“I wanted to ask you something about that.” I still haven’t turned to face him. I don’t have to face him to see him with my eyes that can now see even the thickest of nights. Instead, I’m building him in my mind’s eye. The way he holds himself, out of his plated armor, back in his velvets and silks. Trousers that graze against his thighs, tucked into leather boots. Soft, yet sharp. And his snowy hair that constantly falls into his eyes.
Snowy hair like the man who has been occupying my dreams…I try to keep my focus on the present. I’ve been needing to ask this question and I can’t get distracted now. And Ruvan is nothing if not very good at distracting me.
“Yes?” he asks as if he is somehow completely oblivious to the effect his presence has on me—that my bones have gone white hot and are searing me from the inside out. I wonder if mine has the same on him. If every minute that passes this channel between us grows deeper and deeper, until it’s large enough to swallow both of us whole.
“If we don’t break the curse, what happens to me? Do I stay here forever?”
“Ah,” he breathes softly, the sound becoming a low, rumbling chuckle. “We didn’t really plan for that contingency, did we?”
“I realized we didn’t.”
The sound of the heels of his boots hitting the stone floor reverberates against the ceiling as he slowly approaches. Each step echoes like thunder on a distant horizon. He is the lightning, making my hair stand on edge.
“What do youwantto have happen?”
I inhale slowly in time with his hands as they rise. They hover over my shoulders, a breath away from touching me. If I moved in the slightest I could bolt away, or topple into him. I still don’t know which I want more and that terrifies me. I think of him holding me last night, but thoughts of him crushing me against him morph into when he stole me away—when he kidnapped me from my home and attacked my family.
“I want to be able to think clearly,” I whisper.
“Why can’t you?”
“You know why I can’t.”
“I suppose I do, if you’re half as ensnared as I am.” He has yet to touch me.Why won’t he touch me?The memories of that room return with aggressive clarity. Pale moonlight, just like what shines through the window of the smithy now, casting him in a silver purer than any I have ever worked with.
With an exhale, I’m back in his arms on that forgotten floor. His fangs are in me. I stop existing; he stops existing. We’re one.
I shake my head and do what I should have done already. I lurch forward. I stumble away. Wrapping my arms around myself, I rub my biceps and I try and shake the phantom feeling of his hands on me. Of him underneath the pads of my fingers.
I can’t allow myself to have him. I can’t…
The hot tension that was swiftly growing between us begins to evaporate in the cool night. Yes, he’s lightning, and I’m tinder. One spark too close and I’ll be done for. I’ll burn away, and all that will be left is this insatiable need to collapse the space between us into nothing.
“Well?” I demand, not allowing myself to lose focus. “What happens to us and our arrangement if we can’t break the curse?”
“I don’t know,” he admits.
“You don’t know because you don’t want to? Or because you don’t understand the magic that binds us?” I finally turn to face him and I wish I hadn’t. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen the brief flash of pain across his face. I wouldn’t have seen him swallow thickly. But I still would’ve felt the uncertainty, and that would’ve been enough. “You wouldn’t release me,” I whisper.
He is silent for a painfully long time. “Having a forge maiden here could prove useful.”
“I would never make anything for you again,” I swear.
“Keeping you from Hunter’s Hamlet, disrupting your family line, it could save generations of awakenings to come.” The words are uncharacteristically cruel. I can see from his expression that he doesn’t mean them. Yet, they still deal a glancing blow.
“You wouldn’t make a difference, keeping me here. My mother would teach someone else. My family line runs long. But we’re not so proud as to let the one thing keeping Hunter’s Hamlet from being overrun by vampir die with us. We’re too determined to survive for that.”
“Determined to survive,” he repeats with purpose, approaching. “Yes, you are a stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“You like me that way.” I speak before I can second-guess myself.
“I do.” He speaks so quickly that I know he hasn’t given much thought to the words, much less the sentiment behind them. My heart begins to race. The world narrows once more, focused only on him. On the vampir leisurely stalking toward me. As if he intends to devour me whole.
“Y-You do?” I take a step back and bump into a table; he has me cornered. The side of his mouth quirks up slightly. “Why?”
He tilts his head, assessing me, as if he’s still trying to find the answer to this question himself. “You…” The word hovers.
“Me?”
