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“Please,” she whispers, and the word breaks the last thread of restraint holding me in place.

My fangs sink through her skin, and the world detonates.

The first rush of her blood across my tongue is heat, light and power condensed into liquid. It floods my mouth, and I groan against her throat. The taste of her is indescribable and wild. Her blood is an electric hum that threads through my veins from the point of contact and radiates outward. It fills all of the hollow spaces the hunger carved and eases the darkness that has lived in my chest for longer than I can remember.

I drink, and the hunger that has been clawing at my self-control mercifully begins to recede. Not vanishing—it is never truly gone—but it’s easing back to a manageable distance. Retreating to a place where I can breathe and exist as something other than a creature defined by its emptiness.

My hands grip her hips to steady her as I monitor the rhythm of her heart, counting the beats, measuring the spaces between them, ensuring I don’t take what I cannot give back.

The power in her blood moves through my system, and I feel my body responding, my muscles tightening, the fog in my head clearing. The ache beneath is dissolving as if it were never there at all.

I pull back before I want to. My tongue sweeps across the wounds, sealing them, and the taste of her lingers on my lips as I lift my head and look down at her.

Her eyes are half-closed, her lips parted, her breathing steady but slower than before. The color in her cheeks is high despite the blood I’ve taken. She looks up at me through wet lashes, and the glow of her eyes is the same I’ve seen when her magic surfaces, a candle flame behind glass.

The hunger is gone. In its place is something that burns just as fiercely but has nothing to do with blood.

Strength

It surges through my limbs, and the world sharpens around me as my senses return to full capacity. The steam, the water, the sound of her breathing, her heartbeat, it all crystallizes into perfect clarity. At the center of all of it stands this woman, made to destroy me and save me in equal measure.

I carry her out of the shower, through the steamy bathroom, and into the bedroom. The unmade bedding molds around her body as I drop her onto the mattress, and the water from her nighty darkens the fabric.

A thin shaft of sunlight shines across the bed. I see it brightening the wet silk plastered to her body, but the danger doesn’t register in my mind. When I lean over her, caging her in, the light lands on my skin.

Warm but not burning, and I freeze.

Alessia stares, her confusion evident as I move my hand fully into the light where it’s touching the bed. I wait for the familiar itch before the burning sensation takes hold, but nothing comes. The skin doesn’t blister or sizzle. The last burns I received from chasing her through Xavian’s kingdom were milder than what I remember. I assumed traces of her magic coursing through my veins had something to do with it. But now, having directly fed from her, the light seems to have no effect on me whatsoever.

“Kye?”

I move my arm into the beam of light, feeling its warmth.

She gasps. “Shouldn’t that burn?”

I nod slowly, overwhelmed by the impossibly normal feeling of the sun on my skin.

“Kye?” she murmurs, and my eyes dart to hers. Her hair fans across the pillow in wet, ash-blonde tangles, and I feel her in my blood the way I felt her the first time I fed, that incredible sense of her threading through my darkness, making a home where nothing human should survive, and the rightness of it is so overwhelming that it drowns everything else as my lips crash against hers.

CHAPTER 47

• Alessia •

HIS MOUTH FINDS my throat again—not to feed but to taste.

He presses his lips against the sealed wounds where his fangs entered, lingering there as if the skin itself holds a flavor he cannot get enough of. The morning light falls across the bed in pale strips, and the sheets beneath me are damp from our bodies, but none of it matters because his hands are moving.

I can’t think clearly.

His fingers find the hem of the soaked nightdress and pull upward. The fabric peels from my skin, and the cold air hits my stomach, my ribs, and the underside of my chest before the warmth of his palm replaces it.

His hands move across my skin, and I feel every ridge of his steady fingers as they map the curves and hollows of my body, memorizing, savoring. His thumb traces the line of my hip, and his mouth follows, pressing against my collarbone, my throat, the space between my breasts where my heart hammers. My back arches off the mattress, and the sound I make is involuntarily pulled from somewhere deep in my chest.

His muscular shoulders are warm and solid beneath my hands, and I can feel the bond pulsing between us. My body wants this. My body has wanted this since the first time he touched me in the blood bank, since before I knew what he was or what I was to him, since the moment his hands found my skin and something in my blood recognized something in his.

That is the problem.

Because even as I pull him closer, as my legs wrap around his waist, as my nails dig into his back, as my breath comes in ragged gasps, part of me is still standing in a dark corridor with iron bars pressing cold against my chest.