He chuckled, the sound like dry bones scraping together.
He did.
“Then he couldn’t control himself. Or was it I who couldn’t?” He lifted the Revenant’s shoulder in a painful-looking shrug. “Perhaps both of us. Though he handled…his lessons. That was all him.”
My skin tightened.
“Watching yoursweetflesh bleed was quite…arousing, however.”
I needed to stop listening to him. Everything he said could be a lie meant to mess with my head—and it was working. My heart slammed against my ribs, and my stomach continued to churn.
“It didn’t happen always, but when you slipped into oblivion, we couldn’t help ourselves.” The Revenant’s body tipped forward. “He was smart enough to take from your vein where it wasn’t visible, and you wouldn’t look. After all, my pretty flower was so obedient then, submissive to the Priestesses. You would never…explore such forbidden, shameful areas.”
At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. He sounded fucking unhinged. Or maybe it was more that I didn’t want to understand because I was stuck in denial. But my body understood. My skin prickled and itched, starting to feel like a foreign entity instead of a part of me. Because…
Ididknow.
I knew exactly where. And I had been taught—groomed—not to even think of that area, let alone touch it outside of bathing. And I was always in so much agony after Teerman’s lessons that it felt like the pain was everywhere—
Or was that also an illusion of denial? Had I known the two couldn’t be related and just hadn’t understood what was happening at the time? My chest tightened, and my fingers twitched.
“It’s such a decadent vein.” His voice rumbled and thickened while my skin felt like something was alive beneath it. “I drank from there before. The one near your prettiest flower. And you know what,so’lis? You liked it then just as much as you liked it before.”
I lost it.
There was no other way to describe my response.
“Shut up.” Lunging forward, I grabbed the hilt of the Revenant’s dagger as I drove my knee up, slamming it into the area between his legs. “Shut the fuck up, you sick fuck.”
His body spasmed as I twisted the blade, but Kolis laughed. Hehowled.
“Keep laughing,” I seethed, gripping his hair with my other hand. “It only makes you sound as unstable and weak as you are.”
That shut him up.
“I know what you want,” I said, holding his stare as the essence flared in me, turning the corners of my vision gold streaked with silver and shadows. The wind picked up, whirling across the meadow.
“Is that so?” he whispered.
“It’s not going to happen,” I bit out. “Keep sending your Revenants to watch, and I will end them. I don’t care. But know this, you weak, pathetic…fuckboy.”
The Revenant blinked. “Fuckboy?”
“You heard right.” I smiled. “And hear this. I’m going to kill you, Kolis.”
He went completely quiet and then said, “Then you’ll have to do better than this.” He pulled against my hold until strands of hair snapped. “You’ll have to be smarter.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
He laughed.
And then his arms lifted—hishealedarms.
Fuck.
He saw the moment I realized it. “Yeah.”
He gripped the sides of my head and swung his forward. Pain exploded behind my eyes as he slammed his head into mine.
