“You lied to me.” His voice booms in the night, cutting me off. “You hid exactly the parts of your story that would have saved us a lot of trouble. Marhus wouldn’t be dead right now. So many others besides him.” The malice dripping from his cold voice slashes through my chest like a dagger, directly to the heart. “Their deaths are on your hands.”
“You think I don’t know that?” My voice breaks with endless guilt. “You think it doesn’t haunt me?”
“Does it?” he asks, his tone callous. “Or are you again just saying what I want to hear?”
“Fuck you, Vampire King,” I spit through gritted teeth. I pull at my wrists again, but he only grabs me harder, his fingers digging into my flesh.
“I’m not letting you go, umbra. Face what you’ve done. How you broke us.”
Tears start spilling over my lashes again as I look at his beautiful face filled with sorrow.
“If you hate me so much, why won’t you let me go? Why torment me? Why claim me in front of Mael and risk an alliance we won’t survive without?”
His eyes narrow into obsidian slits at the mention of the human. He tugs me violently toward him, my mouth just a whisper above his. I can feel his cool breath fanning my face, and it makes the hair on my body stand on end.
“I hate your lies, your betrayal. How you ripped the heart from my chest and stomped all over it. How you continue to do so by flirting in my fucking face with Blaise, and now with that human twat.”
My breath catches in my throat, and flames scorch my insides at his possessive tone.
All pretense is gone between us. His jealousy has my heart in a chokehold. My rageful mind wants to refute his words, to tear into him for being a hypocritical asshole. But the softer side of me trembles at his covetousness.
“I hate how obsessed I still am with you,” he continues. “I don’t trust you, Aimee, but I will not let another steal what’smine.”
“I amnot yours,”I reply out of pure stubbornness.
Oh, but how I wishI were.
His cruel laugh reverberates through my skull. There’s a charged electricity crackling between us, and for a split second nothing happens. Then he whispers, “I’ll prove you are,” and lunges at me.
My back hits the sand as he flips us over, looming over me menacingly before he brings his mouth down on mine in a punishing kiss. It’s all tongue and teeth, vicious and desperate, and I can taste his blood in my mouth.
I never thought I would like the taste of blood, but as his hits my tongue, I moan loudly, an unhinged frenzy overcoming my limbs. He let go of my hands sometime ago, and I make good use of them, grabbing his midnight strands and tugging harshly, exposing more of his jaw and throat. My tongue laps feverishly at the blood coating his skin, and I raise my hips toward his erection, desperately lookingfor friction.
He’s an addiction I can’t get rid of, a curse that is eating me from the inside out.
But if he’s my ruin, then why does his touch feel like salvation?
My shadows have been churning against the confines of my flesh since he tackled me to the ground, and I don’t want to keep them at bay anymore. With a sigh, I let go of the tether that keeps them grounded to me, and my shadow double emerges at the same time as Shadow Killian. They waste no time in colliding, two forces of darkness unraveling each other before our eyes. Their urgency for one another is unmatched. Our powers come from the part of our soul that doesn’t care about wrongdoing and betrayal. The part of our soul that isn’t complete without the other.
“Truce?” Killian’s tentative question comes, the same one he asked a few days ago in his study.
This time around, I nod fervently, unable to avoid my feelings any longer.
I want him.
I will always want him.
We come crashing down like the sun and the moon, the waves and the shore, fire and ice.
He wraps his fingers around my disheveled hair and fists it close to my nape as he peppers kisses down the column of my throat, lingering against my pulse point. His fangs graze the skin there ever so slowly, and I feel the pressure of their sharp tips right before Killian moves his head back abruptly.
His crazed eyes drink me in—a mirror of mine, surely—obsession and yearning swimming in them. I claw at his black shirt, buttons flying everywhere.
“Umbra,” he says between ragged breaths. “I don’t think I can do gentle right now.”
My heart clenches at the thoughtfulness behind that sentence.
“Fuck gentle,” I growl.
