Page 113 of Tempted By the Vampire Prince

Tears filled my eyes, and I nearly choked on a sob. A family. That’s what I desired most. To belong to a family. And not just any family. But their family.

The truth terrified me because families could be taken away. Or they could cross a line I couldn’t follow, and I’d be forced to make an impossible choice. What if something happened to them because of me? It had happened before, and there was nothing to prevent it from happening again.

Heat collected in the back of my throat.

Allowing Adrien and Yves into my heart meant offering the world two new places to cut me open. Foolishly, I desired them anyway.

I hung my head, tears dripping down my face. “I desire a family.”

Power rushed through me as soon as I spoke the words aloud. It filled my veins, wrapped around my bones, and crowded into my lungs. My magick had always gathered like heat beneath my skin, but this new charge spread through me like cold water. I began to shake, my body trembling from the chill. The unfamiliar sensation frightened me, and the pressure continued to build until I could no longer draw a full breath.

This was not how the ritual was supposed to feel. Once I offered Damien my deepest desire, the energy from the relics should have filled what had been depleted and settled into my blood. Instead, more power was pouring into me.

I realized I was bracing against the current again. Every muscle in my body had tightened around the power.

Let it come.

“I’m trying,” I said, teeth chattering.

I forced myself to relax, and the pressure around my lungs eased.

“That’s it,” a voice whispered in my head that sounded alarmingly like Dominique.

A second surge of power crashed through me, striking me in the chest hard enough to feel like another heart beginning to beat beside my own.

“There you are,” she cooed.

Until that moment, demonic energy had been traveling from the relics into me. Now something inside me was pouring back toward the snowflake obsidian. The ritual was no longer using the relic to replenish my magick. It had begun transforming my desire into power.

Instead of ending once the relics restored what I had depleted, the current had formed a loop. It pulled my desire into the obsidian, transformed that desire into more magick, and forced the power back into me. Each time the current passed through my body, the desire grew stronger, and everything else inside me became weaker.

“No. No,” I whispered, knowing the consequences.

I tried to close myself off to it, but I had already opened the deepest part of my heart, and thoughts of my little family consumed me. I tried to remember what I had wanted before them, but those desires had already disappeared.

The mausoleum vanished, and frigid, black water closed over my head. I tried to swim for the surface, but my skirts twisted around my legs as the current dragged me down. I was right back in the harbor, drowning, trying to chase after Mama.

“You are drowning in your desire, little witch,” Dominique said. Her voice moved through the water as if she were speaking in my ear. “Call out my name, and I will help you contain it. Deny me, and the desire will turn you into one of us.”

The darkness above me cleared, and I saw Yves kneeling at the edge of the water. Adrien was beside him, with Della perched on his shoulder. Everything I wanted. Everything I could lose.

“You can keep them,” Dominique whispered. “You need only say yes.”

I wanted enough power to close my hands around that life and hold on until nothing could tear it away. I opened my mouth, ready to say yes, when the stone burned against my ribs.

Another surge of magick drove through me. Above the water, Yves’s face blurred, then sharpened again as I fought to keep him in sight. The harder I reached for him, the more power the relic forced into me.

Dominique was doing this.

She had followed the current into the deepest part of my heart, found what I wanted, and turned it against me. Now she was offering to save me from the very thing she was making worse.

“Say it,” she whispered. “Summon me.”

I thought of the doorman at The Drowned Goose. The two witches who had attacked us. The power that had broken through protections my own magick should never have been able to touch.

I’d been grateful for it, and in my desperation, I’d kept using it. Each time, I had given Dominique another opportunity to manipulate me. The deception was unforgivable. I didn’t know if she really could protect me or Adrien or Yves from whatever might happen, but I certainly wasn’t going to find out.

“No.”