“No.”
“Is there a new rais?”
“Zahre.”
His one-word answers grate. I glance over my shoulder, but Ani has made herself scarce. “Are you angry with me? If it’s what you overheard before, I’m very confused about a lot of things since I got my memories and magic back. But my residual feelings for Roshan, even if they are real, have nothing to do with you and me.”
His throat works. “Don’t they?”
“Darrius,” I say, placing a hand on his armored chest. “We are soul-fated. Our path is written in the stars.”
He clenches his jaw. “We are still unbonded.”
“Because I’m not ready.” I try not to let my fear bleed through my frustration. “And you said it yourself—you’re not ready, either. You just won’t tell me why. War is coming whether we want it or not, and we both need to figure this”—I flick a hand between our bodies—“out before that happens.”
“Whose side are you on, Suraya?” My heart flinches at the use of my name. It feels unfamiliar and wrong somehow, as if we are strangers.
“How can you ask me that? I’m here, am I not?”
His eyes grow hard. “How do I know you won’t betray us to go back to him? What if yourconfusingfeelings end up costing us everything?”
“That’s not fair.” I grit my teeth. “What if you decide that Zahre is the alliance you want after all? I don’t fault you for having been with her. Am I jealous? Yes, of course I am, but that’s a natural emotion. You’ve just spent so much of your life suppressing what it means to actually feel that you don’t even know what’s normal.”
The king moves toward me, and instinctively, I move back. My breath tightens as he stalks me, and I match him step for step. I don’t even realize I’m being herded into a small room with a circular table until he lifts a hand and his shadows slam the door shut.
“Do you know why that is?” he asks silkily.
I gulp. “Why what is?”
“Why I don’t allow myself to feel?”
I blink at him, wary of the menace and slightly unhinged gleam in his eyes. That and the fact that he is slowly undoing his sword belt, letting it fall to the floor. Then go his epaulets. I’m torn between looking for an escape route and gazing hungrily at him as each piece of armor is detached. “Yes, you told me, it’s your curse. You become the manticore.”
The backs of my thighs hit the table as he closes the last of the distance, removing his crown and setting it on the polished surface. Darrius cages me between his arms, his rich scent musky and deepened but no less seductive. My entire body quivers as I brace my weight on the wood.
“Yes, love. I was cursed. And I have my father to thank for that,” he says, winding a hand deftly into my hair. When his fingers catch on a knot, I let out an involuntary moan at the tiny bite of pain. His bottomless gaze is so inky that I can drown in it, the menace eclipsed by desire, but I can see the jealousy crowding the edges of it.
“H-he did?” Somehow, I’m not surprised to know it was Fero; the brutality tracks.
Darrius’s fist tightens, yanking my head back, and he runs his nose up the column of my throat. “Yes. That was my punishment for betraying him, you see, for helping my uncle, Saru, in the War of the Gods. I helped banish my own sire to the void where he languished in his own rot for centuries. As a parting gift, he returned the favor. If I feel any emotion—sadness, anger, joy, bliss, lust—the beast would take over. And if I ever found my soul-fated, I could neverloveher, or the manticore would be my immutable future, forever damning us both.”
I gasp when he sucks on my pulse hard enough to leave a mark. Shock at his words combines with lust at the movement of his wicked mouth, and I have trouble concentrating. “Are... aren’t soul-fated bonds sacred? How could he do that?”
“Father of the century, isn’t he?” Darrius mocks. “Technically, he didn’t touch the bond. You see, he wanted to make sure I could never fall in love or I would become the beast forever, and you would be mated to a monster who would never be a man. Our bond would die. He didn’t want me to unite our magic because it would make me stronger than him. Together, my soul-fated and I would be unstoppable.” He rears back, a muscle beating in his cheek. He spins away from me with a noise of disgust, and I grip the edge of the table weakly. “Cruel, isn’t it?” He laughs, but it’s an empty sound.
I stare at him. “How do you know that loving me means you would become the manticore indefinitely?”
He glances over a shoulder at me, despair in his expression. “Each time, my transformation to the beast has been longer. I lose myself a little more. When you were withhim,I shifted for weeks, lost to blood and hunger and madness.”
Oh, sands. He means when I was with Roshan... intimately.
My face heats. Stars above, had he felt me bedding another man through the bond? I frown and think back to my first time in the aqueduct and the strange feelings I’d had reverberating through me, ones of hurt and displeasure. “You could feel... me?” I whisper.
His big frame shudders. “Always. But you chose him, and I could no more take that from you than I could stake my own claim. I would never condemn you to a future with a monster.”
“That’s alsomychoice to make,” I say softly. “I happen to have a soft spot for that monster, you know.”
My attempt at levity dies when he doesn’t react, and I lift a hand to his heaving shoulder. He whirls, driving me backward, and wraps his large palm about my throat. Sands, it should be wrong, but I love when he collars me like this, when he stares at me like he can’t get enough and I’m the only thing he needs to exist. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? I won’t condemn you to this. That’s why I wanted to reject the bond.”
