Page 74 of The Blood Crown

Brutal honesty. It’s what she’d come to expect from him. What she had craved her entire life—to simply be given the truth, no matter how dark, how gruesome it was.

His hands gripped her waist tighter, as if she were the only thing anchoring him to solid ground. “And selfish prick that I am, I just wanted to know that for a moment—just a moment—you were mine, and I was yours," he whispered. "And if my father had accepted my blood oath in exchange for your freedom,” the golden column of his throat bobbed, “that moment with you would have been enough.”

It does not need to mean anything beyond these walls.

His words rang clearer now, dredging up the small detail he’d told her.

“We never swore the blood oath,” she murmured.

“I never would have damned you to that fate . . . to me,” he rasped.

The words tore through her, devastation still written plainly in his eyes.

She wanted to be angry at him, and she was . . . But she understood why he couldn’t tell her the truth in that place. A place that reminded him of everything he hated about himself.

And her heart shattered for him—that he believed himself so unworthy.

“I deserved to know,” she whispered. “I was a bystander to my own life for as long as I can remember, and I will not allow anyone to chooseforme—not anymore.”

His hold on her loosened, his shoulders dropping back to the hard stone floor as he looked up at her. “I meant what I said, Ari—what happened between us . . . I’ll never speak a word of it if that is your command. You can live out your days here at Ravenstone, and I’ll ask nothing more of you. This place is your home as much as mine, and you are free to do as you wish—as you have always been.” The torment was evident in the raw edges of his words even as he said them.

Reaching out her hand, she brushed a lock of ebony hair from his face, watching as his coal-colored lashes fluttered shut at her touch. He went rigid beneath her, holding his breath. As if whatever she did next had the power to bind him or break him completely.

“We might be Bound,” she murmured, “but I choose you. Iclaimyou—here and now. Regardless of Fate’s hand in it.”

Relief smoothed over Ven's brow as breath tore through him. His crimson eyes raked over her face, as if he was trying to etch this moment into his memory. "I roamed this world for three hundred years, alone, until your spark of magick reached out to mine." He reached up, his touch hesitant as he brushed his thumb across her cheek. “There is not a single lifetime or a thousand where I would not find you—where my soul would not recognize yours.”

And in that moment—she believed in Fate, after all.

Chapter 36

Ven's lips crushed hers, the calluses on his hands scraping against her legs as he sat up, hauling her against his body.

Darkness pooled around them like silk, whispering and caressing as Ven’s magick wrapped around her, the weightlessness of his shadows carrying them someplace quiet, dark.

His lips never left her skin, exploring the fluttering pulse at her throat and the heaving swells of her breasts as her fingers dug into the hard muscle of his arms. It was an effort to pull herself away, but she just wanted to drink him in—all of him—and savor the look that he gave her right now, dark with desire. Half feral.

Gods, he was beautiful.

He looked hewn from the very stone surrounding them. Carved and chiseled into an immortal warrior.

Glancing to their new surroundings, her eyes adjusted to the dark—but it was the smell that she recognized first. The scent of cold, damp stone and minerals. The same place where he’d taken her as she’d gone into stasis. She looked at him, brows creasedwith the unspoken question as he lifted a hand, brushing his thumb across her cheek.

“I wanted to bring you someplace where we wouldn’t be disturbed.” His eyes darkened as he placed a chaste kiss upon her lips. “Somewhere I wouldn’t have to be quiet.”

“Too many immortal ears?” she laughed against his mouth.

“Well, you know how Seth is,” he murmured, “terrible gossip.”

The cavern spanned high above them, soft mist rolling off the warm spring deep within the belly of the mountain. But there was something new here as well. Something whispering of life and soft new growth . . .

Where there had only been darkness, light perforated the topmost edge of the ceiling—but what caught her attention were the splashes of veridian and pale green.

Her memory of going into stasis had been fractured with the pain of coming into her power, but even so—she had no recollection of color in this place. Only the black, dark stone and the blinding white of her magick. And yet—there was life all around. Wild vines wrapping around the descending spirals of stalactites and saplings taking root into the black stone beneath their feet.

She let out a breath of disbelief as Ven wrapped his arms around her. “It happened after you went into stasis,” he said quietly, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

But what did any of it mean?

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