His grip is iron. He doesn't squeeze to hurt, but he anchors me, pulling me out of my retreat and forcing me back into his orbit. He pins me against the shelves, his body shielding me from the rest of the room, blocking out the light.
He stares down at me. He is searching my face, his gaze darting from one black eye to the other.
"I knew you were not ordinary," he whispers, his voice rough, stripped of its usual polish. "I knew you were a dampener. A catalyst."
He lifts his free hand. His fingers brush my cheekbone, a touch that burns.
"But this..." He traces the skin under my eye. "This is not human magic, Leora. Humans do not have magic. Humans are mud and water."
My heart is a frantic drum against my ribs. I cannot look away. The blackness in my vision is fading, the sapphire returning as the connection breaks, but it is too late. He has seen.
"Please," I whisper. It is the first time I have begged him.
"Please what?" He leans in, his lips brushing my ear. I shiver, a violent tremor that has absolutely nothing to do with the cold of the room. "Please let you go? Please pretend I do not see the abyss staring back at me?"
He pulls back, looking me in the eye again. His expression is unreadable, a mask of Khuzuth calculation, but his eyes are burning with a fanatic’s light.
"You are Purna," he says.
The word hangs between us, heavy and lethal. It is a death sentence. The Purna were hunted to extinction on the surface. They are myths. Monsters. Enemies of the Dark Elves.
If he knows what I am, he knows he must kill me.
He slides his hand from my cheek down to my throat. His thumb rests against my pulse, feeling the frantic, terrified rhythm of my blood.
"I should carve your heart out right now," he murmurs, his voice devoid of emotion. "I should offer it to The Serpent and beg forgiveness for harboring a parasite."
I stop breathing. I watch his hand. It is steady. He could do it. He could snap my neck before I could even blink.
But he doesn't squeeze.
Instead, his thumb strokes the hollow of my throat. It is a caress. A terrifying, possessive caress.
"But I won't," he whispers.
He leans his forehead against mine. The contact is electric. I can feel the conflict raging inside him—the duty to his god warring with the addiction to the silence I provide.
"You are not human," he says, and the words sound like a revelation. "And you are mine."
He pulls back, releasing me so abruptly I almost fall. He turns his back on me, walking to the window to stare out at the rain-slicked courtyard.
"Go to the bed," he commands, his voice strained. "Do not speak. Do not move. If you try to run, Leora... I will not have to kill you. The city will do it for me."
I sink to the floor, my legs finally giving out. I touch my throat where his hand was. The skin still burns.
I am not dead. But as I study his rigid back, at the way his hands are clenched into fists at his sides, I realize I might have traded a quick death for something far slower, and far more dangerous.
He knows what I represent. And he has decided to keep me.
7
LORD IMAS
The knowledge of what she is sits in my gut like a stone swallowed whole.
I should have opened her throat the moment the sapphire of her eyes was swallowed by that unnatural, starry void. I should have offered her heart to The Serpent while it was still beating, a penance for allowing a Purna—a creature hunted to extinction for their heresy against the natural order—to breathe my air.
But I did not.
