Page 99 of Gothikana

Vad chuckled. ‘No, little crow. Not yet.’

The relief inside her was immediate. She wasn’t ready yet, neither was he. They were just discovering each other, discovering themselves, and while she hoped they would get there one day, it wasn’t the day yet.

‘But I saw this ring when I was getting your dress.’ He ran a thumb over it. ‘And while we’re not ready yet, one day we will be. And that day, I’ll give you another ring. This one is simply from me to you, so you have something of me on you always, like with your mother’s bracelet. I want you to look at it in moments of stress and know that I’m here.’

‘And it has nothing to do with shooing off other men?’

A side of his lips twitched. ‘You should’ve known my motives could never be completely selfless. I am selfish, and I want everyone who looks at you knowing you belong to a very selfish man.’

Corvina blinked back her tears, looking down at the ring.

It was an exquisite high-quality teardrop amethyst — she knew because of the way it refracted the moonlight — the same shade as her eyes, set in silver metal, the same shade as his eyes. The ring was both of them together in substance.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, looking into his eyes.

He pressed a kiss to her knee. ‘There’s an inscription.’

She turned the ring.

‘I will not let you go into the unknown alone.’

‘Dracula,’ she breathed, recognising the quote from the book they’d studied.

She turned her hand for him silently, and he slid the ring on her finger, tying another knot into the threads of their bond, making it stronger, more enduring for the tests of time.

He stood upright and she held his face, looking at him with all the love she felt in her heart, thanking the universe with the whole fibre of her being for this man.

‘You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick,’ she whispered to him, her eyes stinging. ‘You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.’

He crushed his lips to hers, kissing her with the fierceness she would never be able to tame, that she never wanted to tame, and she kissed him back, in the middle of ruins that had witnessed unspeakable horrors, the girl with the soul of the moon — blemished, darkened, ephemeral — finally finding a man with the soul of the night to shine with.

CHAPTER 27

Corvina

He’d wanted tofuck her in the ruins, but after knowing everything that had happened there, she wasn’t keen. So he took her back to the castle and into the Vault, locking them in, sating her and himself, over and over again, while a sexy masquerade Ball took place right upstairs.

‘Will we always be sneaking around?’ she asked him, their clothes on one of the armchairs, the one with the lion heads, as she lay on top of him on the couch.

He played with her fingers, constantly rubbing her new ring, obsessed with seeingit on her.

‘If nothing happens tonight,’ he rumbled after a few minutes, ‘there won’t be any reason for it. I’ll come out as a Board member. Of course, I won’t be teaching any of your classes after that. But I will bend the rules for us.’

‘I hope nothing happens tonight,’ she murmured, watching the darkened fireplace, listening to the calm beating of his heart as he stroked the naked line of her spine, mindlessly pausing to play some melody with his fingers.

While her feeling of something wrong hadn’t entirely left her, she hadn’t heard or seen anything since finding the body in the shack.

‘Has Ajax found anything yet?’ She rested her chin on his chest. ‘Any update?’

‘If he has, he’s not telling me.’ He continued playing with her back. ‘I’m a suspect in his investigation.’

Indignation roiled over her. ‘You didn’t do it.’

A side of his mouth tipped up. ‘No, I didn’t.’ He looked into her eyes seriously. ‘But never assume I’m not capable of it, Corvina.’ He pushed a strand of her hair back from her face. ‘If someone even touched the hair on your head, I would do much worse to them without any remorse. And I’m smart enough and rich enough to never get caught.’

Corvina ignored the flutter in her belly and asked the question that had been bothering her for a long time. ‘Exactly how rich are you?’

He shrugged. ‘Rich enough. It took me some time to get used to having money.’ He looked into the black fireplace. ‘The home Iwas in wasn’t a good place. If they had money, it never got to us. I had three pairs of clothes I had to wash and wear, and no money of my own to get anything. One time my friend was injured, and I couldn’t even buy a bandage for him.’

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