Page 29 of Thane's Demon
I hated myself in that moment. Hated the part of me that lashed out because she had spoken a truth I was too afraid to face. Hated how easily she looked wounded by my voice when nothing else in this world had ever cared enough to be hurt… well, other than my mother, but that was one wound I was not willing to open just yet.
She moved then, shifting as if to slip past me, to leave, to put distance between us before I could wound her again. The thought hit me like a punch to the throat.
‘Do not let her go.’
Before her foot had even fully stepped away, my arm moved on instinct, blocking her path with a speed no human eye could follow. She froze as my hand braced beside her waist on the tree once more, caging her in again before she could escape. Her breath hitched at the closeness, her eyes lifting to mine in quiet shock.
“I…” she began, and then her stomach growled loudly enough to echo between us.
The sound cut through the tension like a blade.
Her cheeks flushed a deep pink, her eyes widening in embarrassment, and something dangerously warm settled low in my chest. I stared at her for a long moment, watching the way she pressed a hand to her stomach, mortified by the noise. It was such a small, human thing, and yet it cracked something inside me all over again.
She had barely eaten.
She was shaking.
And she was here, pinned between my arms, trusting me despite every warning I had thrown at her. My demon went still, almost tender in its silence.
‘Feed her.
Protect her.
Keep her close.’
My voice came out lower, roughened by everything I felt and tried not to feel.
“You are hungry.”
She blinked, startled by the shift in my tone.
“I… I guess I was too nervous to eat earlier,” she admitted shamefully, as if being hungry was a sin.
I inhaled slowly, fighting the urge to touch her, to pull her closer, to give in to every instinct screaming at me to claim the light she radiated. Instead I leaned in, close enough that my breath brushed her cheek, close enough that she would know this was the last thin thread of my restraint holding me back.
“You should not be near me when you are this vulnerable,” I murmured.
Her breath shivered out of her.
“And yet, I am,”she whispered.
The world tilted.
And this time, I did not step back.
Her stomach growled again, a small sound in the tight space between us, but it landed with the force of a blow. It was such a harmless thing, a simple human need, yet it struck deeper than any scream ever had. It should not have mattered. It should not have affected me. I had stood in the middle of battlefields without blinking, had listened to dying men beg and sob without feeling so much as a stir. But this, this quiet admission of need from her body, this reminder that she was fragile and hungry and standing here with me instead of somewhere safe and fed, made something painful twist inside me.
‘Feed her.
Warm her.
Carry her if she is weak.
She is ours.’
The demon’s voice curled through me like smoke, not violent this time, not sharpened into knives, but heavy and possessive and dangerously close to tenderness. It pushed against the walls I had spent years building, testing their strength. Normally, feelings of hunger in the air made it savage, made it crave the fear and desperation that stuck to those barely clinging to life. But now its reaction was different… alien and focused entirely on her. It wanted to care for her. It wanted to provide. It wanted to keep her from ever feeling want again.
Maybe there was hope for us yet.
