by Kaia Bennett
The corners of her lips turned up, but her demeanor remained brittle and unguarded.
“Assuming you don’t kill me the second our bond is severed.” She approached until she stood close enough to kiss. “Why didn’t you just kill me? You were going to drown me and end this. You could’ve snapped my neck, drained me of blood. But you held me close and whispered an apology instead. You gave me your venom when you’d never done so before.”
I couldn’t deny the truth. She’d seen the depth of my feeling, the virgin thrust of my venom into her veins, and the uncertainty afterward. The sharing of breath in the second rite had filtered our separate beings into their true vessels, but not before revealing all of our secrets. I’d never turned a human, never had the desire. But for her, I tried.
“Why?”
I swallowed and stared above her head but she touched my cheek and turned my face to hers. I stared, shocked by the gentle touch. I wanted to pull away, but my feet stayed planted. My heartbeat catapulted when her thumb grazed the outline of my bottom lip.
“Tell me why?”
She swept her fingers through the curtain of hair that blew into my face, dragging her fingers from scalp to neck, and then down to tug the strands toward her waist. Like a memory I thought I’d had once, something lost from a childhood I barely remembered. A woman’s fingers, a soft touch. Something inside me softened in response. I knew Evie manipulated me, but still, I couldn’t stop the thaw.
“I don’t know.” Cowards lie.
I’d have given anything to be a coward in that moment. I wanted to tell her I’d been bitter about losing my pet. If I’d turned her on a whim as a ‘fuck you’ to my father I could at least blame defiance.
I couldn’t lie to her even if I wanted. I couldn’t stare in those eyes, breathe in her breath, and pretend that I knew why I’d saved her.
“I should’ve killed you. I’d planned to. Afterwards, I figured it happened because I’ve never been good at doing what I’m told. I blamed Cai and my father. I carved Vaughn up pretty good, because I wasn’t finished with you yet. In the end, it was your blood. Your mind.”
I touched her temple and tilted my head when her eyes fluttered closed.
“You feed me. I’m hungry every time I look at you. When I taste you, I’m full, but I want more. I’m starving, but you go down so smooth. For a little while, I can think. I didn’t want that feeling to stop.”
A diamond glittered when I swept her hair over her shoulder. I fought dirty, with weapons I didn’t understand in full. I fought with tenderness, mimicking her touch when I stroked her neck. I’d only been this gentle with her when I placed a feather necklace around her throat.
I’m weak. My father was right to tell me to kill you. I should want to clench your throat in my hand, but all I want is to feel your softness on my fingertips. I want you to want my touch.
“I hate you.” The passion in her whispered words could only be rivaled by her cries to come not a half-hour before.
“I know.”
She grinned and opened her eyes. She punctured my chest with the crazed ferocity of her stare.
“I look at you sometimes and wonder how I manage to contain the depth of my hatred for you. Then, I think the only reason I can feel this way is because you saved my life. I hate you even more because of that. I hate the way I feel when I look at you.”
I hate that you’re so beautiful. I hate that you’re the first thing I think of when I wake. I hate that you’re the last thing I see before I fall asleep. I hate that you’re in my dreams.
I pulled her into my kiss, my confession seeping out of me like blood from an open wound. Fucking empaths. Fucking emotions. This hunger to explain myself, to ease an ache I’d so gleefully caused just weeks before made me feel weak when I needed to be strong.
What’s wrong with me? Is this how the rites work? They make everything worse before I’m myself again?
She broke the kiss. Her eyes closed tight on tears. I kissed the salty droplet streaking down her soft cheek, but she stole the sweetness of her tears from me. Her gaze averted, she stomped toward Bryant Park, shuffling through snow that swept her calves. Reflexes wouldn’t let her stumble, but she struggled in heels. The slump to her shoulders as she hugged herself made me furious. She made me feel weak, but when I watched her walk away, I realized how much stronger I’d been compared with the witch. She’d been powerless. She had the body of a predator, the mind of a predator, yet she huddled in on herself like prey. Because of me.
