Once seen, she had to turn. She couldn’t look away. The angel’s head was bowed. Chains bound him. She could see the profile of his beautiful face. As she focused, she noticed his downcast gaze and his sculpted lips.
Kat backed away.
The carving had moved.
She saw it then. On the angelic carving, she saw a brooch with the stylized L like the one she’d found in her sister’s room. It was carved at the figure’s neck as if pinned to stiff folds of a snood around its regal throat. Veins stood out in the wooden figure’s neck as the angel resisted whatever unseen forces held it in place.
Wait.
There. There. And there. The walls were filled with figures that wore similar brooches. They’d been hidden to her conscious perceptions only by their number and by the chaos of the murals’ frenzied composition.
But when she’d found the brooch, it had been familiar because she’d seen it hundreds of times.
The dimly lit hall made the revelation of the brooches a startling horror, but as her eyes focused, the flickering lights revealed a worse observation...
The figure still moved. And it moved to look with staring, wooden eyes directly at her.
She didn’t recognize the danger soon enough.
Though the carving’s wings were shorn, the shadow that rose from the wall fully outstretched its wings as it had before. Those wings reached for her. She was already too cold to move. She could feel the icy feathers as their tips approached her damp cheeks.
“Katherine,” Severne said. He came up behind her. He placed Brimstone-heated hands on her shoulders and pulled her away from the wall. The shadow suddenly retreated as if sucked back into the carving that couldn’t possibly have caused it.
“I thought I saw my sister. There was a monk from the Order of Samuel. I called Grim and he chased him away,” Kat said. “And the shadow was here again. Right here.”
“You’re cold. I told you to be wary of the murals,” Severne said. “And Kat, Grim only answers to me.”
She didn’t protest when he picked her up. She didn’t argue. Her previous words had been expelled in puffs of white. Her jaw felt too cold to move.
It wasn’t only his warmth she desired. It was the negation of his former proclamation. He thought they couldn’t be together. He’d said she was alone.
She wanted to prove him wrong.
* * *
There was little to no light in the passages they took to her room. When she looked around, she couldn’t see Grim. The hellhound was nowhere to be found. Had the poor monstrous beast been hurt by the priest he chased? The Order of Samuel was deadly. They trained from birth to defeat their enemies.
Poor, poor Grim. She’d feared him, but he had helped her when she needed him most. She could only hope he wasn’t harmed.
Severne had been the master of l’Opéra Severne for a very long time. He must know it. Every passage. Every room. Every closet. Every face on its walls? He took her unerringly to her rooms. What must it be like for him to endure the stares of creatures like him, doomed to dwell in the opera house forever, but trapped in a never-ending purgatory of its walls?
She’d been distracted by her preparations for the ball and had left her room unlocked. He turned the antique knob and pushed the door open to carry her inside. Only then did she extricate herself from his protective embrace. She pressed against his hard chest and dropped to the floor when he released her. She moved several steps away. Then, when that didn’t seem far enough removed from temptation, she moved several more.
The large suite was suddenly small.
The rumpled bed was an embarrassment. Not because it wasn’t perfectly made, but because she could too easily picture herself on it, spread with him in passionate disarray.
She had edged toward the cello’s corner without realizing it, but Severne noticed.
“Your music doesn’t hide you from me. It doesn’t protect you. It calls me. The siren song of your soul echoes the Brimstone in my blood. They sing together. They burn together.” He watched her for her reaction. She felt her color rise and hoped he thought it was a blush. She knew better. It was desire. She wanted to burn with him. No matter the consequences.
Playing had never banished him from her thoughts. Not like it banished Reynard. It had never been a screen or a shield with Severne. It had been a display. A revelation.
Then why had her hand wrapped around the neck of her beloved instrument now? Why did she find herself reaching for it when it wouldn’t protect her against him?
“Do you want to call me to you? You play with fire,” Severne warned.
His voice had dropped, sweet and low. Threatening, but with the most delicious punishment she could imagine. His heat. His touch. Him drawn to her side. He had allowed himself a stride in her direction. She could see only a glimmer of his green eyes beneath the mask, a suggestion of sooty lashes. But he had stopped. He was holding himself back.
Katherine decided for him. They were a pair. Destiny be damned.
She rubbed a thoughtful thumb across the cello’s strings. Her fingers detected the nonaudible vibration. Yet John Severne heard it somehow. He closed his eyes. He clenched his chiseled jaw. His flush deepened. He swallowed.
And held himself perfectly still rather than respond to the instrument.
Katherine sat. She embraced the well-loved maple between her knees. She brought the bow across its strings. This time the sound was loud enough for human ears. This time Severne’s eyes flew open, and she was impaled by his vivid glare.
“You would torture me?” he said.
She paused. The last note swelled out, then faded, falling from the air like invisible rain. Only they could feel the pulsations of atmosphere disturbed and then settling on their skin. Severne turned his face to the sound as if his hard visage could feel the kiss of its diminishment.
Then silence.
The hollow potential for seductive music held in her hands.
