Page 10 of What Hunts Inside the Shadows

His arm pressed into the backs of my knees, sweeping me off my feet and making me weightless for a brief moment as Caldris lifted me into his embrace. He cradled me into his chest, tossing me into the air ever-so-slightly so that I shifted my body in his grip and wrap my arms around his neck in a panic.

“Put me down!” I protested, clinging to him in fear that he might do so in a less-than-caring manner. We both knew that if the roles had been reversed, I’d have been the first to drop him upon the ground and hope he hit his head on a rock.

“I find I am very uninterested in that option,” he mused, striding forward with long steps over the uneven terrain and the cracks in the stones as if they was inconsequential to him, even when I knew I’d be more likely to fall upon my face.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, turning a panicked gaze over his shoulder. The Fae Marked were in the opposite direction, and I couldn’t imagine he wanted to put too much distance between us and them.

What if they escaped?

“To the falls to clean you up as best we can,” he answered, stepping up onto a particularly jagged rock. The edges of my fingers brushed against the hilt of his sword, longing to draw it and press it to his throat. To take my freedom in violence and blood, the same way he would own me. “That would be unwise, min asteren. We both know you won’t kill me.”

I couldn’t be sure if the word choice was intentional or purely coincidental.Won’t, not can’t.One day, I was determined to prove him wrong.

“Perhaps it isn’t your life I mean to take,” I said as he rolled his neck. My fingers dislodged from their grip around the back, drifting down to grasp the fabric of his tunic tightly.

His frame went solid, the muscles of his chest tightening beneath my fingers, as he flinched away from the words I spoke. I didn’t meet his eyes, staring at the side of his neck and unwilling to allow him to see the fear my words caused me. I’d been content to go to the Void once, content to end my life even while suspecting that it may be my final life after the ritual in the woods on Samhain.

But knowing for certain I’d face the judgment of The Father and The Mother, with them knowing my last act was one of cowardice, was an entirely different death to die. Before, I’d tried to choose death over a life as a prisoner. Now, I felt as if I’d use death to escape my fear of the unknown and the twisted, gnarled thing Caldris had planted inside of me, the bond between us that threatened everything I thought I’d known about myself.

Ifthiswas what The Fates had chosen for me, would The Father and The Mother be angry with me for rejecting it? Would they cast me into Tartarus and sentence me to eternal damnation?

Was Tartarus even real, or just another construct to keep us obedient to the Gods we worshiped in Temple?

The roaring of the falls grew louder as we approached in silence. The tension of his body never eased, never returned to the calm I’d come to expect from him even in the face of my anger. The tears burning my eyes finally fell as the trap of this cursed bond closed around me.

It was only when he’d stopped beside the pool at the base of the falls that he set me down, lowering me gently to the rock. I clung to his shirt, rubbing my cheeks against it as I tried to hide the evidence of my crying. He had to feel the wet stain upon his clothing, but he said not a word and allowed me to try to find some semblance of my dignity.

When I sniffled, wiping the last of the moisture off my face, Caldris grasped the hair at the back of my head in his fist and guided my head away from him with gentle pressure as I released his tunic and stared up into the brightness of his blue eyes. They were so unlike the obsidian stare I’d grown used to, so unlike the warmth I’d found in that dark stare.

They were so…other.

“You will not harm yourself. Is that understood?” he asked, his voice gruff as his probing stare searched my face.

“I do not take orders from you. Maybe you should consider the kind of desperation I must feel to even think of it. How much I must want to be rid of your stain upon my life that I would be willing to slit my own throat just so that you could never touch me again,” I snarled.

He glowered as he rolled his head to the side, the patience fading from his expression. “It would be pointless in the end. I will heal any injury you suffer, min asteren,” he said, releasing his grip on my hair. My neck tilted forward with the loss of pressure, dropping toward his and bringing our faces closer than I wanted.

“Why won’t you let me go? I don’t want you. I don’t want to be your mate. Surely you would rather spend your time with someone who does,” I protested, closing my eyes tightly as I turned my head away from his.

He swept my hair over one shoulder, baring my neck as his lips dropped to brush against theViniculum.A surge of awareness flooded through me, the heat of his body sinking into my front as he knelt in the dirt in front of me as if there were no clothes between us. “You are too young to understand what we share. Just because you would take it for granted now does not mean that you will not come to appreciate me in time, as your fear and prejudice against my kind dissipates. You have a lifetime of untruths to overcome, but I can be patient for you. I have already waited centuries to feel the love we share. I would wait one hundred more.”

He murmured the words against my skin, the silken caress of his breath washing over my Fae Mark and sending an unwilling shiver through my body. The image of him between my legs flashed through my head, a rapid succession of images from my memory. They were twisted, distorted and shown from his perspective, so that even though I remembered the memories themselves, they were new—different altogether. My thighs clenched as Caldris trailed his nose over my neck, inhaling deeply.

I shuddered. “Do you ever think of anything besides sex?”

“Oh, Little One, what I feel when I’m inside of you isn’t about anything as mundane as sex. It’s about being united with you as one. Our bodies moving in tandem and our souls melded as closely as they can be. It isn’t about fucking you, but about being inside you in every way. The moments when you orgasm are the only ones when you open yourself to me, when you share your feelings so that I may feel them too,” he said, nipping at the top of my neck sharply. “Besides, you quite liked that for someone who hates me,” he teased, as he continued to breathe me in, trailing his teeth over my skin.

He drew away slightly to tear fabric from the bottom of his cloak, dipping it into the frigid water of the pool beside us. I flinched away as he touched the icy fabric to my skin, wiping away some of the mud on the side of my face with gentle fingers. His gaze drifted over me, the tenderness in his gaze stealing the breath from my lungs.

“I hate you more than you could possibly imagine,” I murmured, fighting back the urge to slap his hand away. It warred within me, fighting against the parts of me that needed his gentleness and soothing. The cruelty of my own kind made me feel as if I’d been dragged against the stones of the riverbed, my skin flayed to expose the raw parts of me I didn’t want anyone to see.

“What can I do to lessen that?” he asked, rinsing the cloth in the pool and touching it to the side of my neck that was caked with mud. His fingers gently worked to clean me, ringing the cloth out so that the water didn’t make me any colder than necessary.

“Let them go,” I said, fully aware that imploring him to free me would be pointless. He had already made it clear that he would never be willing to accommodate that desire, but perhaps I could negotiate for the others.

“After what they’ve done to you, you would still seek their freedom?” he asked, raising an eyebrow as he dipped the cloth beneath the neckline of my dress.

I swallowed, shaking off the involuntary response to his touch. “They’re scared. They see me as an enemy, and I can’t blame them. I would likely do the same if I were them—”

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