Page 13 of Born for Silk

Oh my, his eyes.

“It’s all over now,” he states smoothly, releasing my hand, a cool absence sweeping across the grieving flesh.

I blink up at him, the loud fantasy of him and me and whatever strange painful, pleasure that was slips away.

Heat flares through my wrist, so I look down to see the tattoo’s burning presence. It is pretty. A purple womb created from flowers and stems. The same smile I saw on Iris’s face slides across my lips.

I am officially a Silk Girl.

Too soon, he is striding away. I am flooded with desperation that I’ll never see him again, that he’ll forget about me, that Iris and the girls are right about me being Fur Born, so I reach for him before I can think.

Gasps expel.

Eyes widen.

My fingers clutch at a piece of his velvety shroud.

“Take me with you, my king.” The words tumbling from my lips like apples from a barrel.

Shit.

He turns, a creature more predator than man, but his expression becomes one of amusement. I’m not sure I like it. It’s playful in the way an eagle might play with a mouse.

Looking down at my small hand, clinging to the fibres of his jacket, he says, “Not today.”

“I’m ready,” I blurt out, ignoring the girls who gape and the Silk Wardeness who shakes her head, scolding me silently. She doesn’t dare speak in his presence. It’s a vow. Speak only when spoken to. Never touch the king without permission…

Yet here I am…

He studies me, dark eyes drilling through my confidence. “How many years have you bled?”

I swallow. “Five. I can live Meaningful Purpose, my king. I’m stronger than I look.”

“You’re small.”

“I’ll eat more,” I counter.

“What was stopping you before?” His lips twitch with a smile when I have no answer for him. “You have an answer for everything? But not this.”

“I know what I want, my king.”

“And that is?”

To prove them wrong.

“Meaningful Purpose.”

A pause thickens the air.

He steps toward me again, his gait graceful, contradictory to such a large, menacing man.

He cups my face in both big hands, his fingers cradling the back of my head. He could crush my skull. Pop it.

Gone.

I wonder whether he has. I’m sure he has crushed bones within these warm hands, turned them to powder.

Looking down at me, he drinks in the sight, the intensity in which he maps each feature, in which his gaze slices across my cheeks, eyes of violet, my parted mouth, peels me back to bone and breath.

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