Garin brought it to his nose and inhaled, and several images flashed through his mind—a steaming loaf of speckled bread. A vase of dried Cornish lavender on a clean mantle. Sunlight streaming through a window, and a green armchair before a crackling fire.
He was going to kill her.
Garin’s stomach painfully lurched as she watched from the settee—he, transfixed on the blooming splotch of red on her skirts, and her, on him. Slowly, her fingers tiptoed, bunching the fabric of her kirtle and revealing the gash just above her garter sheath. A rivulet of blood trailed down, toward her inner thigh.
He’d lost her dagger and scalpel at some point, barely able to cling to his sanity. His restraint.
“What have you done?” The words escaped from a desolate place. From the husk of the person he was, the monster within already rejoicing for what he’d do next.
Her breath trembled, her words floating on air. “Perhaps it isn’t just blood you hunger for.”
Garin swallowed the saliva flooding his mouth as she shifted her skirts the rest of the way. Her pussy was glistening beautifully for him. His throat went dry as she trailed a trembling hand inward, past the hem of her skirts.
“Lilac,” he groaned in warning.
Her bright eyes danced at the sound of her name on his tongue, surprise flitting across her face and relieving that expectant, curated look of Lilac’s that this girl had replicated with uncanny precision. Her cheeks still deepened in the most delicious shade of currants as he unabashedly took her in.
How he’d missed that look.
But her expression faltered as he rose to his feet, took a step back and braced himself against the mantle.
“This is impossible.” Thiscouldn’tbe his queen. Lilac could not be here, because if she was, it meant everything he’d feared as his thirst had grown in his cellar room, was true. That their time aparthadn’tdissolved whatever this connection was, like the witches said it would.
Before he realized what he was doing, Garin dropped to his knees.
The look on her face was hungry, none of the fearful hesitation that had been there before when he’d refused to entertain the possibility. Her demanding smile was the last thing he saw before he slid his arms under her, dragging her forward. She whimpered at the sudden movement, as if she had the right to be shocked at all after baring herself to him—letting blood for him. A daring offering.
He flattened his tongue against the soft skin of her inner thigh and dragged it upward, lapping the rivulet of blood along the self-inflicted stab wound.
She tasted like an oasis of all things absent: the week he and Bastion had spent in Roscoff trying to process the vampirism that plagued them, breathing in the ocean air for the first time, knowing that this was the seaside trading town his mother had intended to make their new life in.
Carts of cloth, salt, and wood.
She tasted like trips to the long-gone Paimpont bakery, whose owning family was killed in the Raid; warm nights in front of the fire, before memories of that mantle were stained in blood; drifting off in Aimee’s lap with a piece of warm bread in his hand.
She tasted like emerging from the Trecésson dungeon and feeling sunlight upon his face for the first time in two hundred years.
Lilac jerked, as if to shift herself against his mouth, but he wrapped his arms around the outsides of her thighs and secured her in place.
It was her.
It was her.
It was her.
Her blood was a lone beacon shone upon his sinking raft, his only options to drown in it or be swept away, forever lost by the tide.
He would not let her go. Not until he was finished with her.
First, he needed to heal her. She yelped as he sank his teeth into her without warning, right over her wound, her skin and flesh giving way like butter. He was close enough to her pussy that she could have ridden his face anyway. But he held her down.
“Garin,” she growled at the shock of pain, taking a fistful of his hair in her grasp; she tried to push him off at first, but after his first swallow, she let out a gasp and pulled him closer.
The relief he felt was immense. Her blood rushed into his mouth and down his parched throat, like warm milk on a harsh winter’s night. Swallow after swallow, there was a shift in the atmosphere, and the world went quiet. His ears were no longer ringing and his other senses wereimmediatelyrelieved of her, no longer tainted in her essence; he could smell the embers of the fire crackling away behind them, the overpowering aroma that most certainly belonged to the bud and leaves of the Sea Holly. The room was no longer stifling, and he could even feel a cooling breeze coming through the crack under the balcony door.
He swallowed once more, then carefully unsheathed his fangs before he could get carried away.
They both stared, panting, at the marks his teeth left; the slice she’d made with the scalpel was still there, but blood dripped more noticeably from the deep puncture holes he’d left. His bite wound was messy, the skin around them already bruising. He could wipe it all away in an instant, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the pooling red.
