Chapter Forty-Four
Petra trackedSilas’s form in the darkness, but it wasn’t easy. Even in his more human shape, he seemed to blend in with the shadows naturally, like they couldn’t help but cling to him. Her heart thumped unevenly in her chest.He’s coming. You’re fine.
She wouldn’t say she was scared of the dark, but she wasn’t exactly comfortable in it, either. So many of her worst memories involved being alone in the dark — listening to her parents stumbling into their apartment in the dead of night, drunk and fighting, sleeping wedged against a trash can in a dark alley, and being locked in a dank cupboard in the children’s home as punishment for not making her bed.
Petra was a luminist. It seemed pretty reasonable for her to not enjoy the dark even before she began to associate it with danger and neglect.
But it was only when Silas left her there in the clearing that she realized she didn’t fear it. Not when he was with her, at least. She hadn’t even flinched when he took her hand and guided her into the woods.
Because he was Silas, and if he wanted to hurt her, he’d say so. She trusted that. She trusted him. When they walked hand in hand in the dark, she believed he knew the way.
That didn’t mean she felt at ease in the woods, though, and it certainly didn’t rule out the fact that Silas liked to screw with her. She trusted he wouldn’t cause her any damage, but lead her into the woods to freak her out a little? Yeah, that sounded like something he’d do.
But she could make out the twin discs of molten bronze that were his eyes. She could just make out the curl of his horns. She could sense him there, moving closer to her at a swift clip, even if she couldn’t hear his footsteps in the underbrush like she should’ve.
And then he was back, warm hands cupping the sides of her face. Silas hunched his shoulders a little and pressed their lips together. It wasn’t really a kiss at first. He held very still and took a handful of deep breaths, like he just wanted to feel her there and share a breath.
Petra grabbed the fabric of his shirt above his lean hips and scrunched it. Stretching onto her tiptoes, she pressed a little closer, deepening the kiss until he responded with a low groan.
His tongue snaked inside her mouth to curl possessively around hers. Petra sighed as she tasted him, let him have his way with her. Her mind went so pleasantly fuzzy whenever he touched her. Everything seemed bright and soft and warm. His clean thyme and musk scent filled her nose. Her magic, hot and unpredictable, surged inside her to press against her skin, begging for something she was beginning to understand
The kiss deepened, growing messy, more intense, a moment before Silas threaded his claws into her hair to jerk her head back. “Fuck,” he grunted. His fangs scraped her jaw, the curve of her cheek. It felt like a reprimand.
“The fact that you glow brighter when I kiss you makes me fuckin’ crazy.”
Petra forced her eyes open and discovered that she could make out Silas’s face a little better. Not just because he was closeenough to share her breath, but because he was right. “I didn’t know I did that.”
An unsettling gleam entered Silas’s eyes. “What? That never happened with anyone else?”
Even if it had, she wasn’t sure it would have been the smart move to tell him so. Silas didn’t seem like the kind of man who would take hearing about her past sexual partners very well.
“No,” she answered, wary of what that answer would do to his ego but figuring it was the safer of the two options. “I always give off a little light, but normally I only really glow when I feel… strongly about something.” Historically, that strong feeling was anger.
She could make it happen consciously, too, but typically she tried her best to suppress any accidental glowing — mostly because it could lead to some serious damage to those around her if it got out of hand. Being a gloriana came with many gifts, but there were an equal amount of dangers.
Silas gave her one of his knife smiles, but this time it didn’t send a shiver of dread down her spine. “You feel strongly about me, baby?”
After lying about everything for so long, it was a forbidden sort of thrill to answer, “Yes.”
His sharp inhale was loud even over the chorus of bugs all around them. In a low, low voice, he promised, “Little goddess, I’m gonna fuck yousogood.”
“Promises, promises,” she muttered.
There was something about the way his eyes crinkled that took her breath away. “Don’t you worry. I keep my promises. I’ll even keep them when you don’t want me to.”
“Why would I not want you to keep a promise?”
Silas leaned in close to whisper, “Just you wait.”
Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant, since sheknewit was a trap, she asked, “Was he not there?”
Silas untangled his fingers from her hair. They skimmed her cheeks and down her neck, eliciting a shiver, before they settled on the curve of her waist. Half-turning, he pointed toward the ramshackle fort. “He’s right there.”
Petra squinted into the darkness. At first she didn’t see much of anything. The glow of sunset was far behind them, and the moonlight struggled to break through the dense canopy over their heads. Not to mention the fact that her eyes were just never very good in the dark.
“I don’t see any—” The words died on her tongue when a shadow passed in front of the little wooden sign above the door. She couldn’t quite make out the letters, but she knew they were there. That meant she noticed when they suddenlyweren’t.
Petra sucked in a sharp breath as she made sense of what she was seeing. If she didn’t know to look for something, she probably wouldn’t have noticed the deeper darkness that pooled in one place. It was like the impression of a person — a cutout in the fabric of the night.
