Page 59 of Sacrifice

“Come on. You need a drink.” He pulled her up from the sofa and over to a table at the edge of the room. Behind it, tall windows looked out across the Thames to the lights of the city on the other side. He poured her a glass of wine.

Eve looked out at the view. Hammersmith bridge stretched across the Thames in plain sight.

Lucien pressed a glass into her hand and raised his own for her to chink against it. “To the victor,” he said, and Eve echoed him. They both took a sip, and Eve’s eyes returned to the bridge.

“I didn’t realize you lived here. It’s so close.” She tailed off. How peculiar that his apartment should be so close to the place where everything had changed. To the place she had thrown herself into the river. Or fallen in. She just didn’t know. Was it significant? She wondered if it might be on some kind of ley line.

“To where it all began,” Lucien said softly.

“Yes.” That had been the moment.

“I thought, perhaps, I might have lost you, before we had even met.”

His words stopped her musings in their tracks. “Lost me? You thought…” She gazed into his face and his expression was odd. Far from the usual confident swagger he displayed, now he had the look of a schoolboy confessing to breaking a window.

“I felt you from here, Eve. Registered the pain, the panic. I knew something was wrong, so disastrously wrong. Just like tonight, I knew you needed me.”

Eve blinked back at him, confused. “You knew? What do you mean?” She felt him in her thoughts, making himself comfortable inside her head.

You have only just learned to do this. Not so for me.

She stared at him, amazed. Memories tumbled into place. The blurry recollections of the stranger who’d saved her. Naked warmth and sensations that had seemed so impossible at the time she’d written them off as some kind of near-death hallucination.

“It was you.” She knew she was blinking at him stupidly, but couldn’t quite stop it. She scrunched up her face and tried to shake some sense into herself. “Why didn’t you say? You should have told me.”

Lucien laughed. “Yeah, that would have gone down well. Hi. You don’t know me, but I’m your long-lost love from multiple past lives and I’ve already seen you naked. How do you do?” He put out his hand and raised his eyebrows innocently at her.

Eve goggled at him.

“You would have dismissed me as a lunatic and run for the hills.”

She took another swig of her wine. “Well, when you put it like that, suppose I might not have believed you.”

“No, you would not.”

Eve took a step back away from him. Lucien had deceived her. From what he said, it was for the sake of her not freaking out, but really, what did she know about him? She looked him over for clues that his aura might reveal. A veil of darkness cloaked his form. There was no light to divine. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was the only person she’d ever seen that appeared to have no aura at all.

“Why can’t I see your aura, Lucien?” Why was he different from everyone else?

Lucien shifted from foot to foot and looked down at his hands. “It is the binding, I think. I am limited, encased somehow. Trapped by the will of the gods.”

That did fit with the other elements they had discussed. The other fantastical parts of this incredible story.

“I’ve been trying to work this out for a long time, Eve. I’ve collected artefacts from all over the world and now, now I think I have what I need. What we need.” His brow furrowed with the strain for a moment. She could feel how desperately he wanted her to believe him.

“Explain.”

“There are runes, symbols of power. Some have healing qualities, others are destructive. Some are for protection. I drew those on you the night I saved you from the river.”

Eve shook her head. “I didn’t have any drawings on me, Lucien.” She would have noticed that, at least. “I really don’t think that you did.”

“You must have realized by now, there are things the average mortal eye cannot see. I can show you if you’ll allow me?”

“Show me my own body?” She squinted at him skeptically, and he nodded. What did she have to lose? “I suppose.”

“It will mean exposing your skin.” He gave her the smallest of shrugs and a whisper of a smile.

There were worse things than taking your clothes off in the presence of Lucien Knight. Eve allowed herself the glimmer of a smile in return. “Where are they?”

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