The memory shattered like ice, leaving me gasping in my chair. Winter stood before me now, her dead eyes boring into mine. “He made the same promises to me that he made to you. The same pretty lies.”
“Stop,” I pleaded, though I wasn’t sure if I was begging her or the Remnants or my own fractured mind.
“You’re fighting it,” Alastor said, his voice distant and distorted. “Let the power take you. Let it show me what I need to see. I need to understand them if I’m to do anything with them. This is power you shouldn’t have.”
Winter’s bloody fingers traced the air near my cheek. “Yes, let us show you how this story ends. How all our stories end.”
The shadows struck again, and I screamed as they dragged me under.
Snow fell thick and fast, obscuring the world beyond our stolen moments in the abandoned hunting lodge. The fire cast dancing shadows across bare skin as he traced patterns on my back with fingers roughened by years of wielding a sword.
The vision paused. Frozen in time. My heart was consumed by the way she loved him. The depth was more than Winter’s memory. There was a tiny sliver of my own pain here too. Even when I fought to pull away, I still stared into his hazel eyes and remembered when I wanted only him. When I’d considered never leaving him.
Winter’s voice curled around my—her ear.Do you wish to see it, Huntress? Do you wish to remember what he feels like?
I wanted to say no. To back away slowly and find a way to never return. But I was weak with curiosity, and I needed to feel something, anything but the numbness of resignation.
Use your words, Huntress, a new voice said. Though feminine, this one was smokier, sultry even.
I couldn’t turn to see who’d spoken, locked in Winter’s body. My mouth didn’t even move as I said into my mind,I wish to stay.
The feminine chuckle that answered was a sound I would never forget as the memory continued.
Thorne’s fingers slid around to my throat, over my breasts and down my abdomen, inching lower, leaving trails of fire across my skin despite the winter chill. His touch was painstakingly slow, as if he were memorizing every curve of my body. The roughness of his hands only heightened the sensation, a delicious contrast to the smoothness of my own.
My breath quickened as his fingers dipped lower, teasing the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. I arched into his touch, a soft moan escaping my lips as he found the spot he’d been aiming for.
The memory was hers, but the way I wanted him was not. For pleasure. For an escape. I wanted to use him. Use him and break him. I could feel my own heart beating outside of Winter’s. I could feel those fingers betweenmylegs. I could feel the press of his lips to my shoulder. And I was fucking weak. I didn’t need him, but fuck if I didn’t want him.
Say you want more, that strange smoky voice said into my mind.Tell us you want to feel what it means to be loved by him.
I didn’t. It wasn’t his love I was interested in. Maybe his dick, but I wasn’t even in my own body. My own mind. This was a fucked up version of psychosis and there was no part ofme that should have wanted a godsdamn thing from Reverius Hawthorne Noctus, god of complete bullshit. Despite the tiny bit of whore in me begging to say yes, I didn’t.I don’t want this.
Pity, the voice sang as the vision skipped ahead.It’s one of our favorites.
“Tell me again,” I whispered, pressing closer to the heat of Thorne’s body, satiated, sore, and more in love than I’d been before.
“Tell you what, my love?”
“That this is real. That we’ll find a way.”
He propped himself up on an elbow, his expression serious in the firelight. “We’ll run. Far from here, where no one knows our names or cares about bloodlines and birthrights. Where I can love you in the sunlight instead of shadows.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on everything I am. Everything I’ll ever be.”
I believed him. Gods help me, I believed every word from a man I thought was nothing more than a common soldier with uncommon honor.
The vision wavered, reality bleeding through like water seeping under a door. I could feel the chair beneath me, the ropes binding my wrists, Alastor’s presence heavy in the air. But Winter’s memory pulled me back under, determined to show me the end.
The blade burned cold in my gut, colder than the snow beneath my knees. Thorne held me as I fell, but everything had changed. Gone was my gentle soldier. In his place stood something ancient and terrible, power radiating from him in waves that made the air tremble.
“Why?” I gasped, blood staining the white dress crimson. The dress I’d worn to run away with him, to start our new life.
“Because some stories are written in stone,” he said softly, his hazel eyes now burning with an inhuman light. “Some fates cannot be changed.”
“You promised…” The words tasted like copper and betrayal. “You were only a soldier…”
