Page 24 of Nocte

Still, I’m captivated, sucked in. His voice is even quieter now, a whisper.Caspian!If I please this little fae, maybe he’ll go silent permanently. Forever. Blissfully fucking quiet.

“Don’t know,” I admit, but that isn’t the answer she wants. She’ll pull away and Cassius will return. So I look at her, and I lie. “But I can find out. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Her hope. Fuck, it’s brief. It glimmers in her eyes like a shooting star, gone in the next breath. She smothers it deep down where I can’t see. But it’s too late. I know what she wants and she craves it so badly.

Boy, will this be fun.

“Be a good little fae and maybe I’ll tell you how,” I suggest, twisting the knife. Hope is like that, painful and deep, too deep to pull out.

Maybe I’ll discover the real answer. It can’t be hard, but it must be a secret. Cassius knows but he hoards the answer. I can feel him tugging it out of reach, tucking it beyond my view.

Stop and I’ll tell you, Caspian. Stop this. Stop! Or I’ll change my mind…

I wrench away from her. The bastard. He’ll take my fun away.

Her startled gasp is intoxicating, however, tempting me to ask…

“Why do you care?” When I turn back, she’s watching me, still half-naked, wringing her delicate fingers together. She’s doing it on purpose—with every twitch of her hands, the opening of her robe widens, until the sleeve of it threatens to slip off a slim shoulder entirely. Damn her. “Cover yourself!”

She blinks and then does, wrapping the torn halves of her robe tight, pretending they’re whole again. Cassius is even louder.Caspian! Come?—

“I want… I want to see a museum,” she blurts out. “It’s where mortals store their paintings. Their art.” She assumes I don’t know the term.

But I do. Somewhere deep in my thoughts—mine, not Cassius’—that word triggers a bell.Words.Color. Pigment. Linseed oil.I curl my fingers, remembering something. A sensation. Wet. Soft… I just don’t know what any of it fucking means. So I smile and lie. “I’ve seen one. I can take you there.”

It’s a building. A place in the mortal realm, I know that much. A place where they horde things—old things. A stupid place I’d never visit.

Unless she asked me to with those wide eyes. Begged me to, bloody and bleeding. Maybe I’d give in. It could be the last sight she ever saw.

The thought has barely crossed my mind when that hope begins to swell in her again. She can’t even contain it. So full of fucking hope and wonder and the disgusting things that Cassius craves in his prey. It almost makes her pretty, almost. That look in her eye is almost enough.

“You have? What was it like? Did you see the—” She says something. A forbidden word that Cassius blocks out. He’s clawing his control back bit by bit.

Caspian, he growls.I’ll make you pay. Make you suffer. Ungrateful wretch—I’d shrug him off like any time before, but... This time feels different. Angrier. Oh, I’ve made him very angry.

Good.

“I could take you there one day,” I lie, and she eats it up with a startled gasp. Her longing is disgusting. It creeps over me, drawing me closer to her, shutting Cassius out again. The bastard will make me pay for this—oh yes, how you will pay.But lying to her is a game too delicious to resist. It tastes almost better than her blood, so damn sweet. I need it. Just one more drop. “What would you give me in return?”

She swallows hard, her throat trembling. Then she says, “I know what you want. I don’t care. I’d give you anything.”

A laugh rips out of me, but inside I’m irritated beyond all belief. Anything. As if that word means a damn thing. But to her, it does. Anything meansanything. I’ll have her little soul in the palm of my hand. Mine to break. Shatter. Twist and morph. She’s mine. All mine.

You are mine, Caspian,Cassius growls.Come home to me. Now! That is an order?—

“Prove it,” I spit out to her.

She flinches, wrinkling her button nose. I’m sure she’ll refuse. Renege on her previous offer. Good little fae don’t promise their bodies to vamryre after all.

She juts her chin instead and runs a pink tongue along that awkward upper lip. Then she tilts her head as if to offer her throat to me—she doesn’t. No, that would be a step too far. Instead, she issues the next most dangerous taunt: a twitching, trembling hand inches toward the front of her robes. She fingers a carefully hemmed collar.

My vision flashes red. Cassius’s rage, not my own.Come,he growls.Now!

All I can see is a slender patch of pale skin shielding a racing pulse. The thrum of it floods my eardrums, a siren song. She’ll give me anything? Only a fool would spurn such a bargain. Cassius can’t punish me for that—it’s what he taught me to do, isn’t it? Prey.

“Tomorrow,” I bite out to the fae. Cassius is raging, and his summons devolve into shooting stabs of pain ripping through my skull. I ignore him, focused only on her.

She should shiver with gratitude, thankful for my merciful acceptance.

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