Page 91 of Taken By Touch and Torment

My lips curved and my eyes welled with awe. But I couldn’t find words. His love slammed into me just as hard as it had when I’d sat in Durian’s lap across from him. This wave of desire that was entirely selfless. Desire for my contentment, my well-being, my joy, my every taste of beauty. My freedom.

How wrong I’d been about it all.

How terribly, heartbreakingly wrong I’d been about the jailer of my heart and the owner of my body and soul.

He held my gaze by force. “I love every single part of you, from the wicked to the sublime. That powerful mind of yours, equally infuriating and captivating. The delicious chaos of your soul—the way it yearns for adventure and novelty, sex and power, comfort, love, and belonging. You became my entire world without even a drop of magick. We are inevitable. We always have been. And I will never stop showing you how hopelessly entangled my soul has become with yours. It is my deepest regret I ever showed you anything less.”

I looked at our intertwined fingers. The song Rune had once overheard me sing faded into the next one.

“I can’t do anything but love you,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not still hurt at the ease you cast me aside, believed the worst about me without even giving me a chance.”

“As you’re allowed to be,” Rune said. “Just know that it was far from easy. It was all a bluff. I hadn’t ever truly let you go. I could never. Tell me to get on my knees again and grovel, to do anything at all to prove to you that I’m yours—and I’ll do it, Scarlett. Every day for the rest of our lives, if that’s what you desire.”

The waiter—a turned vampire—barely glanced at us as he brought a carafe of water. I waited for him to leave before I spoke.

“Aren’t you worried about how that will look to your clan?” I asked softly.

Rune leaned forward. He glanced at my lips, his intense gaze trailing back up to my eyes in a way that had my heart skipping a few beats.

“Scarlett, my love, I would kneel before you in front of the entire damn world.”

His shadows curled around my arm, and I gasped when the tip of one crept up my neck and gently brushed my chin.

“I was a fool to ever fear you’d make me weaker. You have brought all parts of me into balance. You’ve made me softer when it matters, led me to ask different questions, to fight the complacency of immortality. You’ve made me stronger.”

I homed in on the tips of his fangs, and my stomach dropped.

“The born worship a woman and yet treat the rest as inferiors. And that makes them stupid and weak. I would be more powerful than their best man on my hands and knees in prayer before you.”

37

RUNE

I’d moved my chair to sit next to Scarlett instead of across from her. I couldn’t get close enough, not even when my fingers brushed her lips as I fed her a piece of bread with a spread of olive oil and herbs. I’d ordered her a taste of nearly the entire menu, much to her disapproval and my corresponding amusement.

“I should’ve seduced the vampire lord of Aristelle years ago,” she said with a sigh, sipping her water as she stared into my soul.

It was reassuring to see that she was still a raging brat.

Her eyes narrowed. “We still haven’t addressed the fact that you’d stalked me before I came to Aristelle.”

I twirled a strand of her hair around my finger. “We haven’t addressed many things.”

She leveled a pointed stare.

I told her all of it, our voices low as the music filled the air. I surrounded us with a barrier of shadows, extra protection against prying ears.

I told her about my sisters, how I visited their graves and my mother’s every year or two in early autumn, the time of year my sisters were slaughtered by the born. I explained how I’d gone to the forest, where I’d found their bodies, and I’d heard a girl sing with the voice of an angel.

“I kept going back to Crescent Haven, all those years, to remember my why—why I’d claimed this city for the turned, why the born were undeserving of any semblance of power in Valentin, and why I’d sought out my mentor and asked her to rebirth me into an immortal capable of protecting the powerless and the vulnerable.”

Scarlett stared at me with her big blue eyes, absorbing my every word. Her brow furrowed occasionally. Sometimes, she hid her reactions, and other times, her emotions leaked out beyond her conscious awareness. When I talked about my sisters, she’d found my hand and held it tight.

“Or at least, that was my surface level rationalization,” I said. “In truth, what I wanted most was to remember what it felt like to be human. To fear death. To yearn for dreams forever on the horizon. To live and love viscerally, subconsciously understanding that nothing is guaranteed, and it could all end in an instant.”

“I reminded you of your human self,” she said, the strikingly clever, intuitive girl. “I made you feel vulnerable, just as you secretly desired. And it was everything that Rune, the vampire lord of Aristelle, could never allow.”

“It wasn’t right,” I said, shaking my head as I fought to maintain eye contact. “To watch a child in secret, even if it was for the briefest moments. I just wanted to see that you were okay, that your flame still burned bright. You were the lifeblood of that village, the only thing of interest for miles. I wanted you to have the life that I couldn’t—the life I gave up when I chose to become a monster instead.”

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