Page 44 of Branded By Shadow
Cora approached cautiously, her scent sharp with a terrified compassion a thousand times more dangerous than her anger. “Damon, are you sure this is wise? It looks like it’s killing you.”
“It’s keeping me sane.” The admission felt like swallowing glass. Talking was a lifeline, each word a link in a chain holding me to the man, not the beast. “But your voice too… it helps. Gives me something to focus on.”
She knelt beside the bath and looked from my face to my hands, clenched white-knuckled on the bath. “What is it you’re fighting so hard against?”
I had no desire to give voice to the monster clawing at the inside of my skull. But maybe… After everything that had happened, she deserved an explanation. “The rut… it’s not just heat. It’s hunger. It wants… to claim. To mark. To finish what we started.” I met her eyes, forcing her to see the agonizing truth. “The Alpha inside me wants to mark you. Fully. And the fact that I can’t…”
It hurt. Especially now, with the rut burning through my veins. It probably hurt just as much as her anomalous heat, if not more. And Cora was too clever to miss that, to not understand what I couldn’t say out loud.
“I see,” she whispered. She pushed herself to her feet, taking a deliberate step back. “Then I’m a liability here. I’m making it worse for you. Elara should be the one watching you. I’ll go get her.”
She was being logical. She was trying to help. But the beast didn’t understand logic. It only understood her retreat as abandonment. A primal terror I hadn’t felt since my father was consumed flooded my system.
Don’t go. Don’t leave me in this. Alone.A child’s plea echoed from the heart of the monster inside me.“Stay. Please.”
But she was already turning for the door, her resolve a fresh wound.
I didn’t think. I erupted.
At the back of my mind, Hades laughed. He’d dragged his unwilling queen into the world he knew. How could I do anything different?
I launched myself from the bath in a spray of ice and water, the frigid shock nothing compared to the searing panic of her retreat. The bathroom floor cascaded with the overflow as my arms locked around her waist.
The water swallowed her startled cry. I pulled her against my chest, ice chunks bobbing around us. Her clothes soaked through in an instant, clinging to every curve, the thin fabric no barrier at all. My shadows flared to life, wrapping around her to shield her from the cold that would’ve killed her.
“Let me go! You’re not thinking clearly—” She tried to push me away, a useless battle against the unyielding reality of my strength.
A single, frantic command beat against the inside of my skull. It spilled from my lips, impossible to contain. “I can’t,” I growled. The raw confession stripped away every other lie I might have tried to say.
“This is exactly why I needed distance! Your control is—”
“Still here. As long as you are.”
I focused my will into the shadows, forcing my own body heat to go to her. It was a desperate, silent plea made with the very power she feared, and it worked beautifully. Just like I’d known it would.
The lights flickered and died, plunging the room into a near-total blackness. Her struggles subsided as the truth of the situation settled over her. She was trapped in my underworld, but she was also safe. My Persephone.
A long moment passed as she processed what was happening. Or rather, what wasn’t. “It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered. “The ice… you’re shielding me, aren’t you?”
“I always will.”
It was a promise she shouldn’t have believed. Maybe on some level, she didn’t, just like she hadn’t before she’d tried to run away. I felt her relax slightly, just a fraction, anyway. “Damon… This is taking everything you have, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Just to keep me safe like this.”
“Yes.”
She absorbed that, the weight of my effort. “Then how can you face the Council tomorrow? Alexander will provoke you. They all will. If protecting me from this ritual is so hard… How will you have any strength left to fight them?”
Her question wasn’t a challenge to my control, but a fear for its limits. She understood the cost, understood what we’d soon be facing.
“Because in here,” I said, tightening my arms around her, “I’m fighting to protect you from myself.” I looked down at the top of her head, at the dark, wet strands of hair clinging to her scalp. “Out there, I’ll be fighting to protect you from them. It’s not the same battle.”
The words hung in the air between us, more real than the stone walls, more binding than the summons.
“So I’m still just a possession to protect,” she said, her question brushing against my chest, barely a whisper.
“You were,” I admitted, the words raw and unfamiliar. “But you’ve become something more.”
Her wet hair pressed against my chest, and I felt her heartbeat begin to match the rhythm of my own. “More what?”
