Page 65 of Break Her Heart
August watched it happen, his jaw ticking. “Why do you have magic?”
“I have been taking it from the others. Just a little with each touch. Not enough to notice, but enough to add up. I told you I wouldn’t be defenseless again.”
I’d purged Lavina’s power the moment it became too much—her magic felt like it was unraveling my mind—but I’d figured out how to take without being noticed. Just a sliver here, a flicker there. It wasn’t enough to feel the rush I used to get from truly pulling, but it was enough to protect myself.
Enough to avoid needing him.
“Is that why you had a stake strapped to your thigh last night?” His voice was low. “A contingency plan?”
Flashes of him standing above me naked raced through my mind. “August.”
He smiled as he looked down at me. He wasn’t getting the upper hand. I had to break him.
“Why do I have to be here every day with you? I could find plenty of other things to keep me busy. This castle needs to come to this century. I could visit Adar.” I smiled as his brow furrowed. “Or I could find that vampire that keeps making eyes at me every night. Not eyes like he wants to drain me but eyes like he wants to fu—”
“Because you have to help find a way to stop—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Stop Carrow. I know. That’s what you keep saying. But how? I can’t read the language, I don’t understand half of the things you and Benedict mutter under your breath. And don’t insult me by saying it’sfor my protection. I’m not helpless anymore. So what’s the real reason?”
“Dagger to throat, kiss to the crown, a witch in the palace will burn it all down.”
I blinked. “What did you just say?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to realize he’d spoken. His eyes were somewhere far away—distant and haunted—and then, just like that, he was back.
“You’re pretty to look at,” he said, clearer this time, as if nothing strange had happened at all.
I narrowed my eyes. “So I’m being punished. Spending the rest of my life married to you, always stuck at your side, because I’m pretty?” I sighed. “I knew my looks would ruin me one day.”
He laughed. Not cruelly. Not mockingly. Just genuinely laughed—and somehow, that was worse. But he caught it and stepped back, the mask he wore now sliding back over his face.
“Last night didn’t mean anything. It was nothing but the mark pulling us together.”
Liar.
Still, I smiled.
“I know,” I said, stepping forward until my chest brushed him. “It meant nothing. Just instinct.Hunger.”
A small piece of lint clung to the fabric of his sleeve, and I plucked it off, flicking it away with more satisfaction than the gesture warranted. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t have to. I could feel him watching me, every muscle wound tight, like a predator unsure whether to pounce or flee.
“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t good,” I added, barely above a whisper.
That got him. I glanced up just in time to see it—the flicker in his eyes, the way his jaw clenched, the breath he had to force through his nose.
He wasn’t prepared for me to throw his own indifference back in his face. And it thrilled me. Let him stew in it. Let him remember every second as vividly as I did.
I turned and walked away before he could gather a response. My heart was pounding, my skin flushed with heat, but I didn’t let him see that.
20
Bronwen
I didn’t sleep that night. I stared at the ceiling, replaying every word, every touch, every lie. He wanted me to believe it meant nothing. That it was the mark. But I knew better.
And if he thought he could push me away and hide on his throne like a coward, he had another thing coming.
Something shifted within him when he fed on me. I saw it—a crack in the wall he kept so carefully constructed—before he shoved it down, buried it like it meant nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. Not to me.
