He leaned in, claiming my lips with a kiss, releasing the breath he had been holding. The kiss wasn’t kind.
His arm slid beneath me, lifting and adjusting me until we lay properly on the bed. He pinned me beneath him, towering over me, every nerve alive.
“When I’m near you, Evangelina, I can hardly contain myself. From the first moment I saw you in the academy courtyards, long before you came to Court, I knew you would be my undoing.”
He kissed me before I could respond. And when our lips parted, it was as though he couldn’t breathe anymore.
“I watched you,” he whispered. “From a distance. Making sure you stayed there. You were never meant to take Bramwell’s post,never meant to stand in castle halls. But when you walked through those doors, all I wanted was to keep you close.”
His words struck me like a flash of white lightning. I’d thought he’d barely noticed me before the Court, that I was just the seerling cluttering the halls, but he’d known me. Long before the Academy Ball, long before the magisters’ dinner, long before I’d dared to dream of him. My pulse stuttered.
“All this time… and you said nothing?” I whispered, more accusation than question.
The thought twisted something deep inside, a strange mix of awe and fear, of being chosen and hunted all at once. My skin tingled where his gaze held me, every breath torn between running and reaching for him.
How had I not seen him? Had he been at the academy often, haunting my classrooms, watching me from the dark?
How long ago had he started?
“You draw out everything that’s most wicked in me,” he said, his teeth finding the tender flesh of my neck, eliciting a hiss from my lips.
I arched my back, my chest pressing against his. I parted my thighs, allowing him to settle between my legs. His power crackled in the air, a force that could reduce bones to ash.
“I don’t think it’s wicked,” I murmured. “I think it’s the true you.”
His voice was low and raw. “Same sin, different name.”
He kissed me again, a fierce, ravenous, and desperate kiss. It was not careful, not gentle. It was teeth and breath and restraint shattering like glass, like lightning splitting the sky.
It took little time for him to tear through the rest of my night shift. I wasn’t sure how I would explain that to Naila, but Kael could figure that out.
And now, somehow, releasing my powers from their blackiron box didn’t feel so forbidden anymore. I relaxed my mind, echoes whispering to me like gentle gusts of wind.
I caught glimpses of his feral heart, his grief, his rage.
I saw his youth in fleeting images, then his time under Henrich Eisenberg’s tutelage, the plague, and more grief.
All that ash.
It terrified and enticed me equally. I wanted him more. His hands roamed my body, gripping my breasts hard enough to bruise. I gasped into his mouth, my body arching into his, begging for more without words.
I saw myself through his eyes. Not the shy, awkward Sud girl who was too young to play magister. But a woman, beautiful and sensual, with dark eyes reflecting candlelight like the most exquisite night sky ever beheld.
I barely recognized her at first, yet I knew she was me.
Was that truly how he saw me?
I saw myself at the academy, in the lecture halls from a corner deep in the shadows, in the streets of Befest, in the castle.
Kael had watched me for years. And now, he had me, and I felt the depth of his uncertainty, how little he knew what to do with himself.
Even if he could shatter me with a single thought, I held all the power over him.
My hands explored his firm back, fingertips burning as I traced the contours of his muscles down to his lower back. I hooked my fingers into his breeches and began to pull them down.
He broke the kiss suddenly, tearing himself away as if I had burned him. His chest heaved, his pupils dilated, raw magic crackling in the air. Tiny bolts of light surged from his skin and danced along his naked chest.
He simply stared at me. For one terrifying second, I thought he would wrench himself away again. But then light flared through his eyes.
