Page 92 of Hybrid Moon Rising

He didn’t want to mar her skin. He didn’t want to make her like him. But the need to keep her at his side was stronger. The need to see her smile reach her crystal blue eyes and breathe his name through her lips spurred him on.

With as much precision as claws allowed, he sliced through her skin to the bone that hid the organ that would make her like him. He spread her flayed skin and using all his strength, he carefully broke three ribs from her sternum, allowing him passage to her heart.

“I love you,” he whispered over and over, tears streaming down his face and landing on her bloodied skin.

This had to work.

Draven took his bloodied claw and sliced open a wound on his chest above his own heart. The scar would heal, and the blood of his own heart would give her life.

With claws drenched in the blood of his wolf, he worked his hand under her breastbone and circled it around her heart. The heart she said belonged to him and only him. The heart that should never have stopped beating.

He lowered his head to his favorite spot on her neck and both sets of fangs elongated in his mouth.

“I love you, Flora. Please come back to me.”

At the same time, he dug his claws into her heart to sever her ties to her human essence, he dug his fangs into her neck, delivering a bite of both vampire and wolf. He pushed his venom into her system and savored the last bits of unchanged blood dripping through her.

Draven pulled his hand from her chest and reset her bones and skin. He bit the flesh around the opening, pushing healing venom through her and praying she would survive.

Flora didn’t move, but he knew better than to expect it to happen instantly. Her body was adapting. Changing. She was becoming something more than human and that took time. He only hoped it was time they had.

When he sat up, Rieka was gone. Beside Flora’s head sat a netted pouch that held an almost round stone. One that would fit perfectly with the matching half that sat on the table in the cabin. He reached for the pouch, examining the stone that had brought them together and tore them apart. Inside the pouch was a note scrawled in elegant script.

Make sure she unites the stones before she shifts.

He both hated and adored Rieka. She’d given him Flora. Gifted him with the greatest gift she could have ever bestowed upon them: the ability to live immortally together… as long as she survived. At the same time Rieka had caused his people so much turmoil. It didn’t matter that she was finally righting the wrong that had plagued them for centuries. He and Flora were her champions now, her “intended,” she’d called them, but he wasn’t sure he could do her bidding. Not without Flora at his side.

That’s when he heard it.

It was faint at first, and he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the beating of his own heart in his ears. But then it grew stronger. The pumping of blood through a heart he never thought he’d hear again. Each thump was a reassuring sign she’d survive. Her chest rose. The angry skin where he’d had his hand in her sternum stretching slightly. But then it lifted again and again until it formed a steady rhythm.

Draven drew his gaze to her eyes, which he had closed after he’d bitten her. He silently willed them open, but even though her chest rose and hybrid blood pumped through her veins, and she’d survived the hardest part of her transformation, she still hadn’t returned to him.

When her chest had healed completely, Draven gathered the moonstone and lifted Flora to his chest. Her body seemed small in his arms as he walked back to their cabin. There was nothing he could do now but wait and pray to a Goddess he’d much rather strangle.

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