I loved it. I loved every one of them.
His hand left my centre, the heat disappearing with him as he gripped my hair, bringing my lips to his.
He loved kissing me. And I loved that he loved doing that. My fingers were sliding through his long hair in no time, kissing him back with the same intensity.
Only when we were both starved for air did we stop, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
“Also,” he said, one hand tangled in my hair and the other one coming to my throat. “I haven’t seen, touched and had women you cannot imagine.” He returned the words I said to him earlier. I listened, waiting for him to continue. “I’m celibate.”
My heart halted.
Stunned, I reared back to take a proper look at his expression, hoping for any trace that he was kidding. But the punchline of the joke never came. “What? How long?”
“Six hundred.”
Slowly, I nodded, although I was struggling to digest it. That was a lot of time for a man like him. “Six hundred days.”
“No,Nher,” he said. “Six hundred years.”
The world stopped breathing for a second before it crashed, plummeting me into an endless tunnel of shock.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THRAX
Drained, Thrax walked into the house and closed the door. He yanked off his gloves, revealing the thin red line that ran across each palm—two delicate, angry seams, fresh and bright.
Before he left the cave, the cuts had not healed completely. But he had slid the gloves over the raw lines anyway because he could not risk Sanora waking while he was gone and finding the bed empty again.
He used to resort to a single palm, slicing the same line over and over until the skin refused to knit. He’d watched the wound gape and bleed, let the dark warmth seep into the earth until the soil drank what he offered. He would wait until his head loosened, until he could not stand, until the dizziness painted the edges of his vision and the world flattened into a placid, grateful nothing.
That was until Sanora confessed what she felt whenever he left the house.
Loneliness.
She had felt lonely without him. It was a first, sure. And he didn’t want the first person to ever crave his presence lack it because he knew what true loneliness felt like. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her drowning in the emptiness of his absence. So he’d shifted his ritual. He started going only when she was asleep, bleeding under thecover of night, hoping she wouldn’t wake until he was back beside her.
And to make up for the entire day he should have been spilling his essence away into the ground, he’d begun tearing both palms open to bleed out faster.
It had been his cycle since the day she was born. He’d started twenty-three years ago. One month in, one month out. A month inside Nimorran, offering his blood in the cave. A month outside, observing from a distance. He was always watching. The only time he’d broken that pattern, when he’d not gone to Nimorran for four months, was when Sanora got her first boyfriend in college.
Perhaps that was when she started breaking through the walls of his feelings.
But he’d kept his distance despite it, forced himself into the corner and watched the small theatre of her life play out with that boy.
He had not interfered because he told himself he would not sabotage her attempt at figuring out life. But gods, he’d stalked them. Every smile she gave him was like a knife turned in him, every laugh she shared with him was a reminder that she was capable of giving herself to someone else, no matter how much he tried to ignore it. He’d told himself it wasn’t his place to intervene, that he had no right. But four months later, when he saw them arguing in a restaurant—when he saw her finally dunk his smug head into the cake he’d bought for her birthday and called their relationship quit—Thrax had smiled. A true, unrestrained smile.
Because that fool hadn’t even bothered to learn her. Not the way he had. He’d spent years following and memorising her. He knew her favourite foods, drinks, her dislikes, what made her laugh, the little habits that shaped her day. He knew the angle she liked her books when she read. The details accumulated like moths around a lightuntil he could not deny that her small presence made the thing inside him that had been crusted for centuries bloom.
He did not know when watching her became a need.
And he knew everything about her without exchanging one conversation with her.
But her ‘boyfriend’ couldn’t even tell she didn’t like raisins. The idiot had the audacity to bring her a cake studded with the one thing she despised on her birthday, despite seeing her countless times pick them out of her cereal, bread, and even rice dishes. That was the tipping point for her. He never knew her.
Thrax hadn’t planned on developing a weakness for her. Not until after her second year in college, at least. But somewhere in the endless hours of stalking and borrowing life from her, he’d slipped. She became the only light that bled colour into his otherwise grey existence. Near her, he felt whole and human—something he hadn’t believed possible for him anymore.
Then came her second boyfriend. He’d told himself again to endure it. To let her live her life, to let her stay in control. But when he’d caught him cheating—cheating on Sanora—the control he’d clung to for centuries had flung out of the damn window. He’d cheated on her? Unforgivable. He didn’t kill him, no. He made him mad. He’d mind-controlled him at odd hours, suffocating him and making him gasp for air whenever he was with his friends, or when he was having sex with someone. Until he actually believed an evil spirit was tormenting him.
