Page 103 of Claimed

The Vampire King of New York has apparently decided attempted magical throat murder requires a post-trauma buffet.

His head turns the instant I shift and he’s beside the bed before I finish sitting up.

‘Slowly, little hunter,’ he growls low and deep, reaching for me, his hand cradling my cheek with a gentleness that nearly ruins me.

I swallow, bracing for pain but none comes.

My mouth feels tender, but whole. When I test it, my tongue moves against my teeth. My throat aches faintly, but the raw, torn agony has gone. I breathe in once, then again, just because I can.

‘I can talk now,’ I say, and the words come out a little rough, but they come.

Juddering relief flashes across his face for a sliver of a second so naked it steals the rest of my sentence. Then his expression clamps shut, turning imperial and unreadable.

I force myself to finish. ‘So you can close the mind-bond if you want.’

His eyes sharpen. You do not direct me what to do, Eira.

The sound of him in my head knocks the breath out of me. It’s ridiculous. And dangerously embarrassing. I shouldn’t feel elated because the furious vampire who threw me in a dungeon still wants a private line into my skull. But I do. It hits bright and shameful under my ribs, and from the way his gaze lowers, he feels at least part of it.

‘What happens now?’ I ask, aiming for dry and landing somewhere near fragile.

Now you eat.

He lifts the tray from the table and sets it across my lap with the grim focus of a man preparing for war.

‘I don’t want food.’

‘You need strength.’

‘I need answers.’

‘You will have both.’

‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Several hours.’

Long enough for the Tower to decide whether it wanted to kill me again. Or for Rowan to poke at curses and poison and all the lovely ways Selphine may have turned my blood into a loaded weapon?

My gaze tracks over his face, the bruised shadows beneath his eyes, the harsh set of his mouth, the wrong darkness of the mark. ‘Hate to sound like a broken record, vampire, but you look awful.’

His brow lifts.

‘I mean, still offensively beautiful, stupidly hot, but yeah, really awful,’ I add. ‘But in a way that suggests a corpse and a supermodel tyrant had a very expensive baby.’

His mouth barely twitches. ‘You concern yourself with my appearance?’

‘I concern myself with the fact that you’re standing there looking like the curse has been chewing on you for sport.’

‘Eat.’

‘Has Rowan found anything?’

‘Eat.’

‘Valentin.’

His hand moves to my hair, tucking it behind my ear, his finger trailing my hot cheek and starting fires in my nipples and pussy I can’t, and probably… definitely don’t want to contain in my weakened state. But it’s the tenderness of it, how it makes my chest go tight, that I mildly resent.