Page 51 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

“Did you kill him?”

No response.

“Hurt him?”

Silence.

“Rune,” I said, growing frustrated and panicked. Did I sentence a man to death? Or the loss of an appendage?

No, I didn’t do anything wrong. Rune was the fucking psychopath who thought he could control me, treat me as a slave just like the born clan he was supposedly diametrically opposed to.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why me?”

I’d attracted obsession before. Men who watched me, followed me. It was the danger of any seduction game. But never before had these men made me feel the way Rune did. Never once had I wanted their focus, their madness, their touch.

Only brainwashed whores give vampires their blood, Isabella’s voice floated up from my memories. Then she was speaking to me directly, as if she could see what I was doing instead of finding her and bringing her home. I could taste her revulsion as sharp bitterness on my tongue, and guilt transformed my arousal to icy shame instead. This was what we saw in you. Mom and Dad and the whole village, too. You’re vile. Vampires are drawn to you because they see that you’re a parasitic demon just like them.

“Tell me to stop and mean it,” Rune dared. “Tell me to leave you alone, to never speak to you or touch you ever again.”

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t real. What was real was the pierce of Isabella’s scream, the fact that I was the reason those kidnappers were in Crescent Haven. I was the reason Isabella was taken. Whatever it was inside of me that drew the attention of the vampire lord of Aristelle was the same as what put my sister in danger. Rune didn’t want me. He wanted the hunt, the chase, the fantasy he’d imposed upon my body that would one day fade. He would eventually grow bored. Or worse, recoil from me like everyone else I’d allowed to get too close.

“Leave,” I said, because it was the only word I could truly say and mean with absolute certainty.

Rune released my body, lifting his leg off mine where he’d held them trapped, and he peeled away his arms. He eased off the bed, leaving an absence of warmth in his wake. In a flash he was at my window, and the sight of him knocked all thought from my mind and air from my lungs. He was the dark stillness of night embodied, the canvas upon which the stars aligned.

“You went somewhere, just now,” he said. “The same place you went when you told me to stay away from you in the alley. I can see it on your face.”

His perceptiveness surprised me, and for a moment I was lost in the contemplative planes of his chiseled features, the disarming warmth in his deep brown eyes.

Ask him. Ask him to find Isabella.

What if asking him now shattered the spell, loosened the hold of this tenuous obsession? What if he thought I’d gone to Odessa and singled him out on purpose, solely for this aim? A surefire way to fail any seduction attempt was to reveal ulterior motives.

Would he even care about my sister yet? Given the merciless ruler that he was and the centuries of killing he had under his belt? Perhaps the smarter move would be to push him away, reel him in deeper, and then execute when he was more likely to make a grand gesture. If I could flip the script, pull him back into my game, then maybe what was happening between us could be justified. Because I’d be doing it for her.

Not because when I looked into Rune’s eyes, I saw the cosmos. Not because when he touched me, I tasted the full brunt of desire for the first time in my life, molten and all-consuming. Not because when his attention was on me, I burned with my own aliveness.

And not because, most terrifying of all, when I was with him, I didn’t feel so alone anymore.

“Tell me you didn’t hurt Finn,” I said, altogether ignoring his unnerving questioning.

“I didn’t hurt Finn,” he parroted with a smirk, leaving me unable to tell if it was the truth or he was just following my direct command. “Not your best effort, Little Flame. His hands on what belongs to me was inexcusable, sure, but it was almost too sad to watch.”

The moment I opened my mouth to spew angry words, he unlatched the window and looked back over his shoulder.

“I made you more wet just now than he could’ve managed after a lifetime of practice.”

He leaped from the window before I could say anything more.

The emotional whiplash he’d left in his wake had me unable to move for several long minutes. I’d told him to leave, yet he left triumphant. And we both knew why that was.

He’d given me an out. He’d told me to command him never to talk to me or touch me ever again.

And I hadn’t.

I stomped out of the room, my fist unclenching to whip open a cupboard and pour myself a glass of tap water.

A familiar itch arose, one that had been nagging me ever since I arrived in Aristelle. I tried to ignore it, to let the craving pass as I chugged water.

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