She approached another man, sliding him a cool smirk as her fingers found her way to his lapel, complimenting an emerald green handkerchief poking from the breast pocket.
Careful.
He blinked a few too many times, trying to convince himself that a mirage like her would be interested in a plain thing like him.
She will eat you alive.
Her demeanor reminded me of the movements of certain felines. Slow and calculated because she did not have to be quick to catch these fools. She only needed to be still, and they would fall to their knees before her. I would wager that they would knot their own nooses voluntarily if she said,“Pretty please.”
I had to remind myself to breathe, so easy it was to forget such an insignificant thing in her presence.
While she could not have become more beautiful, she became moreterrifying.
Alina smoothed her hand over the fabric of his jacket, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. I half expected her to bite it off.
The man lowered his face into her neck, flirtatiously dragging his exposed fangs over her skin, teasing the flesh with a pale pink line.
Her sultry smirk never reached her eyes. There was an unmistakable voraciousness, a narrowing-in on her next victim.
She was in the middle of making the poor boy blush when her lips stopped moving, and her eyes dazzled as she took in the gilded finery. I watched them slowly track across the sea of people. Her gaze cut across the room like a blade across a stone, sharpened by the time it landed on me, and suddenly there was no one but her and me.
Electricity shot through my spine and made my fangs twitch, like I was setting sights on something to be caught. Nature was taking over, and all I could think of was topounce.
The tingling of blood filling my eyes made the colors alight, vibrancy bleeding throughout the scene, and replacing the colorblind binary.
In the moments we held each other’s gazes, her expression twisted. I could see scenes flash before her eyes, those of every horror I put her through resurfacing, breaking through the ice like a hot pickaxe.
I don’t know what was worse, the desire to see her run, or the fact that she was approaching, not helping to dampen the urges.
She was so polite in departing the conversation with the man she was toying with, moving through the crowd like she belonged, uprisen and proud. With every step she took toward me, the more my heart beat, faster and faster until I feared I would lose control.
She was close enough now to smell, to hear. Her eyes locked with mine. Everything around us was a blur, the blood flow to my vision making her vibrant as ever.
She stepped before me, her perfume overwhelming my senses. Black cherries and bitter almonds. I could get lost in it.
She placed a gloved hand on my shoulder, dragging it across my chest as she circled.
I followed her with my eyes, my hand reaching her waist as she returned to the front. I stepped, and we circled like an ouroboros, wondering when the tail ends.
She replaced her hand on my shoulder.
I took her forearm, extended it as my lips trailed over her wrist, then down her arm, until the coolness of her skin presented itself as the cloth of the opera glove ran out, and her chest pressed against mine.
The chill of her skin was almost unbearable, prickling at my nerves, sizzling like cold water over cast iron.
The flushed skin around her neck and her cheeks made the pulsing grow louder in my ears, in my chest. She began to pull her arm away, and I let my grip on her arm slip the silken opera glove off as she did so.
She was breathing rapidly; no matter how calmly she presented herself, the heaving of her breasts and her heart gave her away.
She leaned one way; I pulled her the other. A natural push and pull that turned chaos into a fluid, impetuous capriole. Her nails clawed at my clothes, desperate to pierce the skin beneath, a subtle violence that filled the heart with a gleeful fever, the very energy that made us move each other, forever locked in a deadly waltz.
Her nails retreated from my shoulders, but I held her closer before she could slip completely from me. Then, a sharp twinge in my side.
Upon looking down, I saw those beautiful, delicate fingers curled around the hilt of a small blade, buried intimately just beneath the surface of my skin.
“Creature.” Her voice was different, warm and stern, calm and deadly.
I relaxed into the knife, plunging it deeper. Like the pain itself was reassurance that it was all real, she didn’t take her eyes off me.
