Florienne, my rose, is many things. She is a pillar of strength, of change. She has the iron will of a Goddess and the beauty of the stars.
Me—I am nobody. I exist only as her thorns, to bleed her enemies dry, so she is free to bloom.
But now I’m here, staring at her chains in my bloody fists, still mindless with yearning and possessive violence. Still trembling with the force of containing my urges because, without a subject for my rage, this storm inside me will shift into something I can use on her.
And she’s there, looking up at me with hopeful eyes like she used to, asking me the one question I can’t answer.
“Who are you?” she repeats, looking over my body, landing on places that score dread on my soul. My mask. My scarred and bloody knuckles. My eyes.
In the Labryinth, all lies are accompanied by consequences. Burns that sear your skin, branding your untruths. So I tell her the truth—the only truth I know.
“I am nobody,” I grunt, and toss the chains.
My first mistake.
Without something to occupy my hands, my instincts surge. Bloodlust shifts into regular lust. Logic and reason abandon my head and all I can see or think is her, how good she will look splayed out before me, how I must finish what that other hunter started. I’ve been hard since our kiss, but now my cock pulses and throbs with demand. It needs to be inside her, filling her with my seed, staking my claim.
She is mine.
MINE.
“What are you doing?” Her eyes widen.
It’s then I realize I’m advancing on her, breathing labored. My lip curls back, intending to warn her, but a deep, guttural sound comes out.
She startles.
“Run,” I grind out.
“No.” She lifts her chin, but I see the doubt in her eyes. “Take off your mask.”
Her back hits the altar. Trapped. Victory howls within my soul while somewhere distant, my heart screams that this is not how it should go.
My hands clamp onto the stone, caging her between my arms. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, pushing her breasts, erect nipples, against the wet silk and directly into my line of sight. I can smell her fear, her arousal. She’s intoxicating.
“I said run,” I snarl, desperately clinging to the last shreds of my control. “Duck, crawl beneath my arms.”
Because I can’t remove them. My body is not my own.
My Florienne doesn’t back down. Her eyes flash with defiance as she reaches for my mask. I jerk away, my heart pounding.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she whispers. “Drayven?”
The name pierces through the hot haze of lust. I shake my head. “That boy is dead.”
He died the night she was taken to the Pen.
“Then why won’t you show me your face?”
“I can’t take it off,” I admit, the words torn from my throat. “It’s cursed. It makes my instincts hard to control.”
“Dray…”
“That boy is DEAD.” My fists slam on the stone beside her. Cracks form. Debris crumbles onto the briars strangling its base, onto the pulpy remnants of the man who tried to touch her.
“I’m not running.”
“Foolish woman.” My face buries into her neck. My bloody fingers spear into her hair. “Reckless woman.” I run my nose along her throat, inhaling my drug of choice through the mask. “Don’t you see what will happen?”
