Page 65 of Stolen
Jules leans back against the smooth rock, her hair damp, curling over her shoulder, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the water—or maybe from me.
She looks up at me with those wide, wondering eyes and smiles like I’ve given her the moon.
I haven’t.
But I will.
“What just happened? It feels different,” she whispers, and I lower myself into the water in front of her, watching her expression shift from coy to something more serious, something searching.
I cup her face, let my thumb trace her lower lip.
Gods, I want to devour her.
But first, she needs to understand.
“I called on my magic to create a barrier around us.”
“Why?”
“Because if anyone else hears you,” I murmur, my voice low, dangerous, “sees you like this—soft, flushed, pliant in my arms—I’ll have to take their lives,Myrrin.”
Her breath catches. The water laps softly against our skin.
“What? Why?”
“Because you are for my pleasure alone.”
She raises a brow, that flirtatious curve of her lips returning, but I see past it. See through it.
“Is that all I am to you?” she asks softly. “Just something to take pleasure from?”
I hesitate.
Not because I don’t know the answer.
But because I do.
And it terrifies me.
She is far more than I meant for her to be.
More than desire.
More than conquest.
More than I deserve.
But this game we play—this edge of truth and temptation,illusion and reality—it’s too dangerous to name what she’s becoming.
So I give her the only answer I can allow.
“You aremy viyella.”
Thezarethpulses between us at the word.
Ancient. Unyielding. Irrevocable.
And then I move.
