Page 22 of Reflections of Silence

Light fingertips trailed my cheek. He wound my hair around his fingers, tugging insistently. I raised my head, sucking in a long breath.

Why aren’t I afraid of you?

Fathomless eyes fixed on mine, amusement roiling in their shadowy depths. Hurt and something deeper lay beneath the facade, the cover he must use with everyone else.

There are no others, Gella. It is just us, and my staff.

I blinked, listening to his voice within my mind. His presence rested there, amongst the unseen places in my head. Not at all intrusive, more company I hadn’t known I was lacking.

Have you always been there?

But there was no answer, so I asked him again, the usual way. So fast my perceptions had changed. I frowned, knowing I should have more questions, be less accepting of his…situation. As though something was wrong inside me.

Yes. Since you came to New Orleans.

I started, pulling away, but his long arms coiled around me, trapping in his embrace against his chest. I let him press me against his skin, what I’d wanted from the outset of our encounter. Before he taught me so many things about both my body and his.

Before he withdrew from my body, rubbed his fingers in the mixed fluids coating his cock and licked my virgin blood from his fingers.

My concept of what comprised a villain reset every time I learned something new about him.

“You should be afraid of me.” His chest rumbled beneath my cheek while he resumed threading through my hair. “Why aren’t you afraid? Of me,” he added as an afterthought.

I smiled, listening to the nothingness where his heart should beat. “I had... a moment,” I confessed, mimicking the patterns he made in my hair on his chest with my fingertips. A shudder ran over him, small bumps rising on his skin.Something of life remains within him. A different sort of life, perhaps. I smiled at the thought that I could get a reaction from him. “When I saw the blood—my blood…” I trailed off, the image of his lips glistening red.

But no force of repulsion followed that thought, no fear.

“Amoment?” Amusement laced his tone—true amusement, this time.

I propped myself back on my elbows, looking down at him.

Ebony arched eyebrows curved against marble, smooth, and perfectly angled.Soft, over the hardness within.

“Gella,” he murmured. His fingers tangled deeper into my hair, and I thought he would pull me down to him. “Why aren't you afraid?”

“I—” I waited for my head to come up with some logical reason. But the organ I relied on in my lifetime failed me.Thank you for the warning.I whispered the note to myself. “I have no idea.”

“You should be.” His brow furrowed, eyes narrowing as he studied me.

I shrugged, uncomfortable beneath his assessing gaze. “Well, I’m not. So…”

“So.” His eyes cleared. “It appears I have a wife.”

Some emotion swelled in me at his words. I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat, which warred with the nest of worms roiling in my belly. Why I should care so much for an ideal I hadn’t put stock in from the moment my father sold me and left me in a nunnery? Certainly not with a man I’d met but had been promised to at some previous, unknown date, I couldn't say.

Sebastian crushed me against his chest, cradling me tight to his body as though he never wanted to let me go.

Domineering, controlling…monster. I knew what he was; what the girls on the ship and I had contrived to have the other passengers believe, who shied away from us, fear and repulsion in their eyes. Now, I was in the arms of one such creature, and all I felt was…relief.Trust.A long breath left me. I relaxed into his hold and closed my eyes.

A sharp knock on the library door roused me; I glanced down to find Sebastian sleeping deeply. With no breath escaping his lips, he looked...different. I frowned, ignoring the repeated knocking, pressing my hand to his cheek. His flesh was cold asit had been before, but harder, somehow. As though life had left him.

The door creaked open behind me. I shrieked, rolling off Sebastian’s still form, scrambling at my sides in a frantic effort for cover, huddling in the remnants of my dress.

“Charleton!”

“Oh, my— Madame, I am so sorry?—”

The butler, I reallydidneed to learn his title, hovered at the door frame, his sharp gaze taking in his disrobed master, me by his side, my throat covered in flaking blood. Despite his flustered apology, some part of my mind noted that he hadn’t retreated from the room, either.

---