Page 38 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

But it remained. It surrounded me, the few sweet drops of blood I’d tasted scouring my throat with fire, my cock pulsing with the need to bury myself inside her as I drank. I didn’t want to finish it myself. Lust, I had learned to live without. Now, in a moment of weakness, my walls had crumbled.

I wanted all of her. Her mind, her body, her soul… and most of all, her heart.

I wanted her to smile at me. To touch me lovingly. To submit without fear, with bravery and the unshakeable conviction that I would never harm her.

To stand at my side proudly, without reservation.

“You ask too much,” I told myself hoarsely, still feeling her in my lap, her hands moving between us, the softness of her skin and the warmth of her body against mine.

Her throat, so smooth against my tongue, giving beneath my fangs…

With a wordless snarl, I tore my trousers open, releasing the full length of my cock. It jutted, hard as iron against my palm as I stroked myself roughly, imagining peeling the silk from her and throwing her into the bed.

Or had she felt it? My strokes slowed; the same ridges that covered my body extended over my chest and stomach, dipping down to my cock as well. I squeezed tightly, a pearl of fluidbeading at the barbed crown. Heat boiled low in my stomach as I pumped myself, still thinking of Cirrien.

She had to have felt it, pressing against her insistently. Perhaps she’d harbored hopes that despite the rest of me, my manhood would match what most men possessed.

No such hope existed. I stroked that hated shaft, a groan escaping me—ancestors, that single tantalizingtasteof her. The pounding of her heart beneath her soft breasts, the peaked nipples that made my mouth water.

If I could not have her in body, I would have her in mind.

For several glorious, freeing minutes, I thought of nothing but her. I imagined her spread before me, her scarlet hair like a corona, writhing under my claws, the wet warmth of her wrapped around my cock, and my hand sped up.

The ache in my sack became a molten flood, and I slowed my violent stroking to a tight caress.

It was the simple thought of her on my lap, so close and yet a thousand miles away, that brought me to the edge. Close enough to taste, close enough for my lips to touch her throat—

My cock jerked, seed bursting forth in thick white ropes. I sucked in a breath, holding back the groans of pleasure that wanted to escape, milking the last of the flood as the white hot, tingling release filled me.

Afterwards I sat panting, wondering why I tormented myself.

Moving slowly, still musing over these thoughts of Cirrien that felt strangely guilty and blasphemous—ancestors knew what she would think if she could see inside my mind, the ways in which I’d pictured her—I cleaned up. I resettled myself in my trousers, smoothed my shirt, and pretended to be a normal man for a moment.

I realized moments later that the strange sound I heard, the soft, resentful laughter, was me.

This bitter mood was unlike me. Most days, it was easy to push away the anger. I had believed I was strong enough—when I had decided to become a fiend, I had truly believed it was for the best. That I had the inner iron, the strength of will, to see this through without any true regrets.

I supposed it merely took having my deepest, innermost hopes run out of my bedchamber on swift feet to drive home howmuchthere was to regret.

Behind one of the warg pelts, there was a door. I pushed the pelt aside and stepped through, moving upwards through the tower with silent steps. Few came here; the maids were forbidden from traversing this stair. There was nothing at the top of this tower but old memories, ones better left dusty and forgotten.

The moon shone full through the open windows, illuminating the stacked paintings with silver light. It occurred to me that I was spending my wedding night sulking in a tower, an overgrown bat roosting in his lair, but as the humans would say: to hell with it. She was not here to watch me pout like a boy denied his favorite toy.

No, she was safely in her chambers, with handsome Koryek guarding her door.

My lips curled back over my fangs at the thought. I could not be angry with her. She had not wanted this, nor asked for it.

I was only angry with the circumstances. I would havepreferreda hateful woman who would take poppy dreams over reality, because it would be less painful.

“That’s a selfish thought, Bane.” There was no one else here to hear me; I spoke freely. “Why would it matter, to doom one woman over another?”

The paintings did not answer, of course.

I looked over the first one, a bloody scene. Every picture in this tower had been painted by one of the humans who had livedin Ravenscry before the end of the war, when the Rift was held by humanity.

The painter had been named Edda, a Veladari woman with an eidetic memory I’d envied. Everything she saw, she remembered in perfect detail; combined with her artistic talent, she had captured images of the Forian War as though plucking them from the minds of those who had fought on the front lines.

All of Ravenscry, human and vampire alike, had mourned when she was slain by a warg. Much of her work still decorated the halls of the keep, but the bloodier memories, the things no innocent should have witnessed, were kept up here in the dark.

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