Page 13 of Branded By Shadow
My fingers trembled as I reached toward the nearest vine, drawn by an instinct I couldn’t name. It curled around my wrist like a living bracelet, leaves sprouting where it touched my pulse. As if drawing life from my very heartbeat.
Damon had been right. All his claims, all his impossible assertions, were true. My life’s work wasn’t just a product of my intellect. It was a manifestation of my blood.
Before I could process this further, pain beyond anything I’d experienced tore through me. The agony doubled me over, stealing my breath completely, tearing through me like claws. I clutched my stomach and collapsed, no longer able to find relief anywhere.
Through the wall of green that had turned the sterile suite into a living jungle, Damon approached. As he knelt beside my convulsing form, I couldn’t help but reach for him. “Damon,” I whispered, my pride shattered into a million pieces.
Every principle I’d ever held crumbled under the weight of need I couldn’t fight anymore. Every nerve ending screamed for his touch. My blood pounded with a biological imperative that made a mockery of free will.
“Let me help you,” he said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it before.
His fingers brushed my cheek with surprising tenderness, then slid beneath my chin with careful pressure. He tilted my head to expose my throat. The position made me vulnerable in ways that should have filled me with terror. Instead, a strange calm settled over me, as if a drug had dulled all my senses.
His breath scorched the sensitive area where my neck met my shoulder. I trembled as his teeth grazed my bonding gland, the spot swollen and hypersensitive.
He didn’t bite down, not fully, but a sharp, clean pain lanced through me. For a split second, I felt a sudden, jarring connection form. A fragile thread of his cool, controlled power poured into the raging fire of my own.
Cora,I heard him whisper in my mind. But it was only for a second, and it drifted away as quickly as it appeared.
In its wake, relief flooded my system. It wasn’t a slow fade, but rather, like a switch being flipped. The worst of the heat receded, and the cramping eased. I could think again.
I tasted copper where I’d bitten my own lip during the worst of the spasm. A temporary bond. I could feel it now, a thin, artificial thread connecting us, a conduit through which his calm was soothing my chaos. I sagged against him, the strength that had fueled my rage and my terror completely spent, leaving nothing but a hollowed-out exhaustion.
For a single, unguarded moment, there was no hatred. There was only the profound, animal relief of the pain ending. He had been right about everything. He had told me what I was, and my body had proven it. He had told me what I needed, and he had provided it. The thought was more humiliating than the heat itself.
“There,” Damon purred. “Doesn’t it feel better? To be mine?”
I didn’t answer. Around us, the plants continued their impossible growth, responding to the emotional resonance of the temporary bond. In the humid sanctuary they’d created, I closed my eyes and allowed myself this brief reprieve. From the war between my mind and my body.
For now, I would accept this. But I would remember this moment of weakness, this surrender he’d forced from me. And somehow, I would make him pay.
6
Suffocated
Damon
For the first time since we’d met, Cora wasn’t fighting me.
She lay sprawled across the black silk sheets, her deep, steady breathing a quiet rhythm in the stillness of the suite. Completely bare, helpless before me, she was a vision that would have rivaled Persephone herself. Her scent, now stripped of its frantic pheromones, wrapped around me, a silent declaration of my victory.
I remained motionless beside her, afraid the slightest movement might shatter the comfort she’d finally found. Something primal inside me recognized that she was mine now, at least for the moment.
I had expected a battle of wills, a clash of strength. I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer desperation of her fight against her own body, the furious edge to her cries as her instinct warred with her intellect. The memory of her, too proud to surrender but too overwhelmed to win, still coiled in my gut.
From the Shadow Realm, my father’s voice echoed one of my earliest lessons. “Patience builds the foundation of ownership. Rush the claiming, and the bond shatters like glass under pressure.”
I’d knelt before him in that dark chamber, young and eager to prove myself. “But House Hades takes what we want. Why wait?”
“Because broken Omegas serve no purpose,” he’d said. “You want surrender, not destruction. There’s a difference, boy. Learn it.”
But her years of suppressants had twisted everything. Even as impressive as her silphium-based compounds had been, their unavoidable failure had only made things worse for her.
In the end, science could only do so much. Olympian blood would always shine brighter. And as expected, I had won.
The bedside clock read 3:40 AM. Seven hours had passed since I had given her a taste of the claim, and for seven hours, there had been silence.
I let my gaze trace the faint red marks on her throat, amazed that even surface contact had worked so well. They looked right against her pale skin, an unmistakable sign of my claim that satisfied something hungry in my chest. I imagined Stormwright’s face if he could see her now, lying in my bed, wearing my scent.
