Page 150 of Night of the Witch
“Yes,” I whisper into him, getting dizzy on his taste. “Yes, I will have you.” But I pause, draw back. “Do you know what that means, being linked to me? What you’ll be pulled into—this struggle with forest folk and goddesses? This isn’t your fight anymore.”
Otto cradles the back of my head, an amused smile playing across his face before I can even begin to entertain that he has any doubts about this.
“Oh, Liebste, you realize this is all just a formality, right? I have been thoroughly bewitched by you from the moment I found out that you ate all the rations in my house fort.”
I reel back.
“That—thatwas when you fell in love with me?”
He grins.
“Of all the things that happened between us,” I stammer, “I cannotbelievethatthatis the memory you chose… The Three save me, jäger.”
“What?”
“There are so many better things you could have said!” But I’m echoing his grin, I can’t help it, my body going to giddy bubbles in his arms. “Like when you held me after my nightmare?”
“Yes?”
“That was so much more romantic thanrations.”
“Well, when you say it likethat—”
“Or in the Christkindlmarkt, or any of those times on the rowboat, or—”
He silences me with his mouth, half a kiss, half a wide smile.
“Take what I give you, hexe,” he says, jerking my body closer. “And what I give you is all of me, bound forever to you. I am yours.”
A kiss.
“I am yours.”
Another, deeper, lingering.
“I am yours.”
I relent to his ministrations. It is both taking and giving to let him have this victory, and I know I will one day have my own, and on that day, we will find out whose triumph is sweeter, who is best brought to their knees before the other.
But for now, I surrender to him.
It is a promise.
It is a beginning.
EPILOGUE
DIETER
I let them cart me into Trier.
They are so afraid of me, the cowards. As well they should be. I did not merely control their bodies; I occupied their minds. I whispered their sins back to them and watched gleefully as they cringed away from me, shame fueling their fear, just as it should.
It’s snowing when they open the door of the wooden prison cart they escorted all the way from Baden-Baden to Trier. I blink in the light.
Ah, home.
We pass by the burned debris of the riots that followed my former kapitän’s traitorous act. More guards are posted in the streets; windows are boarded up. Winter approaches, the snow quenching the fire of rebellion. This will all soon be forgotten. In other times, perhaps, such resistance would take hold.
