Page 114 of His Darkest Desire

Vex sighed, reached out, and grasped the bottle. At his gentle urging, Kinsley relinquished it. When he set the bottle on the table, Kinsley stared at it, unable to look at him as fresh tears flooded her eyes.

“You hurt me,” she said, voice small and broken as she placed her hands in her lap.

“I know.” He took hold of her chin and turned her face toward his. Regret tempered the heat in his gaze, deepened the crease between his eyebrows, and drew down on his lips. “And I am sorry.”

“Sorry.” Kinsley tugged her chin away with a bitter laugh as she lowered her gaze to the floor. “Sorry. That’s exactly what my ex-husband said. He was sorry that it didn’t work out. Sorry that we got divorced. Sorry that he hurt me.” She angrily wiped away her tears as they spilled. “He told me over and over that he was sorry, just as often as he told me that he loved me. And neither of those words meant anything. They lost their meaning, and they just became…empty.”

“Kinsley…”

“No. You…you don’t owe me anything. It was just sex. There’s nothing between us, right? Nothing except the pact we made.” She clenched the material of her nightgown in her fists. Every word was more painful to utter than the last, but she kept going. “You’ve made it clear that I’m the one who owes you, and now you know I can’t pay the price. You’re stuck here. So you’ll…you’ll just have to wait for the next woman to crash into your woods and hope she can give you the baby you need.”

“No,” he grated.

Kinsley turned her teary eyes to Vex. “What?”

Holding her gaze, he dropped to his knees and spread his wings, curling them around her. His big hands settled over hers. “I want no other. You are all I desire, Kinsley Wynter Delaney.”

Kinsley’s heart quickened. “I-I don’t understand. You’re…you’re choosing me?”

He squeezed her hands. “Yes. With all my heart and soul.”

“But what about the curse? You and the wisps will be trapped here because I can’t—” She pressed her lips together and curled them in, biting down.

Because I can’t give you the child you need for your freedom.

Vex lifted a hand to her face, caught her chin, and gently pressed his thumb beneath her mouth until she released her lips. “Better a single day here with you than an eternity out there, free to roam without you.”

Kinsley’s head swam, and the wine’s effects blurred the lines between her conflicted emotions. Her lower lip trembled. “Vex, please don’t do this to me. Don’t lie to me. Don’t say sweet words you don’t mean. There’s nothing I can give you.”

“You can give me everything I desire. You.” He soothed her lip with tender strokes of his thumb. “Love me, fear me, command me, obey me. I will be your master and your slave, your worshipper, your equal. I will be your everything, just as you will be mine.”

Kinsley wanted to believe his words, wanted them to be true with all of her being. She searched his eyes for deception, for the illusion, but instead found sincerity, yearning, and something much vaster and deeper. Something that made her heart thump ever faster and harder even as it wrapped her in delicious heat.

What would he have to gain by lying?

Nothing.

Vex moved his hand to cradle the back of her neck, his firm but gentle hold keeping her face from turning away. “Something urged me into the woods that night before the wisps ever told me what they’d found. That pull strengthened as I approached the strange carriage, and the moment my gaze fell upon the mortal within, I knew. I knew she was mine. The female who sat there terrified, dying, desperate, whose light would be extinguished before ever I had a chance to know her, belonged to me.

“You agreed to be bound to me. To be my mate. Yet you were my mate before that moment, and you will be forever after.” His expression darkened, and shadows coalesced in his eyes. “And I’d have done everything in my power to save you, even had you refused.”

Kinsley’s eyes flared. “What?”

“You are my mate, Kinsley. My fated one.”

She tried to shake her head in denial, tried to pull away, but his hold remained secure. “Y-You’re talking about…about soulmates. That isn’t—”

Real.

But why wouldn’t it be real when there was proof of magic all around her? She was living in another realm, where will-o’-the-wisps, goblins, and fae existed, where illusions bent reality, where magical fog acted as an impassable barrier. If all that was real—if Vex was real—why couldn’t soulmates be real too?

Because your heart’s been broken once, and you’re terrified of it happening again.

Kinsley blinked back more tears. “The way you treated me… You were cruel. You almost raped me, Vex!”

His lips peeled back not in anger but in anguish, and he pressed his forehead against hers, reducing her world to his glowing gaze. “Neither words nor actions will erase the suffering I have inflicted. Of all the regrets I must carry into eternity, it is the heaviest. I was desperate, at war with my instinct to claim you and my yearning for freedom. All the anger I’ve held for so long, all the pain and grief, it all surged to the surface because you were the key, the thing she never wanted me to obtain.

“Yet none of that justifies my behavior. None of it excuses what I have done to you. You are my mate. You are Kinsley Wynter Delaney, you are my moonlight. Naught else matters. And I will spend our eternity atoning for the wrongs I have done you.”

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