sky. He says something, and she laughs.

She isn’t scared here. She’s content. She’s in her element.

She is a beautiful, beautiful reckoning.

My reckoning. The taste of her terror earlier still lingers on my tongue.

The feel of her skin under mine is like a brand.

The irony of that doesn’t escape me. I lick my lips, wanting to taste her fully.

Every inch of her. I was ready to commit murder when I arrived at the Blood Pit, but seeing her with Starscream, who appears to have taken it upon himself to change his savage teaching tactics with her.

But she didn’t need me. She handled it. She handled him.

Now, watching her in here, surrounded by things that bite and poison and devour, she’s completely at ease.

She pricks her finger on a thorn of the Midnight Orchid.

A single, perfect drop of blood wells up, a ruby against her pale skin.

She doesn’t flinch. She offers the drop to the flower.

Its dark petals curl around her fingertip, drinking.

The sight is a primal, intimate act of power that has nothing to do with screams or destruction. It’s a quiet communion. A giving of life.

The hunger inside me shifts again. For this. For this quiet, unguarded queen who feeds monsters with her own blood and makes them bloom.

My power stirs, a dark, coiling thing in my gut. The desire to see that quiet contentment shift into something wilder. To see her look at me with that same unguarded expression as I make her come apart.

Narcissus lingers in the doorway, his gaze sweeping over the area where I’m hiding.

He knows something is out here, but he can’t see me or sense me.

That’s part of my charm. I grin, but I turn and vanish into the shadows, reappearing in my bedroom, a black cave-like structure on the top floor of the residence building.

I roll up my sleeve and press my fingers over the Midnight Soul Scar, closing my eyes, trying to feel her.

It does more than that. It shows me her in my mind’s eye, still sitting in the greenhouse with a serene smile as she tends to the plants.

I sit on the edge of my bed, a voyeur of her life without her knowledge.

My thoughts go back to the Nightmare Gardens, and I groan softly. Touching her was a revelation.

The memory of her hand in mine, taking control, is a ghost that won’t fuck off.

She chose to touch me, she chose to let me touch her.

For a split second, she didn’t just tolerate my presence; she invited it.

The jolt I felt when my thumb brushed her nipple wasn’t just her pleasure.

It was mine. I crave her. Her peace. Her laughter.

Her unguarded smile. I want to shatter it, and I want to protect it. I want to be the reason for it.

But all the reasons why I close myself off from people, taunts me in the back of my mind.

Everything I told her on that bench was true.

They were words that had never formed in my mouth before, let alone tumbled out.

Truth. My truth. My fear of getting close to someone and then killing them.

It’s a weakness that can be exploited, so telling her was stupid.

But the cat is out of the bag now and running around the Nightmare Garden, there for anyone with the power to know how to use it, to use it against me.

And I don’t give a fuck.

That’s the truly insane part. I laid my greatest weakness at her feet, and the only thing I feel is a desperate, clawing need for her to pick it up and keep it. For it to be her secret. Hers alone.

I stand, shaking off the introspection, and I head for the shower. The water is scalding hot, a poor imitation of the fire she ignites in my blood.

I dress in fresh black clothes. A uniform for the coming dark.

The clock on the wall, its hands made of bone, ticks towards dinner. Time to regroup. I leave my room, the door sealing behind me with a sigh of displaced air.

Verik’s room is two floors down, where hallways twist on themselves, and doorways sometimes lead to a sheer drop into nothingness. Perfect for a Hellfire Architect.

I find his door, a slab of ebony humming with contained power. It opens before I knock.

The room inside is a masterpiece of controlled chaos.

Architectural sketches and runic equations are scrawled across every surface, glowing with a faint, fiery light.

Verik stands in the centre, his back to me, his hands tracing patterns in the air.

A three-dimensional, shimmering structure hangs between his palms.

“Find something?” I ask.

“Found everything,” he says, not turning. “The place has a pulse. A heartbeat, right under the pit. The forge we are looking for.”

The shimmering construct rotates.

“How do you know?”

“I came across it during combat class. It was random, but it was definitely there, waiting for us to find it. There’s a resonance flaw under the western mat. An architectural echo. It’s not a door, but I can make it one.”

“And then what?”

“Then we find out what that ghost of Evren’s was talking about.”

“Why am I starting to not like the sound of this?”

He stares at me for a long moment before he says the most profound thing I’ve ever heard from him. “Because it has to do with her.”

He’s right. Every insane, suicidal plan we’ve ever concocted has been for power, for survival, for ourselves.

This is the first time the objective has a name.

A face. A pair of violet eyes that could shatter the world.

A pair of tits that make a man drool and a voice that could liquefy your insides like a blender.

For the first time in my life, the fear is coming from me. I’m feeding from myself like a fucking cannibal, and it makes me uneasy, which in turn feeds me.

“I touched her,” I blurt out, knowing he has to know before we see her again, but also because, despite his fucking faults, he is my best friend.

He turns to me slowly. “Oh?”

“She gave me permission. Fuck, Verik,” I groan. “She is perfection.”

Verik’s hands still, the shimmering construct between them wavering. He turns fully, his hellfire eyes searching my face for the punchline. He finds none.

“Perfection,” he repeats, the word an alien thing in his mouth. “And?”

“And I think I’m going to lose my mind,” I admit, the words a low growl.

He lets out a short, sharp laugh. “Good. We need that chaos tonight. It’s a variable. Adds strength to the design.” He turns back to his shimmering blueprint. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“Nowhere near close enough,” I snap, the memory of her skin a phantom burn on my fingers. “It was just a touch.”

“A foundation stone,” he murmurs, his focus returning to the glowing lines in the air. “Every structure needs one.”

“Yeah, well, this structure needs a whole lot more foundation stone than a quick grope in the garden.”

He snickers. “If she let you touch her once, she will again. Think yourself lucky. I’m the one on the outside.” He doesn’t sound bitter, simply matter of fact, like it’s a situation he plans on changing very soon.

“See you at dinner,” I mutter and leave his room. I have some thinking to do, and I can’t do it here.