Page 19 of Taken
Pain slices at me, the truth tastes like grit.
“That is what the SoulTakers want. Forgetting is the first kind of death. Leave us now,” I reply grimly.
Aloysious bows low and backs away, closing the door of my throne room as he exits.
I know what he wants.
He wants counsel.
Well, I want salvation.
But salvation lies in the prophecy.
In the viyella.
A boon to any Lord who finds her, a mortal soul bound in zareth to balance his own.
It isn’t romance, not psalm or song.
It is the line between power and ruin.
I lower her onto a cushioned settee.
Saltwater runs off her wetsuit, dripping onto the cracked marble floor. The tight clothing is clinging to her lush curves, but it can’t be comfortable.
She’s pale. I frown. She’s not breathing.
I turn her on her side, and more water drips in rivulets, tracking across her soft skin to the marble beneath the settee.
She coughs, shivers, lashes beaded with seawater, lips parted as if to protest—and the tide rises in me, not with command, but with reverence.
“Phoebe.” I test her name, relishing the feel of each consonant and vowel on my tongue.
She is my viyella—she has to be.
I must admit that deep inside me something recognizes this human woman as something special—as something mine.
My runes burn, glowing in answer to my unspoken question—not just with power but with a hunger I have never allowed myself to feel before.
It thrums through my veins like an undertow—ancient, patient, hungry—and when I look at her, it translates into something else entirely.
But hope is dangerous. This soft human is a means to an end, not a tether I can bind myself to lightly.
Stop being a fool, Kael. Do your duty.
But it’s not as easy as you’d think.
She is foreign to me. Alien. Something stranger, something that draws deeper than any calculus of crown and coast.
Alaric was right in his idea. It is sound.
Trick the Fates. Get the boon.
But Jules is no fluke, no lucky pull of fate wrapped in pretty deception—she is his truth.
Watching them taught me a dangerous thing.
That a zareth can remake a man without undoing him. And now, with this woman folded at the edge of my hall, I begin to suspect Alaric wasn’t simply fortunate.
