CHAPTER 22
“IS SHE ALRIGHT?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened out there?”
“Idon’tknow!”
The voices were all around her, but her body was aflame, every inch of her skin prickling with heat. And she was hungry,sohungry, more famished than she had ever been in her life.
Everything was still, no more rumbling, no more weightless falling, just a solid cushion at her back.
She opened her eyes, her body lying on the bed like a corpse, her feathered black wings cocooning her in safety. They had eyes of their own, just like Bellinor’s, and from them she could see all. It was a dizzying effect, and she tried to focus on the men crouching over her, letting reality set in.
She had nourished the void and survived.
Le Voile’s darkness was not deeper than her own.
“Isabelle!” Rul gasped, pressing a palm to her cheek as if checking she was really there.
Isabelle. A name that didn’t quite fit her anymore, though she didn’t disparage it. It was still a part of her, somewhere deep down, though it washerno longer.
“Rul,” she rasped, getting used to her new tongue, her new lungs, the muscles of her neck and face.
“Why did you go out there?” he asked, his brows furrowed with worry.
She looked down at her naked body, her skin a light blue and covered in sticky red blood.
“I couldn’t let you be destroyed.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Bellinor said, his voice soft. “You should have gone back to Marilet. You could have died.”
“But is that the worst thing? To die and become nothing?” she asked, recalling his words.
Bellinor smiled, though there was sadness in his eyes. Did he see himself in her? Her fall from grace? The brutal repeal of her blind faith?
“Are you in pain, baby?” Rul asked, petting his hand along her chest, her arm, reveling in the new skin laying before him.
Pain? Yes, she was in pain. Delicious, exquisite pain. But she would survive.
And she cravedmore.
“I need you,” she said, wrapping a hand around each of their necks and pulling them down to her.
Rul was at her lips in an instant, his smoky scent shrouding her. She nipped at his bottom lip, andwhen he didn’t protest, bit harder, puncturing the flesh and tasting his saccharine blood. She was ravenous, sucking hard, the delicate drops doing little to satiate her hunger.
Bellinor’s tongue met her neck, savoring her new flesh, her drying blood, suckling her skin like it was the sweetest taste in the world.
“What happened to you?” Rul asked as he pulled away with a gasp, running his hands over her breasts and squeezing hard.
She arched into his touch, her muscles clenching with need as Bellinor pressed kisses along her chin, making his way slowly–painfully slowly–up to her lips.
“I transformed,” she said, before Bellinor silenced her with a kiss, the moment so perfect she thought she would melt into le Voile.
“She’s like us,mon chéri,” he whispered against her lips, and Rul beamed, bringing his forked tongue to her breast, raking a line through her blood and circling her nipple.
She groaned, holding onto them like she’d lose them if there was an inch of space between them. She wanted to absorb into them, like le Voile had absorbed into her.