She made me feel as weak as Liam had when I took his life, but the truth sang in my blood. My arms were strong. My legs were sturdy. For one more week this woman belonged to me.
Mine to fuck and bleed, yes, but like my brothers, also mine to care for. Mine to pull close in a storm, to keep safe.
You’re my mate. For a little while longer.
I caught her in a few steps, turned her to face me. She shrank from my hold, but I lifted her easily into my arms by her waist.
“Hold on to me.” I waited, and like a statue coming to life, she wrapped her arms around my neck. She didn’t pull away when I pulled her legs around my waist. She didn’t flinch at my touch as I averted my gaze and stalked toward our hideaway. I spied her from the corner of my eye, watching my face with a pained expression. Then she tucked her face into the crook of my neck. My hair and the collar of my coat blocked the elements battering her face.
All the heat in her body fed mine as I walked. I gritted my teeth against the hard-on forming, and then at her gasp, and the pump of her hips over mine. I bracketed her waist with one arm, but with my other hand, I swept the softness of her thigh, sliding up to toy with her bare hip. All that silken flesh hidden under her coat and her dress. All those goosebumps from my touch instead of the cold. All that emotion like blood weeping from the open wound of her mind, covering me.
“I hate you.” I knew she said the words as a reminder now, a desperate reminder her body wouldn’t heed.
“I know.”
My response should’ve been matter-of-fact, but I said those words as a reminder, too. Her body lit up like a bonfire against mine, but that didn’t mean she wanted me. I couldn’t keep her, even if she did. The threads that bound us were just doing what threads do, wrapping tight around our throats and strangling us with need.
She hates me, but until the last rite, she’s mine. My mate. My woman.
The thought didn’t grant me solace or power. Instead, my mind, thoroughly rolled by an empath, cornered me with a truth I didn’t want to face.
If she’s mine, what does that make me? Does that make me hers?
A desolate Bryant Park came into view, the fountain and grounds blanketed in snow and stone, with dead limbs stretching toward a pregnant sky. I kicked aside the snow, lifted the hatch, and descended into the dark. I entered the secret entrance of the library, climbed the attic stairs and strode to the bathroom. Only then did I realize I hadn’t set her down. She made no move to untangle herself. I didn’t want to let her go.
When I stopped moving, Evie pulled her face from the nook of my neck and studied me. In the darkness, I saw human eyes and dilated pupils, the human desire she’d once had when she gazed at me. All those times I’d taken her, all those times she’d been at my mercy, these were the eyes I saw. I’d grown so used to her vampire eyes. I’d forgotten desire could look like this on her face.
Her heels clicked against the dated tiles of the floor when she unwrapped her legs and I let go. We both squinted at the brightness when I flipped the lights on. She peeled off her coat, and when I made no move to leave, because I couldn’t make myself leave even if I’d wanted, she slid my coat off too, hanging both on the top edge of the bathroom door.
I lifted a brow.
She stood still for a long moment, staring at my chest, at a world on the other side of me. The lost buttons she’d torn off my shirt revealed bare skin. My heart galloped under the cool stroke of her fingers.
“I’m too tired t
o run.”
Her brow furrowed and my chin rose at the memory. Me staring her down over the hood of a stolen car in Austin. Her defiant look as she promised not to attempt escape.
She leaned her forehead against my chest, rubbing back and forth, inhaling the scent of me. I splayed my fingers against the dimples at the base of her spine and pulled her close, so close I felt the second her heart synced to mine. She wasn’t cold, but deep inside, a chill made her shiver.
Exhaustion and confusion warred within me. I combatted them by peeling that glittering dress down her body until I crouched at her feet. I couldn’t help trailing a kiss down her belly, or snaking out my tongue to taste the taut bundle of nerves capping her sex, the pink pearl hidden under brown satin.
