Page 47 of Our Sins in Silver (Coven of Sin 3)

In my newfound freedom, I hadn’t bothered with things like the sun or vitamin D. I lived with vampires, for freak’s sake.

I got it now.

It was as if the vampire blood inside me was singing, aware of the sun’s rays and how I was not, in fact, dead. My mother’s Helsing blood protected me as if it wrapped my Knight blood in a protective security blanket while allowing it to flow through me and feel the sun soak through my skin.

The thought of my two parts working together, Knight and Helsing, made me smile.

I stumbled through the gardens, past some stone arches boasting big bells, and found myself in a grassy field filled with yellow wildflowers. Stopping, I plucked one from the ground and gave it a twirl. Then I plucked another, then another. Within the minute, I had a fistful. Hiking up the nun robes I wore, I plopped to the ground and strung the stems together in a way I’d seen on TV.

I scented him before I heard him.

Sterling’s lengthy arms hooked around my waist, and he tackled me into the flowers with a laugh-like growl in my ear. I twisted in his embrace so I was on my back, staring up at him as he loomed over me, his head blotting out the sun.

He wasn’t mad at me for keeping up the hunt longer than he’d had the patience for. I knew that by the color of his eyes and how they’d returned to their moonstone hue. They gleamed—almost with an opalescent sheen—as he gave a crisp laugh, even when he pushed me down into the grass and showered me with kisses.

The priest radiated warmth as if the entirety of the sun had been fully absorbed into his pores and seeped right back out, making him glow. Then he pulled his lips from mine and licked a path from my ear to the hollow of my throat.

“Ster, I want you to be my king.”

At this, he wrenched his mouth off my neck and drew back, so his head blocked out most of the sun again. Golden light lit up his pale hair like a halo.

“We talked about this. Pick one of my other brothers. I don’t want your father’s crown.”

I still needed to tell Sterling and Corry that I would not be selecting a king for myself. Part of me wondered if they already knew. I didn’t bother asking Sterling if he suspected my plans of dismantling the Elders. This wasn’t the time or place to talk about that now.

“Not of the vampires. I want you to bemyking. When we’re alone, you rule me.”

The sharp grooves in his physiognomy immediately smoothed over. “Is that my prize for catching you? Although, I’m not sure it should count. I found you laying in a field, playing with flowers. I heard of a female vampire who once ripped both legs off of her prospective mate during a hunt so...”

“I wasn’t playing with flowers. I was making your crown, my king,” I teased through a giggle as I lifted the flower crown that sat forgotten by my head and arranged it on top of his. “But hey, if you’re feeling left out and want a big bad female to rip your legs off, I’m perfectly capable. Heads, legs, what’s the difference?”

The unadulterated adoration banked in the priest’s gaze caught me off guard. My giggle latched in my chest when he slid his palms over my cheeks and cradled my head in his hands. “You are my miracle, Ruby Renada Knight.”

All the little hairs on my frame stood as electricity thrummed through my veins. This was the first time Sterling—or any of my princes—had called me by my father’s last name. The name Baxter was just another part of the lie they’d fed me on the tray shoved under my door, night after night.

I mean, I was a Knight, but no one had called me that because of the dark shadow the surname carried. It had to be Sterling to call me by my father’s name. It had to be him to test it first on his lips in affection, not as a horror story.

He’d taken the name back for me.

I was about to tell him to kiss me, but the moment I parted my lips, I was sure he could taste my need for him coiling between us from the breath we shared. His lips smashed down over mine in a kiss meant to shake me down to my soul.

This was it. We’d been falling toward one another since the first night we met. Now, it was a full-on collision. Our minds melded together, limbs reaching, missing, then finding their mark and tangling together. I clutched onto him, stuck between a stage of half the primal vampire queen born of the Knight bloodline and half the naive girl who was desperate for this man’s love.

With my claws raking into the muscles of his back, I sunk my fangs into the marred section of his throat where my mark was forever stamped. He gnashed his teeth in my ear, sucking in a luscious growl that was as deep as Hell and as sweet as fucking Heaven.

In the past, he’d kept still while I fed. But that had been the formal, gentlemanly Sterling. This version of the sullied priest was frantic with his need to bury himself as deep inside me as he could fit. His hurried manner set everything else slightly off-kilter.

That somehow made it bloody perfect.

He tore his throat from my mouth, savagely ripping his flesh from my fangs. Inky blood gushed from the wound streaking down his clavicle. Just as the torrent of black liquid was about to splatter onto my habit, he hooked his fingers in the neckline and tore it to my navel, just in time to stain my heaving breast in the priest’s venerable life force.

His fingers skimmed over my breasts and my tummy, painting my pale skin with his dark and dripping handprints. His pupils shrunk as he took in the sight of me beneath him, covered in the most precious substance a vampire had to give.

“As a well keeps its waters fresh, so she keeps fresh her wickedness. Violence and destruction are heard in her,” my prince stated, his tone so hushed I had to strain my ears to hear him. Was that a Bible verse? It sounded like it, but the rough, hungry manner in which he spoke had me second-guessing.

With hands shaking, he shoved the remnants of the habit’s rough material over my thighs, fingertips brushing over the flaxen curls of my pubic hair and lingering there for a few intense beats.

Splaying my thighs, he gave them a firm push to flatten them against the sun-warmed grass, a silent command for me to keep them spread. When I fell utterly still, he eased back on his knees, grinning down at me with an impish curve to the crook of his mouth.

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