“Not to torture. No,” Katherine said. She allowed her yearning to glow on her face. She showed him the ache in her eyes. Then she played again and watched him draw in a gasp of reaction as if the notes she played touched him physically, intimately. As if she wrapped her hand around him when she wrapped her hand around the cello to play.
She paused again. The sound faded around them.
He opened his eyes.
“But it is torturous,” Severne said. “Bliss and pain...there seems to be no in-between for us.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I only want to touch you. To reach you. To call you from whatever cold prison it is that holds you away from me,” Kat said.
The words weren’t enough. She could play for hours and it wouldn’t express the longing she had for Severne. This immortal creature she should have feared. And did. But still desired.
“Cold?” Severne laughed. He brought both hands up and burrowed them into his hair. Then he withdrew them into fists and paced away from her until he was on the opposite side of the room. “You feel my Brimstone burn. More than most. You’ve tasted my kiss. Damnation like ash on my tongue and you so very sweet. Cold?” he asked.
“You say some pairs are destined to be apart, like a warning before we’ve even been together. Yet you hold me like you’ll never let me go. You’re drawn to my music. Yet you push me away,” Kat said. “You kiss me to quiet my questions, yet your kiss answers so many, all by itself.” She stood and placed her cello to the side. She had refused to hide behind it. Now that she knew the truth, she wouldn’t use it to seduce him. He would come to her or not without its call. “Aren’t you cold and hard and impossible to touch?”
He didn’t rush to answer, to contradict or confirm. He only crossed the room toward her, one step by agonizing step at a time. So slow. Until his approach seemed a confession he wanted to linger over.
/>
See what I do for you.
Watch me.
Wait for me.
Welcome me.
Kat was weak in the knees by the time they stood toe to toe. Once again, the black of his tuxedo was pressed into the white of her voluminous skirts. She tilted her chin to look up at him. She didn’t need the cello. It was a song in her veins. She didn’t need music at all. Her affinity sang. The cello only allowed her to express it audibly for the world to hear. She heard it every day, every night, in every dream and waking moment.
“Not cold, Katherine. Never that. There’s fire in me for you. Enough to immolate. I’ve sought to tamp it down. To bury it. To control it,” he said.
“Don’t,” she replied.
Immolation.
Self-sacrifice by fire. She went there. Into the flames.
But it wasn’t a hurried conflagration.
He reached for her face with one hand. She took one quivering breath when his warm fingers shook on her skin. How could his touch be so soft when he was all hard muscle and stone? How could the daemon master of l’Opéra Severne be hesitant and sweet?
But the exploratory thumb he brushed across her lips wasn’t sweet. Like the thumb she’d brushed across her cello’s strings, his thumb played her, using her soft gasps as a guide for which note should come next. From one corner of her mouth to the full swell of her lower lip, he caressed, and then he paused. He looked from the vulnerable gasp of her reaction to her eyes, then back again.
Her tongue darted out of its own volition. To taste his salty skin. To moisten the lips he teased.
He watched her lick. His eyes grew deeper and more serious. He moved his hand to hold her chin, and he closed the distance between his face and hers. He captured her lower lip in his mouth. He sought her bold tongue with his.
She would have melted to the floor. Her legs gave out beneath her. But he quickly pressed her to the wall, holding her up, sandwiched between its cool surface and his hard heat.
Did he taste her tangy cocktail as he hadn’t tasted his own? Did he taste lemon on her tongue?
She tasted wood smoke. Not ash. The flavors on his tongue were rich and sweet and evocative of the moment when a log first becomes the flame. She tasted the sweet salt from his skin. He buried his hand in her hair, fiercely, until pins flew and chestnut curls tumbled down, and still he showed her he was far from cold. Because of his reaction to everything she did. His gasps. His widened eyes. The rise and fall of his muscled chest as his breathing caught, as it released.
She reached for his mask, and he paused. He stilled as if caught in a bargain he couldn’t escape. She loosened the silken ties behind his head, and the black domino fell from his face. When she was able to see him fully again, it was almost as if she was seeing him for the first time. Behind the mask, he’d allowed his expression to soften. He didn’t firm it again when the mask dropped away.
She reached for the buttons on his vest. Then on his shirt. He gave her time. No rush. He didn’t pull away. She still feared retreat. Feared the withdrawal that always came.
But his face remained a soft revelation. Even though he was lean and chiseled and perfect, his expression had softened as he gasped just for her.
She was the one who rushed to find his heated skin. She splayed her hands on his chest. He was touchable. He was affected. Not cold. Never that.
He fumbled less. Though his hand had shaken on her cheek, he had no trouble with her formal clothes. Hooks and eyes, strings and lacings, buttons and ties...they all parted easily for his long-lived skill.
He was damned. Different. Doomed to be hunted and dispatched by men who used her like a divining rod to find their prey. Their deserving prey? Maybe. Possibly. She might be risking hell itself to hold him. But if so, why did he taste like paradise on her tongue and feel like salvation on her skin?
