Page 2 of Claim the Twilight
Before…There’d been a before. That part was warm and safe. Perfect. My cheeks heated at the memory. “We were together…”
His mouth softened. “Yes…yes, Orina, we were. And before that?”
I cast my mind back further, ignoring the slight throb in my temples. “Henry! He tried to hurt you.” I sat up straighter, my breath coming faster.
“But you saved me.” Ezekiel stroked the backs of my hands with his thumbs. “Do you remember that?”
Agatha’s grieving fiancé had planned to capture Ezekiel and inflict horrific torture on him. I’d taken Ezekiel’s place and…I’d almost died…Hot needles pricked at my mind.
“You told me you loved me,” Ezekiel said. “You broke my curse.”
Memories filtered back into my mind. “The curse…Yes. It was broken, and I…I was hurt and you…You saved me.”
He’d given me his blood…
Blood…
There was something important about that.
Loud knocking filled the room, the sound jolting through me. I tried to pull away from Ezekiel, but he held on to my hands, his grip firm.
My gaze flicked to the door once more.
“What is it?” Ezekiel prompted, his eyes brightening. “What are you looking at?”
He didn’t hear it.
He didn’t see it.
I opened my mouth to tell him, but the words refused to come. Instead, a cold wave of dread washed over me along with the conviction that I needed to keep what I was seeing to myself. If I didn’t, then something dreadful would happen. Something terrifying.
My insides quaked, but I fixed a smile on my face. “Look, the sun is about to set. Will you watch it with me?”
The light in his eyes dimmed a little, and his gaze flicked to the door in the middle of the room, skimming over it, past it, sweeping across the chamber. Unseeing what I could clearly see.
Knots tightened in my belly. “Ezekiel, the sunset?”
He sighed and stood, his hand still clasping mine so that I rose with him. “The sunset it is.”
I allowed him to lead me to the balcony, the hammering thuds of violent knocking filling the room behind us.
Chapter 2
HEMLOCK
Orina bares her fangs at me, her black eyes glittering in the lamplight. Her fingers, pale and blood-spattered, curl around the bars of her cell. She’s calm compared to her earlier frenzied attack on the wards. She knows she’s trapped now.
“I can’t believe she’s in there.” Merry’s voice trembles. “What if…what if Ezekiel can’t get her out?”
I glance across the room at my brother lying still and silent on the cot against the far wall of our safe room. A cot that Orina and I shared for several nights when Ezekiel had been locked in this very cell. Now Orina is the lost one. Buried somewhere beneath the beast that has taken her body.
Orina saved Ezekiel from Henry’s trap, and it nearly killed her. Ezekiel saved her by using his blood. Blood that was still in her veins when Christian and Micah…I squeeze my eyes closed as the image of the contraption that they used to bleed her fills my head. I’ve seen it. Seen the place where Orina breathed her last as a human. Where those bastards Micah and Christianused her blood in a ritual to free Loviator, hoping to contain the goddess and use her power.
Instead, they unleashed the evil deity.
Orina died.
She died but was resurrected by the vampire blood in her veins.