Her soft sigh and the tremor in her thighs made me smile against her cunt. She clutched my shoulders as I slid off her stilettos. I nipped her inner thigh and she buried her fingers in my hair, guiding me toward the hum of blood between her legs. My forehead caressed her navel and I inhaled the musk of her sex. Salt and sweetness teased my taste buds like her blood had that first night, like the blood that flowed freely from between her thighs weeks later. Her blood called to me, like her mind had done, from the moment she woke from her watery grave.
You’re too tired to run. So am I.
I stood, and while she peeled diamonds from her hair and removed her matching earrings, I stripped off the remnants of my suit and turned to run the shower.
I held out my hand. My fingers trembled, waiting for her hand to fill mine. I clenched her slender fingers in my fist while she watched with a furrowed brow.
I’m not a gentleman. Even in the decades when I dressed like one, I never waited for permission to take what I wanted. I never escorted ladies to anything but their death. Changing this now, even with a simple hand gesture, felt like regression. Weakness again.
In that moment I hated her for staining me inside out with bullshit like kindness. I saw Vaughn’s sneer as he shut the door to the box in my mind. Disgusted by how I’d left a kill to tend to a witch. A turned witch. Because I hadn’t been able to kill her.
And you’re the leader? The strong one?
I slid an arm around her waist instead. She squeaked at my speed and averted her gaze. I pressed the sticky-sweet skin of my mate against my own and twisted her chin up until her stare met mine. I took what she’d been redesigned to give, thanks to my venom. A lie and a kiss. A trick of the blood. The pull of the moon. She kissed me like my breath gave her life, and then pulled away, gasping like she’d been drowning. Her breath stuttered against my chest and the beat of her lashes rose and fell in the lazy pattern of arousal. I lifted her and put her in the shower, stepped in to join her, and watched her melt into the water and mist.
She shuddered with her eyes closed and I realized water, even when just cleaning her, had become her enemy. I’d kept her trapped in one shower after another, fucking her in and out.
Before you drowned me, you made even a shower unsafe.
A girl in a dream flashed before my eyes, her face interchangeable with Evie’s. Both drowned and were carried away by a current.
She showed me family. She showed me a girl named Nora and an omen of her death when the girl drowned years before I took Evie.
I returned to the real world to find her face in my hands, and my brow against hers. She shivered and clutched my hands because I’d become her only anchor. I narrowed my eyes, desperate to quiet her flashes of terror and despair. I coaxed her bottom lip out of the hold of her teeth and lapped up the blood pooling there. I smiled against her mouth when she placed her hands on my ass and pulled me closer. Strange how this had become my favorite ritual. Making a mess of the witch meant getting clean, fucking her weak under a spray of hot water.
She sighed and tilted her head to give me her throat. “I’ll never be clean. I’ll always be the mess you made.”
I recoiled at the sting of truth. She hadn’t said anything new, but I felt a twist in my gut. Emotions she’d slid into my veins like poison I didn’t understand, let alone have the antidote for.
Guilt.
Her mind cycled through them. My cheeks blazed with heat. I felt ill.
Shame.
I wanted to go back in time, but why? To undo taking her? To undo killing her?
Regret.
Or, did I want to undo the things that made me a predator? Making her cry. Making her come against her will. Making her fear me. Showing her the thrill of the kill.
Weakness. You’re a coward, Jesse. You’ve spent your whole life believing a convenient lie so you can make a mess of other people. You’ve never had to clean up what you’ve done.
Like sweet poison in the blood.
Cai had said the words, but I hadn’t known just how right he’d be. I hadn’t known how screwed I’d been since I spotted her in her boyfriend’s arms.
To think, I’d smiled then, giving Liam and Vaughn a nod. This one, I’d thought, the way I had so many times before. She’ll put up a fight. I can smell her from here. That sweet fear.
Stars spiraled in my mind. Generation after generation of lives, bursting and burning out, only to lead me here. Humbled before a snack during a detour.
I wondered now if I’d even had a choice when I chose her. Had she been like those settlers stomping toward the shore in the vision of my father? Had she always been my inevitable end?
“If you’re my mess, I’m yours.” My fangs grazed her throat but didn’t pierce the skin. Tenderness again, even as I admitted a sharp truth.
