Page 21 of Wings of Ashes (Wings of Ashes #1)

CHAPTER

é tienne Thierry was known for being firm and unwavering like stone. Known for seeming heartless.

Lose enough family members to an ancestral curse, and it was bound to happen. Loss and sleepless nights could turn any ray of sunshine personality into eroded, scratched stone. Not that he had ever been sunshine.

Who can sleep when he knows his future is to die, all alone? étienne knew exactly what Miss Oadess meant when she said she wanted to walk around to tire herself out enough for her brain to sleep.

He had a hard time remembering what it was like to really, truly sleep .

Tonight, however, his inability to turn his brain off was…different.

Because he had been thinking about her . Standing atop the roof and gazing out at the moonlit landscape, étienne had chastised himself for thinking about a student so much. Then, she had appeared.

She was just…a mystery. étienne prided himself on knowing everything about every creature. Yet, she kept surprising him. Kept proving his assumptions wrong.

She read my whole textbook .

He had never burned with the desire to kiss someone more than when she said she read his assigned reading—something few students accomplished by the end of the year.

He had assumed she would never catch up on the material and yet… Did that make her his best student?

His visceral desire for her pissed him off. She had called his behavior “assholery,” yet it was worse than that.

He acted like an immature child on a playground, pushing the pretty girl away because of his confusing feelings for her.

Feelings.

The gargoyle shifter, who actively turned to irreversible stone a little more each day, did not have feelings.

And right now, the biggest, most choking feeling that caught in his throat was lust.

Salacious lust. A mutual lust, apparently, because Nix Oadess panted with pink cheeks and pointed nipples as she stared into his eyes with her endless blues.

“Oh,” he said in an I-dare-you-to-look-at-me-while-you-lie tone. “You don’t want me?” he asked lowly.

The forest stilled.

Tree branches quieted in their shaking. The wind halted in its light breeze, allowing the quiet night air to blanket the two of them.

He swore he could feel her presence in every electrically charged molecule of oxygen between them.

Her throat bobbed with a swallow as she said, “I don’t like assholes.”

“No?” Yet, in his class, she sat beside Baelfire Obsidius, the sex demon miscreant. Maybe she liked dominant assholes.

“I find you unattractive,” she lied.

“Tell that to your body.”

She sputtered, inhaling more of his rich, musky alpha scent.

“You read the full textbook?”

“Y-Yes.”

“You are forgetting chapter three, Miss Oadess.” étienne’s hand lifted to hover over the curve of her cheek. “Alpha shifters’ paranormal sense of smell includes the ability to scent the lust of others. And right now? You are all I can fucking smell.”

Her brows furrowed, adding creases to her forehead, as she exhaled roughly.

“That scent is clinging to my lungs, refusing to leave my chest,” he breathed. “Never smelled something so…sweet.” His gaze dropped to her pink silk nightgown and the way it flowed over her breasts. “Your body is fucking hot for me.”

“My nipples are hard from the chill in the air,” she exclaimed and crossed her arms to cover herself.

“I am not smelling your hard, little nipples, Miss Oadess,” he purred.

Her mouth opened and closed, and she hastily pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “Er—”

“Your dampening pussy is what’s giving off that mind-numbing scent.” étienne breathed her in, and an animalistic growl shook his chest. “So sweet. So needy.”

His pupils dilated into big spheres of primal black. His fangs ached and lengthened in his mouth. His forehead throbbed where his stone horns craved to extend and rub against her soft body.

“I…I am not horny for you!” Her voice cracked on the lie.

“I thought you were my ‘honest’ student. My good, extra credit, reads-ahead student.” étienne’s thumb grazed her chin. So soft . So…warm. Turning into stone left a man with a constant chill. “Your prideful, angry voice haunts me.”

His thumb tingled from where he touched her chin, right below her parted lips. He growled at himself, struggling with his self-control.

“Fuck,” he admitted. “I’ve never wanted someone. Ever. I don’t feel things like this…”

“You don’t even like me,” she whispered as his thumb jerked up to press to her bottom lip—the plush, pillowy pink flesh he wanted to suck. And bite. And lick better.

“I don’t like anyone.” Not even himself. His thumb petted her bottom lip, and her teeth nipped the tip of his digit. étienne’s cock stiffened beneath his black pants, and he cursed, “ Fuck .”

