“Dilys!” she cried, shuddering. “Dilys, please!”
“My true Name, Siren. Speak my true Name, and I will give you everything you want and more.”
The terrible need she thought couldn’t get worse peaked even higher. The magic in his voice whispered across her nerve endings, played upon her like a thousand lips, tongues, fingers, becoming a torment of exquisite agony, until she thought she would say anything, do anything to find the relief just beyond her reach.
A name trembled at the edges of her mind. The same name she’d heard before. Strange and foreign, a name that was both new to her and yet as familiar as her own skin. His Name, she knew. It rose in her throat, throbbed on her tongue, pushed to be Voiced. But she daren’t. If she did, if she let him in, let herself love him with the wild, all-consuming abandon currently raging through every cell of her body... He was the flame that would light the world-destroying inferno inside her.
Her head thrashed from side to side. She was in an agony of need. She reached for him, fingers clawed. “Dilys, enough!” When he didn’t immediately respond, desperation sharpened with spikes of anger. He thought he could refuse her? That he would torment her into bending to his will? “Enough!” she barked, and something very powerful from very deep inside roared up through her body and spilled out of her mouth, filling her voice with Command.
He shuddered as though she’d struck him a mighty blow. His eyes flared golden bright. His lips pulled back, baring gleaming white teeth that now included a distinct set of long, sharp fangs.
He dove down, taking one breast with his mouth, the other with his hand. The thumb beneath her skirts pressed hard on a spot between her legs that made her gasp and start to shake. He lifted his head, tugging her tight nipple up between his teeth, stroking the pebbled tip with his tongue until she wept and pleaded against for release.
And then he uttered, “Ililia nua,” in a Voice that penetrated every part of her being.
Sensation exploded across every nerve ending. A scream ripped from her throat as an ocean of pleasure crashed down upon her. It swept her up, tossed her wildly about, sent her tumbling, washed over her again and again and again until she was boneless and limp, her throat raw from her unbridled cries.
Dilys cupped her face with shaking hands. “Now, Gabriella,” he urged in a harsh whisper. “Speak my Name.”
She stared up into his fever-bright eyes, and found herself floating once more in that sea of sunlight again, heat and blinding radiance all around. And the voice was singing in her mind, a Siren’s Song that promised endless happiness, love, complete belonging, an end to the loneliness that had surrounded her soul since birth. She wasn’t meant to be alone. She was meant to be joined. To be part of another—part ofhim.Two halves of a whole, joined forever through unbreakable bonds that only she could forge.
“Speak my Name,Sirena. Claim me as your mate. Bind me to you for all time.” It was Dilys’s voice speaking to her in the sunlit sea, but the tones throbbed with a compulsion that worked on her like a thousand tiny chisels, chipping away at the wall of her will.
Despite the shattering release that had just torn through every part of her being, the power she’d feared all her life was nowhere near drained. Instead, it was bubbling inside her, rising like lava in the throat of a volcano, pressure building, making the shuddering ache of her pleasure-wracked body seem minuscule by comparison.
Claim what is thine. Speak his Name. Set us free.
The voice was like a sentience inside her, a caged beast fighting to be free, furious at the continuing shackles she placed upon it. It wanted Dilys with a wild, ferocious eagerness. Rejoiced at his nearness. Reached for him with all its considerable might.
And she, Gabriella, the Season who knew what horrors came from someone like her letting down their guard and surrendering to the madness of love, was all that stood between them.
If she gave in...
“No!” she cried. “No!” She sat up quickly, shoving at his chest with force enough to throw him off balance.
“Gabriella.” He reached for her as she leapt to her feet.
That powerful wildness was still leaping hungrily inside her. If she let him touch her—seduce her—again, she would lose the battle to keep it contained. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. “No!” she cried. “Get away.” She shoved him away once more, and this time, unbidden, a burst of sharp power shoved with her.
There was a flash of light. The smell of something burning.
And Dilys Merimydion went flying backward through the frothing white curtain of Snowbeard Falls.
“Gabriella!” Dilys bobbed up, surfacing in the Llaskroner Fjord in time to see the Siren he planned to marry run out of Snowbeard Falls Grotto clutching the edges of her gaping bodice with both hands. “Gabriella, stop!” She paused, saw him there in the middle of the fjord, then took off running again, heading for the palace.
He swam quickly to the fjord’s north shore and was about to climb out of the water when he realized hisshumawas gone. The linengudohe wore beneath was burned, and hanging in tatters from one hip. And there were scorch marks on his abdomen. He poked experimentally at the reddened skin and hissed a little at its tenderness. The blast of power that had sent him flying off his feet and into the drink had not only burned hisshumaright off his body, it had done a good number on him as well.
A little lower, and she would have burned off something he’d miss a Hel of a lot more than hisshuma.
And he would have deserved it!
He smacked the water’s surface with the flat of one hand and sank back down into its depths, kicking off from the shore to float out into the center of the channel. He tracked the sky blue of Gabriella’s gown through the gardens and back into the palace, where she slipped in a side door and disappeared from view.
Only when she was safe inside did he drop beneath the waves and dive deep into the cold, dark waters of the fjord. The webbing between his fingers and toes expanded, giving him greater speed as he swam the length of the fjord and out into open sea. After what had just passed between Gabriella and himself, he needed the comfort of the deep, blue saltwater world that was his natural element. He needed to think and regroup.
He had, without a doubt, made a gross tactical error.
Fury sizzled his veins, the bite of self-recrimination sharp and painful. What had he been thinking? How could he have made such a grievous mistake? All his life, he’d trained for one ultimate goal: to forge a powerful and lasting mating bond with the woman to whom he would anchor himself, body and soul.
