My fist slams down hard on the table. The wood groans before it splits in two. Maybe Celeste is right. Perhaps I have gone mad. It certainly feels like it. My mind is on a constant loop of “protect, protect, protect.” My insides burn with an insatiable desire for her. I want—need—to be close to her. I want to bury myself under her skin, but even then, I don’t think it will quench the thirst she’s ignited inside of me.
I always have immaculate control when it comes to my cravings, but this is far worse than bloodlust. I now balance on a knife’s edge. Thoughts of protecting her and fucking her and making her mine consume me until my head spins. I need to get her out of here. She can’t stay. I can live without her. I haveto, because keeping her here has the potential to shatter five hundred years of rules and treaties. And if anyone so much as touches her, I’ll snap their fucking necks and burn them at the stake myself.
A dull ache throbs behind my ribcage, pulling me from my homicidal thoughts. The pain is right where my heart would be, if I had one. I haven’t felt like this since I’d turned. It took every ounce of strength I fucking had to make it through that speech without claiming her right there in front of everyone.
I need to get it together. The Five will be arriving soon and I can only imagine what they will do if they discover that my mate has just walked in.
My motherfucking vampire-slayingmate.
The Five have been looking for a reason to blackmail me for almost a century. I shudder at all the ways they might seek to use her to get me to do what they want. The magic in our realm is almost dead. I have come too close to burying it for good, and now my plans are spoiled.
“I need blood,” I command Celeste as I keep my eyes fixed on shattered splinters of dark wood laying across the black marble floor. I feel dizzy, as if my life-force has been sucked away by an annoying brunette with death in her eyes.
Why does it feel like this?
“Knox, talk to me.Whyare you really doing this?”
Questions, questions, questions. I fucking hate questions.
“Are you deaf? I. Need. Blood.” I enunciate every fucking syllable so she gets the message.
“You won’t be getting anything if you keep speaking to me like that,” she hisses. “Fetch a Rabbid. I’m not a slave.”
When I finally look at my former Familiar, my jaw aches from the tension. Her wide garnet eyes flash with concern.
“No, you’re not a slave. But you’re not my equal, either. Get me some fucking blood before I show you what a madman really looks like.”
The threat is an empty one. More energy is leaving me by the second and smashing that table didn’t help.
Is that girl some kind of energy demon?
My blood turns icy at the thought. This all has to be some ridiculous cosmic fucking joke.
Protect, protect, protect.
I didn’t hear Celeste call for the Rabbids, and I don’t remember slinking down into the large armchair to rest. My head is too full of her. How the intoxicating scent of black pomegranates hit me, how deliciously wild she looked riding the Rabbid’s bike across the inbetween.
Blood pours down my throat. The warmth of it chases away the chill that settled over me.
“Knox, tell me what’s going on, please? Please!”
I hate begging. I hate it more than I hate The Five. Celeste knows better than to beg. I lazily open my eyes and meet her gaze. I once thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Now I feel nothing. She is eclipsed by the blue-eyed barbarian who flipped my world upside down tonight.
“If you tell me, I can help you. If you don’t, then I’ll have no choice but to send you back home.”
A bolt of fear brings me back to life.
I can’t leave her here unprotected.
She can’t escape back to the human realm.
There is no way out of the inbetween.
Besides, this entire forsaken realm is malfunctioning more and more since the magic began to decay. She could get lost in the endless desert and cease to exist.
I don’t want to care. All I want to do is watch the magic of this world die and take The Five down with it. We will all perishand so will our realm. And I’m so close to achieving my goal. But it looks like I have no choice in the matter. I know very little about mate bonds since they are so rare for our kind, and I never bothered to dig deeper. But something tells me that none of these symptoms will ease while she lives.
“You can’t send me home,” I mutter before taking the goblet of fresh blood from her hand and guzzling more.