He stared at her lips as she stared at his. They were both locked in the same moment of mutual, forbidden hunger and desire. Her tongue flicked out to dab where her teeth nipped his thumb.

“ Fuck ,” étienne repeated.

Nix blinked and breathlessly said, “Just because my body reacts to you and you’re a hot man doesn’t mean I want to want you.” Her gaze still fastened to his mouth, she added, “You can’t just treat me cruelly and expect me to melt for you.”

“Would you?” He tipped her chin up and looked so deeply into her eyes; his forehead leaned forward more and more to eventually press to hers. “Melt for me? If I apologized for my bad behavior and slipped my hand between your soft thighs—”

“I—I have things to do!” Nix snapped, blushing deeply. Those red cheeks called to étienne. “Important things. I don’t have time for a sexy professor interaction right now. Okay?”

He had never had a sexy interaction ever. Never wanted to learn someone like this.

But she was not his mate. He was attracted to her, but his body continued to turn to stone—though delayed by his daily potion. Who knew how many days he had left before he could not move?

He had lived a thousand lives through books, but his own life? He had never lived . Or taken risks. Or kissed the pretty girl who just so happened to be his student—a woman who awakened something usually dormant inside him.

“I need to go and, uh, continue my hike. Okay?”

“You…are rejecting me?” he asked.

“Very hard for you to believe, huh?”

She doesn’t want you, fool . étienne’s fingers shot back, away from her smooth, beautiful face. “I…crossed a line.”

The ever-present chill of cold stone made itself known once more in his chest. In his veins.

He stepped back, rubbing at his eyes behind his glasses. The large black pupils shrank back to a more normal size as he restrained the unfamiliar rise of feelings . Of course, she did not want him .

“Did you really think I would be interested in, uh—” She licked her sensual, bow-shaped lips. “—kissing you after everything you’ve said to me? The way you’ve acted?”

The way I have acted…like an asshole . Somber, étienne cracked his knuckles and grated sincerely, “I…apologize.”

“ Do you?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” he replied wholeheartedly. “I regret how I have acted in…all of our interactions.” In the dark forest, he saw very clearly why he had initially judged her.

“So, you see the error of your ways now that you’re attracted to me?” She huffed. “What a man.”

étienne flinched. He swore she had just stabbed through his hard chest with an invisible dagger. “You know what I am,” he said softly.

Nix jerked her head down in a nod. “A petros—a stone shifter. Specifically—”

“Gargoyle, yes. And what do you remember about my kind?” Damn, now his cock was getting hard again, thinking about her reading and absorbing his class content.

Tilting her head, she gazed warily at him as she said, “They were originally shunned by the shifter community. Outcasted. The ability to turn to stone was thought to be disturbing. At first, gargoyles were seen as evil creatures,” she said. “Seen as demonic vessels.”

“Vessels, yes,” étienne repeated emptily. “Hollow and soulless.”

Nix frowned at his sad tone.

A human artist first saw a Gargoyle shifter standing on top of a building at night. The human decided to start the architectural trend of constructing man-made gargoyles on the top of castles and cathedrals.

The human had made sure to depict the stone creatures as ugly enough to scare away the most evil of spirits.

It was particularly twisted how gargoyles were seen as both demonic vessels and guardians. The humans crafted lookalikes to have the practical function of draining water from roofs to protect from erosion. Evil but useful. Ugly but serviceable.

It was demeaning.

étienne told her, “Gargoyles turn to stone if they cannot find their mate before they hit full maturity and their immortality activates. I have watched family members and friends turn into catatonic, lifeless sculptures, unable to find a fated mate in time.”

He inhaled, exhaled, and spoke slowly, “Gargoyle shifters perish without a mate.”

He reached out to touch one of her stray locks of pink-tipped platinum hair. Did she think she needed to dye her hair to stand out from the other swan shifters?

“My life depends on love.” He stressed in a protective growl, “Yours doesn’t .”

Nix’s brows wrinkled as her face formed an expression he was not sure how to catalogue.

“You can do anything. Be anything,” he said.

“And instead, I watch as you cygni go to dances, flirt in the cafeteria, and throw yourselves at alphas, trying to secure a partner who may not even be your fated mate. You don’t have to marry someone when you graduate.

That tradition, you don’t have to follow it.

You have your whole immortal future ahead of you—”

“Wow,” Nix muttered. “Underneath those studly glasses, you’re secretly dumb, huh?”