Page 58 of You Only Love Twice
What would she say if she knew the truth?
His "conditioning" with Dr. Richter saw to his scattered memories, he suspected. It used to always make him "feel better" after a session with the doctor, but now....
Just what were they doing to him?
And how long had they been doing it to him?
"I lost track of her once I was sent to Falkirk. I remember her name. Marina. She became a cook at an inn, I believe. I remember the way she would swear in Russian. And I remember her nightmares. But little else."
He frowned. What little he could recall of his childhood didn’t seem to fit the story. He remembered other children laughing and playing in the snow with him; a man bent over an enormous desk in a gilded study, pointing to some sort of ledger or book; a smiling woman in elegant court attire bending down to kiss his forehead before she was handed up into a carriage….
Fire. Always fire.
He could not recall anything more of Marina than the scent of vodka, her plain wool gowns, and a certain grim-faced intensity as she dragged him down the gangway of a steamship.
She'd fled from something in her homeland.
His father, perhaps.
And she'd never stopped looking over her shoulder for someone.
"A man came to examine me one day when I was fifteen," he murmured. "I had the craving, though I don’t know how I got it. His name was Dr. Erasmus Cremorne. He worked with rogue blue bloods like me, he said, to help control the craving. They had a treatment program at Falkirk. Marina had signed me up for it. It was the last time I saw her.”
"I'm so sorry." Gemma's hand stilled on his arm.
And Obsidian hauled himself out of the past. The savage beast within him—the hunger—felt like it finally eased its grip upon him at the stroke of her hand. Not soothed. Never that. The proprietary urges he felt toward her only sank their claws in tighter. But he was almost certain the darkness within him would kneel at her feet and surrender itself to her, if she only kept touching him like this.
"I never knew my mother," Gemma whispered. "I always wanted to track her down and ask why she’d sold me to the Falcons. Who could do that to a little girl?"
Who indeed? He wanted to tear someone apart at the flare of rage her words wrought in him, to protect her, but the very intensity of his sudden emotions alerted him. Obsidian surfaced from the depths of the hunger through sheer will, blinking at the sudden lightness of the world around him.
What was happening to him? What was she doing to him?
Ensorceling me.
Wrapping him around her little finger, inch by inch.
Mine, whispered his darker half. Obsidian's teeth ached, his lip curling back off his right fang as his gaze dropped to her throat.
He had the sudden, insistent urge to bury his teeth in her throat and claim her. Bloodletting was an intimate thing, never to be taken by force. But he wanted it now. He wanted to crush her in his arms and bury himself in her body. The hunger rushed through him like oil thrown upon a fire, engulfing his vision until he could barely see. Only hear the throb of her pulse.
The world went black.
His cock hardened, thrusting insistently against the placket on his breeches.
"Obsidian?" Those wide eyes locked on his mouth, but he could no longer see the pretty blue depths of her irises. Only gray. The entire world around him was gray. "Do you have... fangs?"
Fangs.The thought hauled him out of the darkness. Shit. How close had he come to losing control?
Obsidian shoved away from her abruptly, turning toward the wall. It was better when she wasn't touching him, but not... not gone.
"But... how?" she whispered.
"They grew in several years after my transformation." All the better to pierce her skin with, and suckle the sweet blood from her veins. His cock flexed, and he fought the urge to turn back toward her.
"I didn't notice them before."
"They descend when I'm hungry."
