Page 21 of His Darkest Desire
This is the end.
Kinsley squeezed her eyes shut, awaiting the killing blow.
His hand tore away from her throat, claws grazing her skin, and the bed shook as he shoved himself away. The flames in the fireplace sputtered as though disturbed by a strong wind just before the bedroom door slammed shut.
She jolted, opened her eyes, and sought him out. But he was gone, and she was alone.
A cry broke past her lips as she snapped her thighs together and curled up into a ball on her side, letting the tears flow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Vex threw open the ritual chamber doors with a blast of magic. They pounded against the stone walls and bounced off, vibrating with the impact. He stormed through, boots thumping on the worn stone steps, and thrust his hands backward to release another violent arcane burst.
The heavy oak doors barely had time to groan on their ancient hinges before slamming shut. The sound reverberated through the chamber like thunder across the heavens.
Echo, Flare, and Shade whispered amongst themselves behind him.
“Silence,” he commanded.
Their words ceased. Vex stalked along the centuries-old groove he’d worn into the ground around the standing stone circle.
Tension, fury, and magic crackled through his being, more volatile than any storm. Raw mana buzzed up his legs each time he crossed one of the ley lines that converged beneath the tree. Those tastes of magic only exacerbated his frustration. Virtually limitless power, and yet he could not use it to accomplish his singular goal.
“Freedom dangles before me,” he growled, lifting a hand with fingers curled, “and I cannot grasp it. This human knows not her place. She needs but submit, and our suffering will end. I demand nothing more than that to which she has agreed!”
His wings drew in tight against his back, thrumming with tension.
She is my mate.
Kinsley carried a piece of his soul within herself, and it had meant nothing. She’d disobeyed him. She’d rejected him. She’d looked upon him like he was a monster.
The wisps drifted closer, casting their soft glows over his shoulders. He should have bidden them to watch the human. Kinsley was no more capable of escaping these woods than Vex, not while she was bound by their pact, but she was human. She was vulnerable to all manner of threats, from the overt, like the dangerous, unnatural creatures that sometimes stumbled into his realm, to the mundane, like a raised root in the forest or a bramble patch. Above all, she was vulnerable to her own stubbornness and folly. The lifeforce he’d shared with her had certainly enhanced her survivability, but he doubted it had pushed her limits particularly far.
She was too fragile and too important to be left unattended.
By root and thorn, the memory of her feel lingered at the forefront of his mind. That soft, supple skin beneath his hand, those yielding thighs, her heat. The ghost of her scent remained in his nose, a fragrance that had haunted him since the night he’d found her—orange blossom, honey, and fresh rain. She smelled of foreign lands, and yet her scent was somehow familiar.
But in her defiance, she’d spoken those damned words.
Rape me, you fucking monster!
Roaring, he halted and hammered a fist into the wall, wings extending to lend momentum to the blow. Stone cracked and crumbled around his hand. “What could a human know about monsters?”
“No less than you have shown her, magus,” Flare responded in their raspy voice.
Vex tore his hand free from the wall with a growl, sending more debris to the chamber floor. “I commanded sile—”
The word caught in his throat as he beheld the sight before him. His shadow was cast large upon the wall by the light of the runestones in the circle, but the flickering glow of the wisps made it amorphous, unstable. He stared at that unpredictable, insatiable mass of darkness. Yet regardless of its imposing presence, it was ultimately empty. Impotent. Powerless.
A shadow…or a reflection?
“You knew well the answer already,” Echo whispered, “else you would not have stopped yourself.”
Vex lowered his gaze to his hands. Hands that had grasped the human’s throat, that had been about to guide his cock into her heat. Hands that had acted despite her protests.
He’d been about to take Kinsley against her will.
A shudder coursed through his wings, which reflexively folded against his back.