“About as well as your attempts to dodge my earlier question.” I nudge his thigh with my foot. “So, you gonna level with me about why you’re skulking around the bedroom while I sleep like some kind of… well, like Jude?”
Draegan lets out a quiet laugh, but it’s quickly overtaken by a deep sigh. “Augustine told me about the mark.”
“The… oh. Right.” That explains why he was touching my back—just wanted to see if he could find the mark, is all. Nothing more, nothing less.
That probably shouldn’t disappoint me as much as it does, but…
Sigh.
Wrapping the sheet around me like a toga, I rise from the bed and go stand near the window, gathering my hair and lifting it off my nape. “Do you see anything in the moonlight? I was trying to look earlier with a mirror, but I couldn’t find it.”
He joins me at the window. Close. Too close. The heat from his body envelopes me, his breath misting against my bare skin as he leans in to examine the mark.
His touch is powder-soft, fingers spanning the base of my neck, their gentle touch sending a shower of sparks skittering down my spine.
It triggers something in me, that touch. His breath. His nearness and the scent of his skin, like a storm-tossed sea that promises only death to anyone who dares to get close.
I suck in a breath, remembering the mages on their knees.
Remembering the blood as Jude made the death cuts.
Remembering how I begged Auggie… and the feel of him inside me—his tail, his tongue.
And after, the desperate need I felt in the car when I begged Draegan to touch me and he made me feel so…
I gasp, and Draegan lowers his hand and takes a step back.
There’s no hiding his effect on me, all of it magnified by a million since the other night.
He may as well be reading my mind.
Blowing out a shaky breath, I plaster on a smile and turn to face him again, ignoring the burning need between my thighs and forcing the memories of his perfect fingers out of my mind.
Pay rent, or get the fuck out, assholes…
“Anything?” I ask.
He arcs a sexy eyebrow over a slate-gray eye, and I swear I see a flicker of desire there. The air between us crackles with electric heat, with wanting, with all the unnamed things that have been swirling between us since the very first moments in the bell tower…
But before either of us can make a move to tear down the walls and just… justdosomething about it, he turns away. Crosses the room, moving about as far from me as he can get.
“No,” he says firmly, and I’m not sure whether he means no, he doesn’t see the mark, or no, we can’t acknowledge this thing between us, let alone act on it.
Whatever the hell it even is.
“Draegan, I—”
“Have you always had it?” He wraps his hand around the back of his neck, rubbing the spot where the mark supposedly lives on mine. “Since childhood, even?”
So we’re back to the mark, then. Ooh-kay…
“Maybe? For all I know, I could’ve been born with it—it’s not like my father would’ve said anything. He had a hard enough time trying to convince people I wasn’t a total freak.” I sigh and lean back against the window, the glass cold on my bare shoulders.
Across the moonlit room, Draegan’s eyes are dark and intense. Impossible to read, as usual.
“Draegan,” I whisper, another terrifying idea taking root. “What if… what if the dark fae… I don’t know. Put some kind of claim on me? What if it’s not just Zorakkov and the shadow magic society coming for me, but the fae, too?”
Chapter Thirty-One
