He didn’t chase her across the room. He didn’t yell or throw the lamp at her. He didn’t even growl.
What he did was much, much worse.
Hewalked.Slowly. Each step a perfectly measured and executed movement that pulled him farther out of the glow of the fairy lights. His heavy boots crunched in the chunks of glass on the stark floor, then went silent as he passed over the fluffy rug. He walked and he didn’t say a word.
Cecilia began to hyperventilate. She looked around for more weapons, but unless she could summon some serious adrenaline super strength, she didn’t think she could chuck the bedside table at his head with any sort of effectiveness.
Besides, without the element of surprise, what chance was there? She’d seen him rip Duke’s arm off like it was nothing. That kind of strength and brutality was beyond her comprehension.
“You should know,” she warbled, flattening her spine against the wall as he officially entered her personal space, “my best friend is a stone-cold crazy bitch. If you kill me, she’ll spend the rest of her life hunting you down and destroying everything you hold dear. And then she’ll shove something down your throat and watch you die. I know because she’s told me she would, word for word.”
Dahlia would never forgive her if she died like this. The woman could hold a grudge like no one Cecilia had ever known, and it’d just been the two of them against the world for so long that she was absolutely certain she’d see her furious best friend in the afterlife.
She warned me to be careful,Cecilia silently bemoaned.She told me to call her if Duke came asking questions. Why didn’t I call her?
Her breathing was little more than shallow pants as the monster pressed his palms flat against the wall on either side of her head. Heat blazed off of him, scorching her despite the fact that he hadn’t touched her. The alarm grew louder as his head dipped. For a wild moment, she thought it might be a manifestation of her panic, but she quickly realized it was coming from within his shattered helmet.
There was another sound, too: a deep, rattling purr so powerful it seemed to shake the very air between them.
Cecilia shuddered as he dropped his head onto her shoulder. The sharp bite of glass against the tender skin of her neck made her jump, but she had nowhere to go and no room to move. Despite being slightly taller than the average arrant woman, he completely towered over her.
The burning in the pit of her stomach intensified with every deep, audible breath he drew in, muddling the very real terror with the same fucked up desire that she’d never been able to explain.
How humiliating. I’m gonna die turned on and not even in cute underwear.
The monster sucked in another deep breath. The pitch of his purr changed as his gloved hands slid slowly down the gritty wall with an ominous rasping sound.
“My doe,” he whispered. His voice was distorted and double-layered. One was the robotic monotone she remembered from all those months ago, while the other came from within the shattered edges of the helmet.Thatvoice was… different.
Rough. Deep. Breathless.
Lust scorched a path down her spine, aimed straight for the juncture between her thighs. Trying to force it down, Cecilia sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “What…”
She wasn’t even sure what she intended to ask.What do you want? What is happening right now? What can I do to get you to let me go?
Whatever might’ve come out of her mouth was irrelevant because he cut her off with a very elvish hiss.
Her phantom drew one hand away from the wall. She tensed, waiting for those claws to do… whatever it was he intended to do to her, but nothing happened.
Instead of touching her, he reached toward his own neck. There was a quiet click, then a rustling noise as he lifted the bottom of his broken helmet up. Her eyes darted down reflexively, but there was little to see. He hadn’t taken the helmet all the way off. It’d been lifted just enough to reveal a sturdy chin and finely sculpted lips. Pearly fangs, an upper and lower pair, were starkly white against the dark shape of the tongue that snaked out to drag against the curve of her jaw.
Electricity sparked along every nerve-ending. Cecilia gasped, her fingers curling against the concrete, desperate to find purchase as her knees wobbled.
She knew he was an elf. Most elite members of Patrol were, and he was clearly that. But she’d never really been close to one before. They didn’t socialize with arrants — or anyone besides their kind, really. Things had been changing since the sovereign took a witch as his wife, but she wagered it’d take at least a century for those changes to trickle down to her lowly social rung.
To her and people like her, the elves were not just indestructible predators who’d once cracked open their bones to suck out the juicy marrow. They were the lawmakers. The protectors. The monsters in the dark. They kept the streets cleanand the universal income flowing, but they were ruthless in their pursuit of order.
To them, she was nothing.
So it really didn’t make any sense to her why she’d been thrown in what could only be described as the world’s strangest cell. She wasn’t important enough to ever make herself known toanyelf, let alone a member of Patrol. Aside from that one incident in the alley, she didn’t think she’d ever been worthy of even a glance from one of them.
The few times she’d been near an elf, her instincts had screamed from an ancient place in her mind that still remembered when they’d served her people on dinner plates.
But whenthiself ran the flat of his tongue over the hammering pulse in her throat…
Cecilia bit her lower lip until it stung. A sound caught in the base of her throat. It was a strangled, involuntary moan that made her face flame with embarrassment.
One moment the elf was drawing a line down her throat with his tongue and the next he was across the room, one massive hand pushing the shattered mask back into place.
