Page 122 of The Night Prince

“What?"

Almost delicately, he takes a strand of my hair and tucks it behind my ear. The gentleness is at odds with the look in his eye, and what is going on behind me. My breath catches.

“It’s just a dream,” he says. “We don’t have to do it my way. I can be gentle, if you like.”

My mouth dries. “Blake. . .”

He cups my face in both hands. “Let me have you. Just once. Please.”

My insides combust. He is begging. Blake is begging. And I know he is manipulating me. I know he will do or say anything he needs to in order to get what he wants, because that is how his mind works. Yet my blood heats. I cannot move. I cannot think. He steps closer, and his body is flush to mine. His lips are inches away, and his breath brushes my mouth.

He smiles, a dark wicked smile, and tilts my head back. “It’s just you and me. He doesn’t have to know.”

He.

Callum.

Ice crashes through me and dowses the traitorous flames. I block the moaning, and the slapping, and the deep grunts. I stagger back.

“You cannot think of me like this.” I try to put a command in my tone, but my voice trembles. “This... this will never happen.”

He has the audacity to look sad. I turn and crash through the door.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Something tugs inside my chest. There’s a familiar press of attention on my skin, a whisper of air on my cheek. My pulse kicks up, as if my body senses a threat before my mind has caught it. I open my eyes.

The night is thick. I must have turned onto my side, because pine needles dig into my cheek. The fire burns low, and the orange embers glow in the darkness. The trees sway overhead. Philip snores gently, long legs stretched out, though one hand rests on the dagger at his belt. Everything seems normal, yet my blood thrums.

I blink a couple of times, then warily push myself upright. I breathe in sharply.

Blake watches me from the edge of the clearing. He sits against one of the tree trunks with his knees raised, his hands dangling between them. “Hello, little rabbit.”

My stomach plummets. “What are you...?” My question dies in my throat as my eyes adjust.

He is not sitting in the forest a few feet away. He’s on a cot, the mattress thin, and there’s a dark stone wall behind him. There are books scattered on the bed around him, and his wrists are bound in shackles. His dark hair is messy, as if he’s been dragging his fingers through it, and the top buttons of his shirt are undone.

Both the forest and the cell have a shimmer to them. It’s like I’m seeing everything underwater. The sound of the stream nearby echoes in my ears, and everything feels far away. This is a dream, yet I’ve no doubt that the wolf before me is really Blake. Panic twinges inside me. It’s not just because of the aftermath of our shared dream. I don’t want him to know where I am. I believe Callum. Blake will come for me, when he gets free. I can’t face him.

He tilts his head to one side. “Weren’t you going to say goodbye?”

“I thought it best that I did not.”

“I waited for you. I thought you would come.”

I shake my head. “We’re not friends, Blake.”

“Perhaps not. Did you figure out the nature of the bond?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It changes nothing. You may not have created it, but you manipulated me.”

He tips his head back against the wall, exposing his throat. A laughs escapes him—cold and hollow. It echoes around his prison cell. “You still believe that?”

“It’s true, is it not?” I sit straighter, twigs crunching beneath me. Stones dig into my palm. “Mrs. McDonald told me itneeded to be accepted to come into effect. That’s what happened that night, when James bit me, isn’t it?” I think of the light I saw in the depths of my subconscious, and I remember Blake coaxing me to take it. “You tricked me into accepting it so you could use it against Callum, and my father, too, I imagine. Then you hid its true nature from me.”

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