Page 56 of Monster's Pretty Bride

I should push him away. I should fight.

His fingers brush lower, over my collarbone, down my arm, tracing the bruises forming from his grip.

"No one can you away from me, Eryss," he murmurs, a whisper of something feral. "They’ll have to break me to pieces first, destroy my body, and even then, I’ll haunt them every moment of their life and the lifetimes to come."

My heart pounds, my pulse hammering beneath his fingers.

I have spent my entire life fearing him. Hating him.

But this?

This is not hate.

This is not fear.

This is beyond anything I thought I will ever feel.

26

NARANUS

The taste of death is still in my mouth. The ghost of it lingers on my skin, seeps into my bones. I almost lost her.

I stare at the woman cradled in my arms, her breath shuddering, her body trembling against mine. She is alive. But I don’t believe it. It’s not enough that I’m holding her.

My hands tighten around her, claws digging into soft, bruised flesh. Proof. I need proof that she’s here. That she is real. That the raging torrent didn’t rip her away, didn’t shatter her fragile body against the jagged river rocks.

Her lashes flicker, damp from the water, dark strands of her hair clinging to her face, her neck, her lips. Those lips, parted slightly, lips that have defied me, cursed me, threatened me. Lips that are still warm.

I should let go.

I should force distance between us, keep that damnable chasm of control between what I am and what she is.

But I can’t.

Something inside me is unleashed. The thing I have kept buried beneath layers of brutality, of restraint, of relentless, iron-fisted self-control.

She almost died. I went feral.

My thumb brushes her cheek, over the purpling mark forming there, the wound where she struck the rocks. She could have died. I see it again, the way she fell, the soil crumbling beneath her feet, her expression caught in that single, heart-wrenching second of terror before she vanished into the abyss.

I see her falling, over and over.

I hear the ragged scream I tore from my own throat.

She doesn’t look away from me now. Her hands press weakly against my chest, not pushing, not resisting, just there. Just touching.

“Say it,” I growl. My voice is guttural, ripped raw from my chest. “Say you almost died.”

Her throat moves in a swallow, her pulse fluttering, frantic beneath my fingers.

“Eryss.” I murmur her name like a curse, like a prayer, like a thing I want to own. “Say it.”

She parts her lips, but no words come.

I bare my teeth, low and dangerous. “Coward.”

Her eyes blaze, igniting like embers catching fire.

---