?I lean forward to focus on the exchange happening. Trouble dips her blooddrop eyes to his shoulder and the air turns electric. Slowly, keeping her glaring expression, Trouble lifts her hands to Castiel’s collared shirt and undoes the first couple buttons before dragging his left side over.
?His breath hitches as his glare turns heated and his fisted hands press into his thighs. I’m sure to keep them there instead of roving over her body like he wants to. Like I want to.
?She exposes his collarbone and the crook of his neck – right where she had bit him four months ago. Right where her bitemark still mars his flesh.
?It has me standing up and leaning on my desk to look closer. Castiel had gloated before about it. Described in full detail how she felt. Her body on his, her fangs in his skin, her venom flowing through his veins as she drank.
?Then there had been an altercation with them in Varian’s classroom. Callahan beat every opponent for a month in training after that altercation. Neither of them would tell us what happened, but Castiel shut up about the whole thing. His only comment afterward had been when Thorne asked why her mark wasn’t fading when it had been weeks.
?But Castiel said her mark stayed longer because of the poison. He said it started fading after two months. He said it was basically gone right before she woke up.
?And yet. . .
?Two distinct imprints are scarred over his skin. Two white marks as vivid as if she had just bit him.
?Not gone. Not faded.
?“So. . .” Her voice shakes slightly as she continues staring at the mark. “What would my fated think,” she repeats and time moves at an odd pace, “if my scent was all overhisbody?”
Eight
Castiel – Novam 14
She looks up through her lashes at me and I can’t get any air into my lungs. All the space within is full of her, and even still, it’s not enough.
?The first night I met her filters through my mind. Tasting her skin, soaking up her scent, curling my body – no matter that it was serpentine – around hers.
?I lied.
?To my best friend. To the male I see as a brother. To the only remaining true family I have left.
?I told him there was no tie and have kept my aura under lock and key to keep control of everything within. When she told Varian she had known they were fated since the incidentin her room, saying both fated know instantly together, she had glanced at me.
?And when she plucked that thread between her and us I relied on the power of my primordial mother to keep still.
?“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask on a breath.
?She flicks the collar of my shirt closed and steps back while shifting to a guarded expression. The red of her iris’s deepening and exposing a ring of shadows and glowing light around the edge of her iris.
?“Because fate is bullshit.” She glances at her mark now covered by my shirt. “And that was not a claiming mark so it’ll be gone in a few more months.”
?The tension and electricity in the air glitches and then dissipates at her words and tone.
?She hadn’t said that with her usual dry tone or sass or sarcasm. She spoke like she was speaking a threat. A promise in her words fueled with raw, uncontrolled wrath. Even though she didn’t make a threat, she said it the same way.
?Then it all disappears.
?Like someone flipped a switch, her eyes return to their rosy hue, her aura disappears, her scent barely permeates the air. After feeling all of that, after witnessing her magic firsthand, after knowing about the extent of her power, it makes my soul curl claws into the thread connecting us because she feels dead. It feels as if she just died with how much she simply disappears.
?“Now what do you want?” she snaps. Crossing her arms over her chest and lifting a brow in question.
?Irritation flickers through my blood as it always does when she dismisses me. She does it in class too, always ignoring me and keeping her eyes away.
?I don’t have a right to demand things of her. None of us do. . . but now that our tie is out in the open that primal urge to make her mine is irreversibly daunting. I want my body wrapped around her again but in this form and no interruptions.
?I also want to know why she was in here with Darian.
?Mimicking her stance, I cross my arms as well. “Why were you in here alone with Darian? And why was your scent all over his body?”
