Steeling her courage and buoyed by the beast’s desire to be closer to him, consequences be damned, she inched her way into his space. “Here,” she croaked, raising the cup.
Hands, hot and rough, gently closed over her own. Her breath escaped her lungs in a greatwhoosh.
“Sweet Josephine,” he whispered, not taking the cup but using it to slowly, with the utmost care, reel her closer. “How are you today? You look tired. Did you not sleep well? Are you ill? What is this on your hands — coal dust?”
“It’s charcoal,” she found herself whispering, blushing hard at the memory of her frenzy, how desperately she sought to commit his form to memory and paper. “I drew last night and it— it doesn’t wash off easily.”
Strong fingers slid over hers, warming her as he inspected them. “Ah, I see. Was it your drawings that kept you from sleep?”
They were close enough that she could feel his body heat radiating between them. Josephine felt herself flush to the roots of her hair as her core clenched. “I… No, they didn’t. I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Why? Were you frightened?” His deep voice rumbled even lower, sounding aggrieved at the very possibility. “You would not be if I were with you. I would keep nightmares away.”
“Not nightmares,” she croaked.No, I was thinking of sinking my fangs into your throat as you thrust your cock into me.
A different sort of nightmare than what he imagined, certainly.
“What, then? When you left me yesterday, you were soft and sweet with me. What changed?”
There was not enough courage in the world for her to explain her explicit, violent fantasies, but she felt compelled to tell him some version of the truth anyway. Her tongue tangled the words into helpless knots, but she forced them out. “I worry that— after yesterday, when we… when I touched you, it made me feel different.”
His fingers flexed around hers on the cup. “In what way?”
“When we touch, I believe it makes me compelled tobiteyou,” she admitted, horror plain.
A beat passed. He said nothing. He didn’t even tense. If anything, he leanedcloser.
She expected him to balk, but of course he didn’t. This was the same man who demanded she bite him only moments after their meeting. His lack of reaction was further proof that he still did not believe her. He didn’t believe that she carried lyssa, nor that his infection would kill his ability to shift — his very soul.
Tears were hot and heavy behind her eyes.I can’t bear that.
If he were infected, the guilt would eat her alive. He would be broken. He wouldhateher. Then what would she have? The tortured memories of the warmth of his skin, the way he spoke to her, soft and understanding?
She carried with her so many horrors. She’d witnessed the depths of desperation and the depravity of her father’s ambition. She thought she knew pain in all its guises.
Now, standing before her shifter, with his kindness and his warm hands, she feared that she did not know pain at all.
Worst of all was the shame. She was ashamed of how fiercely she wished to bite him, knowing what she did. She was ashamed of her senseless, overwhelming arousal. She was ashamed that even at that moment, when she considered all the pain to come, shestillached to nip his throat.
All these terrible thoughts accosted her, one after the other, in the space between one breath and the other. Josephine blinked. A tear, fat and crystalline, splashed down her cheek.
“Ah,” he breathed. It was a pained sound, the kind one might make when a bruise is pressed.
Those warm hands left hers. Immediately, her baser side slid into acute panic at the loss, but the worry was quelled when rough palms cupped her jaw. His hands were so large that they practically encompassed the entirety of both sides of her head, and the chain linking his cuffs clinked as it rested against her décolletage.
Josephine froze. In that instant, she was aware not simply of his nearness, but of the ease with which he might simply wring her head from her neck.
Instinct screamed. Her muscles locked.
He made a soft shushing sort of sound and then, with deliberate slowness, leaned down from his great height to press his lips against the tear track. His beard, unkempt and a little prickly, tickled the soft flesh of her cheek and jaw.
A purr filled the cool air of the cell. The shifter’s hands, so strong and work-worn, trembled.
A weighty stillness settled over her. It was a sort of internal quiet she had not experienced since the day her father injected her with the distilled venom of the dead vampire. There was no conflict between her rational mind and that of the beast. For once, they were in perfect accord.
Then, without warning, she felt herself cleaved in two — broken open by some monumental force to expose a part of herself she had never suspected existed.
From that place a single thought arose, drifting soft and sweet as a sigh:I’m safe.
