Her fingers traced the edge of my tunic, sliding up toward my collar.
“I thought perhaps… we could…” she whispered, her voice melting into breath.
I didn’t have the patience for this. I looked at her, and all I could see was Evie.
Evie’s eyes. Evie’s lips. Evie’s neck. Evie’s chest…
Selena kissed me.
“Do you remember…” she began, her mouth leaving mine, but I caught her wrist.
“Don’t go there, Selena.”
“I was hoping we could do it again.” She smiled.
Not Evie’s smile, but my cock throbbed in my breeches and lightning cracked behind my eyes.
Selena saw it, her lips parting. Her hand lifted to my jaw, fingers threading into my hair. “Let me…” she whispered. “I can quiet it for you.”
No. I would not let her quiet anything.
She wanted to tame the wolf, to lure it into her cave of ice and drown it, but the wolf wanted out.
And I was perilously close to setting him free.
Her psionic magic brushed against my scalp. I felt it and shut it out. Easily so.
“Go away,” I growled.
She kissed me again. “I can take it, Kael…”
Can you?
My voice rasped, “You don’t even know whatitis.”
“I can make the storm go away.”
I won’t let you.
I had fucked Selena once. The night I’d granted her sick mother the mercy of ash. She had asked for it, desperate to drown the noise in her head, to forget what the plague had taken from her and the kingdom.
Had that single night made her believe she understood me, understood this? The wolf that gnawed at its cage, pacing beneath my skin?
Back then, the storm had been quiet, docile enough.
But tonight, lightning crawled beneath my flesh, ready to spill free and swallow the city of Befest whole.
What did Selena wish to forget this time?
Yet none of that compared to the sound in my head. Evie’s scream.
The knowledge that she’d taken pleasure in the pain I’d caused had not repelled me; it had unleashed something primal, something raw and hungry that I barely contained. It drove me closer to the edge. And I had done exactly what I dreaded most.
The storm had called her, and she had answered. But I hadhurther, drawn that agonizing scream from her. And I hated myself for it.
I hated how it cracked open the vault of everything I’d buried.
All that blood.