He pulled back from their kiss as the delicate bodice fell away from her breasts. Against the white crystals, her hardened nipples were dusky, dark and pink. The fairy Gothic dress had puddled into a tulle pool at her ankles. She stood before him in nothing but a sheer blush of stockings, a wisp of panties and her shoes.
And her mask.
Unlike his, hers was gossamer. It was nothing for him to reach up and brush it aside. It drifted to the ground like a glittering snowflake.
She hadn’t been as practiced or quick with his clothes. His shirt was parted, his trousers loosened and low on his hips. He pulled her to him before she could loosen them more. He brought her down on top of him as he fell back on the bed.
She straddled him.
His hard beauty, unrelieved by any softness, was cupped between her thighs.
She could feel his need, and it was a natural extension of the steel she’d felt everywhere on him whenever they’d touched. She reached for his erection, the hardness she’d wrought rather than the hours of work in his torture chamber of a gym that had hardened him everywhere else. But he rolled her to the side. He pressed her to her back. Suddenly fast and completely in control.
“I’ve shown you I’m not cold,” Severne said. “Have I frightened you yet? Or have you kindled, Katherine?”
His voice alone, deep and low, was an intimate hush across her skin. His Brimstone-heated exhalations were hotter than an ordinary man’s breath. His whisper tickled and teased. Yes. She was kindled. Already hot and humming with need. But when he followed his query with a warm hand down her quivering stomach to the barely covered V of pink lace, she burned hotter still.
“Severne,” she said. It was confession. It was a supplication. He wasn’t only the opera’s master. He was her body’s master. And she called him by name. “John.”
“I’m here, Kat. I’m here,” he promised.
And he brushed the lace aside to find her.
She was a gifted musician. She’d seduced him with her song. But his gentle, questing fingers found her hidden heat so easily. After all the resistance, the edge was easy. Too easy. Too strong. They were a pair. And it was terrifying, because the universe was in their way.
“I burn. I’ve always burned. But you burn for me, Katherine. And that’s a gift I’ve never received,” Severne said.
He was an impossibly hard man, but his fingers were an artistic maestro’s fingers on her tender flesh. They stroked, they played, and when he penetrated her intimate folds, her hips rose to meet his careful thrust.
Kat cried out. Her body clenched around the rhythm of his fingers. With his other hand, he reached for her ankle and lifted her leg. The move gave his questing fingers better access, but it also brought the shoe he’d given her up to his shoulder. He allowed her heel to rest there against his Brimstone-blushed skin. The fairy-tale shoe he’d placed on her foot in the warehouse was now a sexy part of their intimacy. He tilted his face to nuzzle her leg, and she lost all control, finding delicious release. Her body pulsed around his fingers, and he allowed her leg to fall. His kiss muted her cries. He pressed his hot body against her. And as she came down from the high peak where she’d finally flown without the safety of a parachute, she tasted tears on her tongue.
Chapter 19
He was off the bed before Grim scratched at the door. Without her cello, with eyes closed and replete from orgasm, she was irresistible.
He backed away, resisting only by distance and ruthless determination. What he wanted was to bury himself deep inside her, paired with her forever.
That wasn’t an option.
This hadn’t been, either, damn it. She opened her eyes and blinked. He backed farther away.
She knew. Had known before she’d allowed him to touch her. He wasn’t cold, but he was disciplined. He’d been disciplined for decades.
Until now.
Grim scratched again and whined urgently at the door. Something was wrong. Severne had sent him in pursuit w
hen he’d seen Kat leave the salon after the crimson figure in the porcelain mask.
He didn’t pause to button his shirt. He didn’t say goodbye. He went to the door. She watched him leave. Silent. With large, dark eyes. The Cinderella shoes he’d given her were still seductively on her feet, a reminder of all he wanted to give her, but couldn’t, because he wasn’t a free man.
* * *
They had failed him.
Every potential he might have trusted to father seekers with the D’Arcy sisters.
Reynard had the man bound with heavy ropes after he himself repelled the hellhound. He wasn’t sure how badly he had injured the beast, but he’d seen the Brimstone flare. He’d heard the hound’s cries. It had disappeared back onto the cursed pathways only it could traverse.
But Saul had cried out the truth of where he’d been and whom he’d seen there.
“I found her. I’m the father of the next generation,” the monk cried.
His blood stained the ground in pools before he finally breathed his last.
“You found her, but you didn’t deliver her to me,” Reynard declared.
He didn’t have to wield the whip. Saul’s brothers completed the task, brutally punishing their fellow monk for leading a hellhound into their midst and for challenging their master with his final breaths. They whipped the robes from his back and then they flayed the skin from his bones.
Saul had failed.
The pride swelled in Reynard’s chest and elsewhere as he acknowledged the proof of his favor. He was Father Reynard. He was fully recovered. His blood pulsed as powerfully as it had when he’d first claimed the leadership role meant to be his.
The journey couldn’t be completed in an instant, but he made the calls and arrangements while Saul’s blood cooled. He had always structured the universe to his liking. He’d been too patient. Too kind. Nearly dying had changed that. He’d felt as if he had forever to complete his task. Now he knew better.
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