That look warms my cracking heart.
“He, uh... he can’t go back,” Aries whispers.
Everyone in the room shifts to face her.
“What the fuck do you mean, I can’t go back?” My teeth grind together with slicing pain shooting once more through my chest.
Corva’s thin brows lift in surprise as she looks at her little sister. The smile on her lips is unsettling, to say the least.
That smile clings to her lips as she speaks. “You bound him, didn’t you?”
“Ahh,” Krave says with a smirk as well.
The two of them are not fuckin’ helping right now. “What!” I holler. “They did that demon binding. It’s for demons. It’s fucking useless on seraphs.”
“Ha-ha, that’s where you’re wrong, my pretty pink-feathered friend,” Krave says with a shake of his long glittering finger.
Fucking incubus.
I grimace once more, but this time, it has nothing to do with physical pain.
“It’s a ritual created by high fae magic. You’re bound to my sister,” Corva says with gleaming excitement in her eyes.
“I—I have to go back,” I say sternly.
“Yes. Yes. You do. But when a binding is stretched,” Corva claps her hands together, and as she slowly pulls them away, a thread of golden magic disperses between her palms. It becomes thinner and thinner. Until it snaps with sparking colors. “It won’t be pretty for you, Angel.”
“Fuck,” I growl out, my palm pressing over my pec to sooth the carving agony.
“If you stay, it’ll hurt. And if you leave Aries, it’ll really fucking hurt,” Krave explains in layman’s-blunt-stupid-fucking-incubus terms.
I’d say something back to him, but the next jolt of throbbing terror hits my heart like I’m dying with a full breath in my lungs. Dying while my head throws back.
And a beautiful gift from the gods looks down on me. “I’m so sorry, Zav.” Her tone is hushed and intimate along my ear. Her breath skims my skin while her fingers thread through my hair.
Maybe I am dying.
I’m dying a sweet miserable death that I deserve.
“Can you help him? Can you reverse the bindings?” Aries cries, her voice shaking so hard, it hurts to hear.
“No.” Corva’s long smoky dress fumes around her as she turns away from us. “You can pass the binding along to someone else, allowing them to inherit your angel. That’s the best you have right now,” she calls over her shoulder as though she’s done for the night.
She’s so much fucking worse than the pretentious castle fucks.
“That’s bullshit! Numb his pain! I know you can.” Aries is standing and storming across the floors to her sister so fast, it sets the entire room on edge. The men around me shift their stance toward the woman dressed in all black.
If Corva were to so much as scratch Aries, those three idiots would die avenging her slight discomfort.
Corva’s eyes are so bright, they’re like hellfire glinting in the dim lighting. Her amusement is enough to give me chills. “I’ll help him,” Corva says with that slow crawling smile catching her lips. “But I want something in exchange.”
Ryke groans at the sound of that statement.
I glance toward him and his thick etching scars are all I can focus on while the two women talk less than three feet from me. I can’t help but compare Aries’s smooth flawless body to Ryke’s in this moment.
He’s been touched by Corva’s dark fae magic for over a century. But it all started with him needing one thing from her.
Just like Aries does right now.
