Page 51 of Girl Anonymous

When she reached with one hand, he pressed it into her palm, then took her other hand and wrapped it around the bottle, too, so she cupped it in both her palms as he had before. He enclosed her hands in his, so a layer of him supported her, and a layer of her supported the now joined bottle and stopper, and inside the bottle the blood of Jånos rejoiced. Even more than the sex betweenher and Dante, even more than the click that signified the bottle and stopper had mated, the mere act ofholdingwhile so entwined seemed like it meant…something…

Dante leaned toward her, his breath softly caressing her skin. “After so many years, they are one. Maarja, can you feel their celebration?”

Mesmerized by him, by the sense that together, they’d created something greater than themselves, she nodded.

“Maarja, shall we celebrate, too?”

She thought he would close in on her, kiss her, be that kind of masterful upper-hand I-took-your-virginity guy that he actually was.

He waited. He wanted her to lean into him.

In a distant corner of her mind, she was aware this was probably not wise.

He was the enemy.

He handled a knife like a professional executor.

Yet nothing about this, from the moment the explosion blasted her to the moment she gave herself to this dangerous stranger to the moment she’d reunited the bottle and stopper, had been wise. She gave herself over to the dizziness of knowing that together they had made history, and stood on tiptoe to lightly touch his lips with hers.

His fingers clenched around hers, holding her holding the bottle. The glass ignited with such heat she felt as if the whorls on her skin had been dissolved and rearranged. His mouth applied a firm pressure, his lips opened, and what she had thought would be a soft accord sizzled with lightning so bright it blinded and thunder so loud it deafened…yet her mind unwillingly comprehended the brand that burned them. Without words, an ancient wrong had been righted, a new vow had been made.

CHAPTER 23

Maarja whiplashed herself back, away from this…this…this omen. “What wasthat?”

Dante’s lips were red and swollen, his eyes smoldering in a primitive display of ownership. “You know what that was.”

Did she know? In that ancient part of her brain that sucked in the knowledge of an object’s past, did she comprehend what he’d done? “Did you perform some kind of voodoo marriage?”

“We.Weperformed an ancient ritual that wiped the ancient stain clean and restarted our worlds. This is it. This is all. You and me—we began in fire and explosion. We continue with sex and union. Now…now we are fused, together, one.”

We? No! “Wedid not!”

He lifted her hands and the bottle to her eye level. “You’re not the only one who knows a few of the bits and pieces of history. The Arundel family has always known the past could be resurrected and changed.”

“Thefuck!” She wasn’t usually a hardline swear-girl, but by God, this situation required it.

“Yes. The fuck will happen.” Dante smiled, all half-crooked-up corner of the mouth, sexual anticipation, and amused, smiling eyes. “It’ll be good, too. If I could, if we had time, I’d shove ourpants down and push you against the wall, and together we’d celebrate our new world.”

She clenched. Thighs pressed together. Breasts nipply and hard. Coochie, damp and flexing.

Damn him. He had her thinking like him, reacting to him, wanting him.

He knew it, too, but he knew what she didn’t, and he got serious in a hurry. He glanced around at the walls and again at her cove molding. “We don’t have time. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She looked, too. Her cam…yes. He had definitely positioned them for optimum viewing, and all of this had been recorded. For whom?They?Why didtheycare? “Why do we have to get out of here?”

He turned her toward the back door. “I told you—I’m not the only one who can hack your cameras. They saw us do this.”

“As you meant them to!”Who were they?

He didn’t argue. “They’re our witnesses, and they’ll want to kill us and destroy the proof of what we did.” He plucked the bottle out of her fingers and did that stiletto magic disappearing act with it. “Not everyone believes in fate, and if they do, they also believe they can change it. They think they can be Èrthu, and seize the future for themselves. If we let them. We will not let them.”

* * *

They turned away from the monitor that showed the interior of Maarja’s bedroom, and faced each other. “Dante’s move to bring this Romani into the family signifies a change in plans. We cannot permit that. We have to eliminate him, too, before she carries his child.”

“Too? We didn’t eliminate Raine. Somebody else did.”

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