Page 101 of Hunted

It is profoundly inconvenient how much I crave this sharp-tongued scrap of a human. Worse, how deep the craving has gone. This is no longer merely wanting the taste of her mouth, though that alone has become an obsession I resent and revisit in equal measure. Last night I attempted sleep with intent, not because I required rest, but because I wanted the possibility of finding her in reverie again. Wanted that strange dream-space where she slips through my mind like contraband light.

She did not come.

The dark yielded fragments and frustration, and I woke in a temper so black that one wrong word from the Twelve might have earned someone a shattered wall and a lesson in administrative correction.

On the wrong side of the coffin, as she would no doubt phrase it.

I prowled the Tower awaiting her return and discovered yet another irritation.

I had to force my thoughts back to Lyra Hannigan.

To the proper gravity. The correct emotional alignment. The sacred necessity of finding the woman woven into my blood.

And it was difficult.

Because Eira Cross has begun to embed herself where she has no right to be. Not merely in my thoughts, but in the reflexes of my body, the cadence of my temper, the marrow-deep place where instinct and need become indistinguishable.

She is in the air of my rooms after she leaves them. In the silence after she stops speaking and in the pause before decisions that should have nothing to do with her and yet are shaped by whether she will approve, resist, flee or provoke.

She needs to be rooted out. That is the sane conclusion.

Then my mouth closes over hers, and sanity fractures.

Her lips part on a breath that sounds like surprise and surrender, and the taste of her detonates through me. Every argument I built around restraint collapses into heat.

Netheris fires and starlit skies, she is warm and sharp and aggressively alive. Her mouth meets mine boldly, resisting for one pointed fraction before she opens and lets me sweep inside for a first, frantic taste.

That resistance.

That taunt.

Even now, she refuses to be taken without taking in return.

I should resent it. Instead, I am undone.

My hand slides to the side of her neck, then over the curve of her jaw, thumb catching the corner of her mouth as I angle her face and deepen the kiss. She makes a small, breathless sound that goes through me like a blade drawn slowly from a sheath.

Her scent blooms at once.

Fear. Adrenaline. The bright metallic edge of nerves. And threaded through it now, unmistakable, the darkening sweetness of arousal.

The knowledge hits with brutal clarity.

My fangs pulse against my gums.

Hunger, desire and the need to fuck rise together in my kind more often than mortals would survive understanding, but with her the overlap is becoming a problem of unprecedented severity.

In this moment, I have never wanted to fuck a woman as hard and as desperately as I want to fuck Eira Cross.

I snarl under my breath and force myself under control.

No fangs, she insisted.

As if she sensed how close the edge truly is.

I stroke her tongue with mine, wet and warm, and struggle to keep the promise.

Barely.