“I should’ve killed you, Evie. You should’ve been dead a thousand times over.”
I slid my thigh between her legs, forcing her to brace her sex on the muscles I flexed. She moaned and rode my thigh, seeking friction and giving friction as my cock skimmed her stomach. I wanted to silence her mind. I wanted to silence my own.
“I’ve been a killer my whole life. I should’ve killed you. I thought I wanted to, but I couldn’t let you go.” I couldn’t look at her. I buried my face in her hair to hide my eyes. “You asked why I kept you alive. You asked, like I had a fucking choice!”
I couldn’t fight anymore, not tonight. This fake love, this chain of biology or chance, this curse, had thoroughly ensnared me. Why did telling the truth make me feel like a coward? The bloody pulp inside my chest ached when she kissed me. Like everything else between us, her kiss felt more real than anything I’d ever felt before, deeper and sweeter. The second she pulled away, I stole another taste.
How could an accident, an abomination of nature, feel this right?
She screamed inside, wanting to break free of the doubled-edged sword of her gift. I grabbed her hips and rocked her onto my thigh as I kissed her, hard and fast. I didn’t want her to push me away, and I feared diving inside of her now. I feared drowning as thoroughly as she had if I fucked her now.
Her nipples scraped my chest as her breath hitched. Her nails bit into my back and shoulders. Hot water blazed across the wounds, trickling down the mending skin with my blood. I knew the scratches would last longer than if a human had made them, but I wished they’d last longer still. I wanted the wounds to linger. Instead, I stitched together while Evie came apart in my arms, humping my thigh with the same rhythm she reserved for my cock.
I smelled rain instead of shower spray. We were diving into the past again, trapped in the dank, mustiness of a dilapidated farmhouse. The past threatened to merge with the present. Every memory highlighted wounds I’d given her. I tugged her mind into a different crisp, clean cocoon of a shower. I masturbated us, my cock slipping against her heaving stomach. For a moment, I felt jealous of Vaughn.
I’d seen her as just a fascinating toy in the farmhouse. I’d been standing behind her, listening to every moan, every sigh. I’d tasted her tears and scented her come, I’d controlled the tempo of her subjugation. Vaughn, however, he’d been able to watch her face. Watching her fall, watching her eyes flutter closed and open would always be his memory, n
ot mine.
What am I doing? Why am I trying to erase that day? To replace it with this? I can’t replace my memories. I can’t feel regret or shame. This stupid impulse is her influence. She hates me. She wants me to drown in this human bullshit.
I didn’t care. I wanted to see her face. I wanted to watch her explode against me, and not because I’d pounded her pussy into submission. I wanted something… gentler. Something like the moment we’d shared in the woods in Austin, but without the feeding. Something just for her.
When she tried to hide her face by resting her forehead against my chest, I grasped her chin and lifted her head.
She bit my thumb and opened black eyes to stare at me.
“Come on, Evie. Come for me.”
She moaned at my words, throaty and so full of need, I shuddered. My cock jerked against her stomach. We were both close, so close we didn’t dare let air or water come between us. I didn’t need to fuck her, to get deeper inside her. I lived inside her now. She lived inside me.
Why do I feel closer to her than ever? We should be separating but—
“Jesse, oh God, Jesse!” I clenched my teeth and strangled my thoughts, my confusion. I didn’t need answers to anything except how hard I could make her come just with a flexed muscle and my refusal to let her go.
“You coming for me, witch?” I moaned against her mouth. “You coming just for me?”
Her voice cracked in reply, then panting breaths were all she could muster. I wasn’t far behind her, my cock vibrating between us and slicking our stomachs with pre-come.
“Make a mess, baby, and I’ll lick it up for you.”
She came against my thigh, a hot flood of juice and spasms. A hard kiss punctuated her unraveling. I braced her lower back so tightly, I strangled my cock between our bodies. With every jerk of my body, my shaft flexed, and jets of come painted the spaces between us. I splashed her stomach, and breasts, her navel, smearing us both, and her come painted my thigh.
