Page 46 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

At the sight of Marigold’s Bakeshop, dark and closed up for the day, I thought of my new friend. I knew that there was nothing I could do, that I’d probably only get in Snow’s way if I were to go back for her. My humanity made me frustratingly useless.

In the dark of my apartment, I listened as infrequent patters of rain turned into something steady. I locked every window as the downpour battered against the glass. When I went to undress, my hand skating over the thigh holster and dagger, I realized I’d never once even reached for my weapon when I’d been cornered by Rune.

Worse still, he’d likely felt it when he’d grabbed me, and certainly when he’d pushed me up against a wall. My only defense meant so little to him that he hadn’t even acknowledged it.

I could lock my door and windows and sleep with a weapon hexed against vampires under my pillow, but none of it would keep Rune away from me. Strangely, it wasn’t his threat to my body that terrified me the most.

Because he hadn’t only broken into my apartment. He’d also snuck his way into my mind. His words reached a place no other being had ever glimpsed before, and though I wanted to believe it was a strange coincidence, a trick, or a grand seduction, I couldn’t help feeling like it was all so much more.

There was this sick part of me that no amount of shame in the world could entirely kill. This hungry, yearning, unsatisfied piece of my subconscious that had been awakened, intrigued. I wanted to want Rune to leave me alone and stay the fuck away from me.

But as I lay in bed listening to the rain, worrying about Isabella and Jaxon and Snow and the mortals of Lumina, my selfish mind wandered back to him over and over.

He’d violated my privacy. He continued to tell me that he owned me, that he wanted to control me and ruin all others for me. He demanded I give him all parts of myself. He should’ve made me feel the way other entitled men made me feel—abusers and traffickers and selfish pricks—but he didn’t. Not at all. And I couldn’t understand why.

I didn’t want him to stop. I was going to fight him, fight myself, because all of this was so beyond messed-up that I couldn’t possibly allow it to continue. But I would be waging war against my own desire.

It was a desire that belonged to me, and only me, and I clutched it tight as I lay bathed in darkness. My fantasies of faraway lands and great adventures were replaced by Rune’s face, his scorching touch, and worst of all, his terrible, loathsome words.

23

RUNE

Staying hidden, I followed Little Flame all the way home.

Of course, Scarlett had inserted herself directly in the center of a dangerous riot. It had been strange watching her face contort into such adorable rage mere moments before the entire crowd had broken out into chaos.

Trafficking was a disgusting, despicable crime, that was for certain. But what exactly had churned in that powerful mind of hers? What had she been thinking about when her eyes flashed fire and her forehead scrunched in concentration?

I hadn’t even needed to use my blood connection to find her. She simply stood out, as if she had her own center of gravity that commanded the world’s attention. Her long brown hair hung in perfect waves, her captivating eyes and small stature like a beacon of vulnerability and allure. She was a greedy, hungry little thing.

“Detain the organizers. Do what needs to be done to break up the violence. No unnecessary killing or maiming, but put on a hell of a show for them,” I’d said to Uriah as I watched the fighting.

I rolled my neck. This was a headache of magnitudinous proportions. What the mortals didn’t understand was that just because they didn’t see our countermoves against the born and their slave trade, that didn’t mean they weren’t happening.

The kingdom would be sticking their noses in our affairs in a matter of weeks. This was not the time for mortal uprisings, and in fact, riots would only divert our attention from the trafficking that these mortals were fighting against.

Now was not the time for a display of weakness or pandering.

So, naturally, I was forced to play the role of a fascist, heartless lord in order to keep the mortals on their best behavior moving forward. I was used to being misunderstood. What did public opinion of me matter when I would live on and everyone in this square would one day perish? What did it matter if they hated me if it meant this island was free and safe from worse monsters?

Stay away from me.

As I stood outside Scarlett’s building, using my shadows as a shield from the rain, I remembered the look on her face before she’d said those words and turned her back on me. When she’d gone from testing every last ounce of my restraint with her heady arousal to testing it again with her hurt and fear. Perhaps I’d said too much, revealed how deeply I’d wanted to know her in a way no other had known her before.

When she was struggling against her own desire, grinding against my leg with wide pupils and parted lips, every ounce of the control that Sadie had beaten into me had begun to slip. I’d wanted to capture her lips with mine. I’d wanted to sink my fangs into her neck, her breasts, her thighs, her tiny wrists. I’d wanted to mark her all over, use her body as a canvas for my cruelty, force her to show her brands of ownership to every man who watched her a fraction as desperately as I did.

The scent of her still lingered on me, her sweet decadence and her filthy lust. The poor thing had no idea that I could sense every time her heart picked up, smell and see and hear every change in her body, calculate exactly how aroused she was at any given moment. She thought she could hide herself from me, but I was already inside her. Scarlett was most aroused when I called her my toy, when I removed all her doubts and replaced them with certainty. She was most drunk with desire when I exerted my control and bent her to my will—her will, even though she repressed it—and when I threatened to punish her, put her in her place.

She hated how much she wanted me, and it was deeply, intoxicatingly, satisfying. I wanted to break her. I wanted to see her lose every ounce of her self-control, melt into a puddle of need and desperation at my feet. I wanted her to look up at me with those piercing blue eyes and recognize me as the jailer of her heart and the owner of her body and soul.

All in due time.

At the reminder of eternity’s never-ending march, a melancholic feeling leaked from my slow-beating, ancient heart.

I shouldn’t have been getting involved with a human. I was going to destroy the both of us with this obsession. I thought about Crescent Haven and its ghosts, the cemetery that had continued to expand over the centuries.

Mortals were fleeting, and I was eternal. My Scarlett would haunt me with all the rest one day.

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