Page 54 of Sold to the Nalgar
Why? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to. But she hated that she remembered the feel of his skin. The sound of his voice. The look in his eyes when he watched her like she was his salvation and his prey all at once.
Still, beneath all of that, she was a prisoner. Stripped of her choices. Brought here for his amusement. His desire. Whatevertenderness he showed was built on the foundation of that awful truth.
And she didn’t know if that would ever change.
CHAPTER 26
Cecilia surfaced from sleep not into silence, not the cool blankness of night, but into light—unnatural, unsettling light. It wasn’t the sun-warmed gold she knew, but a viscous, crimson tide bleeding through the high, black-framed windows. The chamber swam in shades of blood and nightmare.
For a moment, disorientation pinned her.Where am I?
Then the jolt came. Something was wrong. Deeply, instinctively wrong. Her pulse faltered as her eyes adjusted.
He was there. Zarokh. In the bed beside her.
Not sprawled. Not touching. Just there—an obsidian statue carved from shadow and war, his presence a weight that bent the air around him. His crimson eyes, glowing like embers in the gloom, fixed on her. Not merely unnerving. Magnetic.
The moment she met his gaze, he moved. A slow, fluid shift that stole the breath from her lungs. His hand rose, fingers threading into her hair. The touch was impossibly light, almost reverent, as though she were something rare and fragile, unearthed from centuries of dust.
His.
Her breath hitched. Her hair—once a warm brown kissed by sunlight—was darker. Not just muted by the red glow. Black. A fathomless void, like the endless space behind his eyes.
She recoiled, dragging the sheet over her chest. “What the hell?” Her voice rasped, raw and alien in her own throat. A cold shiver ran down her spine. “How long have you been here? Watching me?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even blink. He tilted his head, studying her with the careful patience of a predator—or a scholar mapping uncharted stars.
Her fingers flew to her throat. Smooth skin. No new wounds. No ache of fresh violation. Had he fed again while she slept? She found only the faint tingling of old scars. No pain. No blood. But the chill in her bones deepened.
“No,” he murmured. The translator hummed in her mind, turning his low, velvet voice into words. “I did not take from you again.” The sound trembled through her like the brush of silk on bare skin.
His lips curved into a slow, dangerous smile. “I could have. You would not have known.”
Her body betrayed her—heat rushing where anger should have burned. It felt like a morning after, quiet and intimate, when nothing about them was either. He was right. She had been defenseless. Exposed.
“Hello, human,” he breathed. His fingers ghosted over her hair again before retreating. The translator echoed the words, soft and invasive.
Her pulse drummed in her ears as she forced herself to meet his gaze. “Don’t call me that,” she whispered, brittle as glass.
One black brow lifted. “Would you prefer… mine?” The claim hung between them, unspoken yet heavy as iron.
She flinched. His gaze didn’t soften. There was no mockery in him, no smirk, no cruelty—just that unwavering confidence.That quiet possessiveness carved into every perfect line of his face.
She hated that he was beautiful. Hated that she’d seen something close to tenderness in him. Hated that a desperate part of her wasn’t as terrified as she should be. Fury was the only shield she had left, and even that was cracking.
Her grip tightened on the sheet. “Why are you here?”
He studied her for a long beat before rising from the bed with a fluid grace that made her stomach tighten. Even bathed in the bloody light, he moved like a dark god—tall, unearthly, dangerous.
“I wanted to see,” he said quietly, “if you would wake unchanged.”
The word coiled in her mind.Unchanged?
Her heart thudded, too fast. He stood there, watching her from across the stone floor, ruby light painting his skin in bruised shadows. His expression was maddeningly calm.
And then she saw it. His chest. The wound—the knife wound she’d driven between his ribs. It was closing. Skin knitting, blood fading, muscle rethreading as though time itself bent for him. In seconds, it was gone. Like she had never touched him.
“No,” she breathed, backing away. “No, no, no…” The sight was too alien, too impossible.
