Page 97 of Taken By Touch and Torment

Snow and I were in big coats, hats, and gloves, lounging together in the gardens. Attendants set us up with chairs, pillows, blankets and a table of snacks. Several guards were posted around us, reasonable distances away.

In the training field, vampires were sparring. And Snow may or may not have peeked out at them over her book on multiple occasions. Desire was ripe in the air, and it made me laugh to myself.

Snow shot me a frustrated glance. “Stop that.”

I raised up my hands. “I’m only reading.” A true double entendre. Soaking up desire had me relaxing back in my chair, my spirits lifted. I wasn’t going to manipulate anyone. But I couldn’t deny that the act of feeding did wonders for my exhaustion.

I looked back down at my book, The Taming of Marianne. I hadn’t made it far, yet I was fairly certain the main characters were a few pages away from jumping each other’s bones. And not in a normal way. In a very kinky, Rune-and-me kind of way.

I couldn’t wait to tease him about his personal library of indecent literature.

“Scar—um, do you know what that one’s about?” Snow asked, jolting me from my current page. She glanced at the book in my hands with a frown.

I met her concerned gaze. “Kinky sex between a human and a vampire?”

She hesitated. “Well, I suppose. But it’s pretty old, and I just—it’s not very consensual at times, and extremely dark. It’s more like she’s his… slave.”

Snow’s features twisted with discomfort, watching my face closely.

I blinked at her. “It’s fiction. I don’t mind.” I furrowed my brows. Her description of the plot only turned me on, but I knew she was trying to say that I shouldn’t be reading something that mirrored my trauma. My cheeks burned. “I appreciate your concern, but it feels different to me. It’s fantasy. An escape. And I—I still want to be able to enjoy sex.”

The dark and depraved kind, but I kept that qualifier to myself. Snow appeared pensive, and I could tell she didn’t quite understand. And maybe that was okay. I wasn’t sure Snow was into the same things that I was in bed, but I did know that she’d taught me not to be ashamed of my sexuality after years of being scorned by Isabella.

“If I feel triggered, I’ll stop reading,” I promised. “But between these pages, I’m safe. It’s not even remotely the same. Here, I have power. When men have hurt me in the real world, I’ve had none. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, it does,” Snow said. She offered me a small smile. “Controversial or not, that’s the book that started it all for modern kink. It’s what gave us the word sadism.”

“You’re a walking encyclopedia sometimes, you know that?” I teased.

“It should come as no surprise that I was bullied relentlessly in school.”

I shook my head. “Give me a list of names.” I pinned her with a serious face, setting my book down in my lap. “I’ll succubus the shit out of them.”

Snow laughed. A couple of vampires looked over at us from the sparring matches, and they were promptly yelled at by Mason.

I wondered where Rune was. That thought became more pronounced the longer I read, lost in this faraway world that was somehow both achingly familiar and exhilaratingly foreign. To say the romance between Edgar and Marianne was dark was an understatement. And yet, just like Snow, I found myself sitting perfectly still, my bottom lip sore from how hard I was chewing on it.

Snow suddenly squealed, launching her book into the dead grass. “Ugh! I hate this stupid book and I’m never reading again!” She was breathing rapidly, her face moving from anger to regret. “Oh, hell. I shouldn’t have thrown that.”

She bent down and picked up the book from the grass and dusted it off, mumbling an apology to the inanimate object.

When she rose back up, she was nose to nose with an amused Uriah.

I bookmarked my place and closed my own book. I now had different, but equally entertaining, content to consume.

Snow reared back, wrinkling her nose. “First, ever heard of a thing called personal space? Second, you’re all—smelly and sweaty.”

Uriah stuck his hands in his pockets. His honey blond hair was tucked behind his ears, his rugged features radiating confidence and delight. Like the others, he wore all black. The tips of his razor-sharp tattoos brushed the base of his neck and hands.

He grinned, and in a flash of movement he’d ripped the book from Snow’s palms and held it up.

She squealed and leaped for it, but he was tall enough to keep it out of her reach and block her as he scanned the pages.

“Just as I suspected,” Uriah said, shaking his head and making a low whistle. He returned the book right as Snow conjured glowing lunar magick in her palms.

She snatched it away. “You still don’t know how to read?”

He chuckled, pouting his lower lip. “Big strong man only know how to kill. No good with words.”

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