Page 50 of Ashen Souls

I opened our chat and typed out a safe half-truth instead.

Me: Office hours done. We talked Endymion. He’s… intense. I don’t know what to think.

Harper: Knew it. I bet the tension in there was a literal fire hazard. Spill. Every. Single. Detail.

Another message bubble appeared before I even had time to respond.

Harper: Also, don’t wait up tonight. I’ve got a date. Priorities, babe. Content later.

I shook my head at the screen and tucked my phone back into my bag.

Harper’s absence left the apartment lifeless. I didn’t try to fill the nothingness with music or homework or the pretense of a normal evening.

I didn't even change my clothes. I just lay down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as the shadows stretched across the plaster.

My body felt caught in a brutal tug-of-war. On my waist, the phantom pressure of Ethan’s hand still burned, but at the nape of my neck, the stained thumbprint pulsed with a darker demand.

I had spent the whole day seeking out the rational authority of my professor to protect me from my own mind, only to lie here, starving for the very nightmare I was supposedly running from.

I stopped fighting the pull. I let the withdrawal win, surrendering completely to the darkness.

The glow of the streetlamp seeping through the blinds suddenly snuffed out, swallowing the bedroom in pitch blackness.

And then…

he was there.

14

♫ CHASE HOLFELDER—ANIMAL

My eyes snapped open, and the biting chill of Vesbridge was gone. The air in my lungs was thick, coating my tongue with the bitter taste of ash. I was right where the rot in my own soul had dragged me.

The chamber no longer wore its velvet mask of sanctuary. The stone walls had closed ranks, radiating a heat that drew a prickle of sweat along my hairline. In the iron grate, the flames didn’t merely burn, they snarled. The fire cast elongated shadows that clawed their way across the flagstones, shrinking the room until there was nowhere left to hide.

Two rings of ember-orange fire watched me from the deepest corner of the room. The space between us remained untouched by his hands, undisturbed by his voice. Yet the possession in those burning eyes choked the fight out of me before he even crossed the room.

Every rational instinct screamed at me to scramble backward, but a shameful ache pooled between my thighs, slicking me for a monster. A desperate urge gnawed at my throat, a craving to map the sculpted ridges of his abdomen with my tongue, to taste the molten lines of red throbbing beneath his skin, and follow them lower. Down into the dark.

My mind hated him. My flesh belonged to him.

“Miss me?” The low timbre of his voice scraped along my nerves as he stalked forward.

“Daeren.” His name cracked on my lips, less of a greeting and more of a confession. “I thought you left.”

A smirk touched his mouth as he stopped inches from the bed. “You thought I’d abandon my favorite obsession the moment she started begging to be claimed?”

He surged closer. The mattress dipped as he braced one arm beside my hip and the other near my shoulder, caging me in. I shrank back, already pressed flush against the headboard, unable to stop the shaking of my limbs.

Daeren halted. His eyes tracked my shoulders, dissecting the raw fear I couldn’t mask.

“You’re terrified,” he observed, an abrasive rumble vibrating from his chest. He invaded my space anyway, indifferent to my retreat.

“You bruised me. “You left marks.”

“I branded what belongs to me,” he corrected. “And I will leave a hundred more before I’m done.”

He didn't allow me another inch. His hand lashed out, fingers sliding beneath my hair, shackling the back of my neck. His thumb locked perfectly into the plum-colored bruise he had crushed into my flesh the night before.