Page 39 of The Blood Crown

“Sit,” she softly commanded, his eyes finally lifting to her.

He obeyed, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. His spine was still rigid, but it put him closer to eye level with her as she placed the basin on the floor between them and wrung out the cloth. He moved to take it from her.

“No,” she murmured, “it’s the least I can do.”

After a long moment, he acquiesced, shrugging off the ruined jacket. He grasped the heavy silver chain from beneath the collar of his shirt, winding it around his knuckles and tucking it intohis discarded clothing with a reverence that made her chest tighten. Unbuttoning his shirt, the elegant whorls of black across his lightly bronzed skin were exposed.

He seemed to be holding his breath as she knelt before him, on the precipice of something and threatening to tumble into the abyss. She tried to ignore the way his muscles bunched in his abdomen. How his hard chest rose and fell with every breath, as if he was struggling to slow his heart like she was.

The cloth was poised in her fingertips, the only sound in the room the smalldrip, drip, dripof the warm water running down her wrist and back into the basin. Her gaze trailed the ink spanning the width of his broad chest, an intricately drawn sun rising over the horizon, bold runes surrounding it.

Searching for anything to break the silence strung tightly between them, she asked, “And what does that marking mean?”

Blood speckled his face from the straight blade of his nose to the proud, high cheekbones under his dark brows as he eased back into the chair. “It is our symbol for the Goddess of Death,” he murmured. “Fate is not so much a deity as an inevitability. Just as the sun rises and falls, each of us must meet Fate.” He smiled faintly. “The Green Folk think our Goddess a greedy, vengeful creature—but in truth she is peace. Respite. A reprieve from the darkness of this world.”

She lifted his hand in her own as he spoke, scrubbing away the caked blood beneath his fingernails, washing away the splatters along his palm, his wrist. And she could have sworn he hissed out a soft breath as she worked her way up the corded muscles of his forearm, across the spirals of black ink that wound up his biceps to his shoulder.

The action took her back to that first night in Ravenstone—how he’d gently washed her cuts and scrapes, rebinding the injury she’d taken from the demon. She hadn’t deserved any of it, but he’d held out a hand to her anyway.

Standing again, she stepped between his long legs, moving to wipe away the constellation of blood across his brow. He tilted his head back, his thick black lashes fluttering shut, the strong column of his neck exposed to her as she washed away the evidence of what he had done.

For her.

The scent of him enveloped her, intoxicating, hypnotizing as the rise and fall of his chest as she wiped the cloth across his golden skin. He claimed that this did not need to mean anything beyond these walls—but for her at least, that was a lie.

“Venohan,” she said his name aloud, tasting it. A strong, beautiful name—fitting for the male in front of her.

“It meansRetributionin the old tongue.”

Fitting indeed.

His eyes opened, dropping to her lips, the crimson darkening to nearly black as he whispered, “Why did you come back?”

A plea. Not the accusation it had been before, the words stained with such anguish that her breath hitched.

He captured her wrist between his fingers, eyes ablaze as they searched for the truth. “Because Iknowwhy I stayed,” he rasped.

She knew he would release her in an instant if she uttered a single word of dissent, but the heat that licked across her body at his touch was something she didn’t want to give up.

The truth clawed at her throat.

It hadn’t been achoiceto leave her old life. Because when she’d walked back through that mirror—there hadn’t been any thinking, any planning. Only a deep, gut-wrenching need to get back to Ravenstone . . . Back tohim.

It was as much a choice for her to find her way back to him as it was a choice for dawn to chase the deepest night.

It was inevitable.

The air was thick between them. She was desperate to tell him—all of it—but the words wouldn’t come.

He pulled her closer, their breath mingling in the small space between them as he whispered, “I couldn’t leave even when—even when I didn’t think I would see you again."

He’d felt it, too. That inexplicable draw. The invisible tether that seemed to bind them to each other.

“Why, Ari,” he pushed, desperation tingeing his voice.

She owed him a truth in return for the one he’d just given her. A truth that still felt too raw, too exposed to say aloud in a place like this—but to deny it was an agony she couldn’t bear any longer.

Ven reached out his hand, brushing a thumb across her cheek. Hesitant. As if he might be scorched just from touching her.

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