Page 63 of Reaper's Ruin
Gods help me, I did.
Images flashed unbidden through my mind—how she would feel beneath me, the sounds she might make if I kissed her neck, the weight of her in my arms not just for a dance but for more, much more. I imagined peeling that dress away, revealing the soft skin I’d glimpsed when lacing her bodice. I imagined her gasping my name—not Death, not Reaper, butRhyker—as I showed her pleasure she’d never known.
The thoughts were inappropriate. Dangerous.
And completely unstoppable.
She was a soul I was supposed to guide to her afterlife. A task. A burden. A final mission before my own darkness swallowed me whole.
But she was also the first warmth I’d felt in centuries. The first spark of somethingalive.
As the music swelled toward its crescendo, our bodies moved closer, my hand pressing tighter into her back, the warmth of her skin flooding into my fingertips through the silk of her gown. My thumb, acting of its own accord, traced the smallest circle against her spine—a betrayal of control I couldn’t stop. Her lips parted, soft and pink, and when she looked up at me—gods, those eyes.
There it was again.
That look.
Desire. Honest, unguarded, and directed at me.
It couldn’t be. I’d imagined it the last few times—chalked it up to projection, to proximity, to the way she made mefeelthings I shouldn’t. Things I’d forgotten how to feel. But now, there was no mistaking it.
She looked at me like I was a man.
Not a monster.
NotDeath.
Just... me.
And it wrecked me.
My chest tightened, a thousand-year-old instinct roaring to life inside me, louder than the thunder outside. That expression—I’d seen it before. In another life. When I was human. When love had felt like something I might be worthy of.
A flash of memory—another dance, another time. A harvest festival, torches burning against the night, the sound of fiddles and drums. The woman in my arms had looked at me with a similar expression, an unmistakable invitation I’d gotten from so many others. But like all of them, it had left me cold, unmoved. I’d gone through the motions, playing the part expected of me, feeling nothing but the weight of duty.
But this? This was fire where there had only been ashes. This was coming up for air when I’d spent lifetimes drowning beneath the waves.
The way she looked at me left no room for confusion, and yet, it still felt like some cruel trick of fate. She couldn’t want me.Not really.
And yet... her gaze flicked to my mouth, lingering just a breath too long. My pulse stuttered.
She wanted me to kiss her.
It hit me like a blade to the ribs—shocking, excruciating, and so impossibly tempting I forgot how to think. How to breathe.
My need to devour those lips and claim them as my own surged through me like the lightning crackling above had jolted through my system.
But kissing her was impossible. The worst idea I’d ever be able to conceive no matter how many centuries I’d roamed this land. Forbidden. Wrong.
No. I couldn’t kiss her no matter how she stared through me with those eyes flooding with want I would never understand.
She was light and warmth and all the things I could never touch without turning them to ash.
But gods... I wanted to.
More than I’d wanted anything in any lifetime.
The space between us vibrated with possibility, with want, with everything we weren’t allowed to have. Just her. Just me. A current between us crackling louder than any lightning above.
