Page 46 of Blood Vows
“I didn’t know she was going to lie to you about a curse.” I gasped, my hand going to my trembling lips. He looked pained by my reaction but went on to explain regardless.
“The witch, she works for me. All I wanted was the dagger, but once she found you, she knew that fate had just handed her a means of getting it for me. She also knew how to play on your insecurities to ensure your compliance.” I swallowed hard and forced myself to ask,
“And you… What wasyour plan for me?”I asked, my voice was steadier than I felt.
He stood slowly, the movement was almost predatory. In one smooth motion, he shrugged off his long black jacket and tossed it over the back of a nearby chair. My breath caught. Without it, he somehow looked larger, broader, every line of muscle defined beneath the dark fabric of his shirt, the wet material clinging to him like a second skin.
“Not what happened,” he answered firmly, his voice low, unyielding.
“Then what happened instead?” I dared to ask, the words trembling on the edge of fear and fascination.
He turned to face me fully then, his expression unreadable, shadows flickering in the depths of his eyes. And though part of me wished I hadn’t asked, the other part, the one that was braver and reckless, knew he wasn’t done with his confessions.
Not when he lowered to one knee in front of me and told me…
“I fell in love with my prisoner.”
18
WHEN TWO DAMAGED SOULS COLLIDE
For a heartbeat, I swear that the world stopped turning.
His words didn’t just linger in the air…
They pierced it.
They sank down deep into the marrow of my bones. I could still hear the fire crackling behind him, the gentle hiss of rain against the glass, but it all felt far away. Too unreal.
He was still kneeling there, the stormlight from the window carving the sharp planes of his face into a thing of raw beauty.
Watching me.
Waiting.
And I… I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find the words that would fit the magnitude of what he’d just said to me. But regardless of my inner turmoil, he was done waiting.
“Say something,”he murmured, his voice roughened by vulnerability, by something dangerously close to fear. But there was nothing I could say. Words would have been too small, too clumsy, to hold what was breaking open inside me.
So instead, I moved.
I leaned forward, closing the space between us, my trembling hands lifting to his face. His skin was warm beneath my palms,but there was something else too. Something that pulsed like energy just below the surface. The darkness that lived within him, the power that I knew must have frightened everyone else, stirred under my touch.
It didn’t recoil or rage as I expected. It shifted and moved as if it recognised me. As if it wanted me. My thumbs brushed the edges of the blackened veins that traced along his jaw, and they pulsed faintly, alive beneath my fingertips. His breath hitched, his hands gripping the edge of the chair on either side of me, fighting for control. I felt it then…that wild, tethered thing inside him now straining to reach me, not to harm, but to connect.
When I finally kissed him, it wasn’t cautious or testing. It was surrender. A collision of everything we had both tried to suppress. His lips met mine with a hunger that spoke of decades of solitude, of agony and need, of finding light after too long in the dark.
The shadows answered our kiss, curling softly around us like smoke, alive and sentient. I could feel them brushing against my skin, tracing lines of warmth where they touched. They didn’t frighten me. They felt like him, wild, protective, desperate to claim and be claimed.
He tore his lips from mine with a ragged breath, his forehead pressing against mine, the firelight painting our skin in amber and shadow.
“You shouldn’t touch it,” he rasped.
“You don’t know what it could do.”
“It won’t hurt me, you know it won’t. So, trust it…trust me with your darkness.”I whispered and he closed his eyes, a shudder running through him, the darkness I spoke of still thrumming beneath my hands, alive and yearning.
“Gods help me,”he breathed, before admitting softly,
