Page 115 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

Rune didn’t belong in this world, on this plane. He was a ruthless immortal lord who bled humanity, a terrifying god who studied poems and collected music. Baffling and powerful, and yet he offered me—a human from nowhere—a place at his side.

The opera seemed more realistic than what my life had become.

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SCARLETT

When I arrived back at my apartment, I was buzzing with nervousness for Rune and excitement at finally living out one of my dearest dreams. The way the singers had commanded the stage had unlocked something inside of me, something I’d stamped down and hidden in the crevices of my mind. The thought of doing what they did, or what any musician did in front of a crowd, was downright terrifying.

But it turned out that I enjoyed doing things that scared me. Things that hurt. Uncomfortable, humiliating, sinful things. Rune was teaching me something I’d always known about myself, on some level, but had never put into words.

He was teaching me just how much I could endure. He was showing me how adept I was at making suffering beautiful again, and he was right; that skill made me powerful.

After laying on my bed in my silk gown and staring up at the ceiling for an hour, remembering as much as I could about my favorite parts of the opera, I found Rune’s latest gift on my black dining table.

It was a stack of papers with a wooden clip holding them together. I recognized his elegant, only slightly messy, handwriting slanting across the top page.

My heart skipped as it always did when he wrote to me. Then it began to hammer, my stomach doing somersaults as I leafed through the pages, all filled top to bottom with his words. I lifted the smaller note he’d left near the stack.

Deal accepted. Here’s the first chapter of a novel I’ve been thinking about for a century or two, but never put on paper.

I look forward to my first private performance.

I touched my smile, traced the curve of my lips. I’d thought he hadn’t been interested in my proposal when I’d asked.

Out of all the gifts any man has ever laid at my feet, Rune’s many extravagant gestures included, this stack of sprawling words was by far my favorite.

The next few days, I did nothing but work, hang out with my witchy friends, and read Rune’s chapter over and over, finding new gems each time. I was drunk off his beautiful sentences, the labyrinth of his mind and the mesmerizing way he experienced the world.

The tension between the born and the turned had only simmered, never reaching its boiling point. But from every hushed conversation on the streets of Lumina and Nyx, concern was mounting that an explosion was inevitable. Rune didn’t talk about it with me, evading all my attempts to pry for information. Every time I asked about progress with Isabella, he was unrelenting in his promise that efforts were underway to find and rescue her. He also continuously threatened to chain me to various furniture if I ever put myself in danger again with the born.

He was busier than ever. I’d only seen him once briefly, otherwise writing to him in our secret notebooks.

He probably saw me more than I saw him, given his habit of watching me sleep like the massive creep that he was.

One chapter wasn’t enough, and I feared whatever conflict was brewing would keep him too occupied to write more. Which I understood was an entirely selfish thought, to make his art more important than keeping the city safe and the turned in power. But it was a worry I harbored, nonetheless.

During one of my re-reads of the chapter, warm tea beside me and a knit blanket over my lap, Rune strode in from my bedroom.

I jumped, the table rattling and tea sloshing over the side of the mug. I scrambled to gather the pages and keep them dry, and Rune gracefully grabbed a kitchen towel and moved to soak up the mess.

“How do you do that so damn quietly?” I snapped at him.

He grinned. “How many times have you read that, Little Flame?” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “I’m beginning to worry you’re obsessed with me.”

I stood, pinning him with a scoff and a glare. “To think I was going to say nice things about your talents.”

Though his smile was characteristically cocky, his arms crossed as he towered over me, a flash of vulnerability flitted through his eyes. Rune hadn’t even mentioned what he’d written, dodging all of my compliments and calls to discuss it with him.

“It’s good, Rune,” I said. “Really good.”

“So you’ve said,” he said softly, the back of his hand brushing my cheekbone.

“The village reminds me of where I grew up,” I said, searching his eyes. He’d told me bits and pieces about his family, but he’d never actually explained where he was from and how he came to be a vampire.

“Hmm,” Rune said.

His features became guarded, which only made me want to pry harder.

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