Page 88 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

I moved my hand from her throat to her cheek with a gentle stroke.

“How did you know?” she asked, confusion twisting her dark brows. “The opera, this room… how did you know how much I’d…” she trailed off.

I kept my face neutral, knowing the sharp little seductress was adept at reading every unconscious micro-expression, each shift in the eyes and mouth. She hated how well I could evade her prying gaze, dodge her attempts, and mirror her tricks.

After I first heard her sing a lonely song to the stars—that chilly autumn night when she was swinging on the edge of the dangerous woods—I slowly renovated this room. I expanded my collection, painted the walls with the brushstrokes of the cosmos. I started listening to music again for the first time in decades.

In immortality’s long march, vampires experienced a certain amount of anhedonia for human endeavors. I’d learned that in order to retain pleasure for things like art, aesthetic beauty, music, food, or philosophy, those muscles required constant upkeep. Sometimes, the meaning of it all faded and had to be found again. Other times, turned vampires succumbed to their new nature, seeking meaning only through blood, sex, and power.

I’d never been one for inevitability. That was half the reason I returned to Crescent Haven, year after year. The born, as children of Lillian, may have been predestined to be soulless demons. But I had once been human, and that was something I refused to let die. I would never be like them.

Scarlett was never supposed to see this room, this space for which she’d been the unequivocal muse. I might have resisted inevitability’s grip, my place in the gods’ tapestry of fate and souls, but Scarlett seemed to be dragging me into her cosmic orbit no matter what I had to say about it.

“Rune?” she asked, watching me closely.

There was beautiful hope in her eyes. She wanted to believe it was all magick, all serendipity, and how could I deny her of that humanlike devotion to the ethereal?

“I feel as though I know you,” I said carefully. “I told you that I’d bring your every dream to fruition. In your eyes, I see galaxies and oceans, and a deep darkness too. You should always be surrounded by the rawness of life. The lofty beauty and the harsh bite of pain. I want you to experience it all.”

She looked at me like she was searching for something, surprise rounding out her eyes that quickly faded. “You see deep darkness?”

“Scarlett, I would drink your darkness, bathe in it, pull it into me while I held you inside my own.” I let my cloud of shadows seep from my skin and surround us in a quiet stillness.

“The painting, the blue one with the man on his knees surrounded by bondage and void… You see yourself in it, don’t you?” she asked me.

This fucking girl. She stared at me as her fingers roamed my arm. I had to stop myself from shuddering at the gentleness of her touch.

I didn’t answer, but she nodded as if I had. “I feel like I know you, too, sometimes. Even though it doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“I think the best things in this world defy logic. They just are. Nameless, formless. All feeling, devoid of the bondage of logic and limited mortal understanding.”

“Can you speak like this with all of them?”

Them. She meant my clan. Now it was my turn to leak surprise into my features, the slip making the corners of her lips infuriatingly quirk up. Damn this dangerous woman. She loved when she cracked me open.

“Sometimes,” I answered honestly. “With some of them. But with most of my family, I am bound by my role and hidden underneath my mask. This is how it needs to be, especially in times like these.”

“Do you think everyone wears a mask with their family?”

Scarlett may have chiseled a small crack in my ribs, but I was about to make her bleed for me. I wanted her truth a million times more than I wanted her perfect body.

I shifted to the side, and we lay facing each other as the stars twinkled above.

“To varying degrees. Family is the stage upon which generational pain is reenacted over and over again, the same story with different characters.”

She frowned at this. “You don’t think children can be better than their parents?”

“They can be, yes. Most try, but few succeed. It’s difficult for mortals to recognize patterns from their own limited perspective. They can’t see the way their great grandparents passed wounds to their grandparents, their grandparents to their parents. They can’t hear the echoes of the eons, fathom the trauma they absorbed from something that happened centuries ago, spread through words and actions here in the present.”

She was painfully adorable when she was deep in thought. I wanted to kiss the crease that formed between her brows.

“Did your family not make you feel seen, Little Flame?”

Her eyes snapped to mine, and I heard her heart pick up and pump hard. She faltered, her gaze dipping to my chest now in avoidance. Her mouth clamped shut, but after two beats, she shook her head.

“That was their loss,” I said. “I cannot fathom not wanting to see you, all of you. Your voice is my new favorite sound.”

Her cheeks flushed again, still avoiding my eyes. “They had a lot going on. My mom was sick for most of my life, and my dad was, too, in a mental way. Isabella had to be the adult, and that wasn’t fair. They all tried their best. Maybe it hadn’t been enough. I’m starting to see that now. But it was still their best.”

---