Chapter 15

CHAPTER15

The music vibrates through my chest. It flows through our little band of immortals like water, carrying us away on its waves. We have centuries of practice and decades of grace, after all. But when you’re a vampire in particular, dance has a music all its own. It fills me with heartbeats. The sound of muscles working and air passing through lungs. Feet tapping in percussion on the floor. Voices and laughter. Whispers of skin. Caresses. Kisses. The scents and sounds of desire.

With every note, I feel myself restored. I close my eyes and smile more than I’ve smiled in a while. I lose myself in the surge of sound. I dance until a thin film of sweat embraces my skin and glows in the flashing lights. I feel more like myself with every song.

After a while, I separate from the others, standing at the edge of the dancefloor to catch my breath and just watch for a moment. When I look toward the tables, I spot Davina sitting with Cassian, giving him a tentative smile as he leans forward in the throws of an animated tale. Something about that moment seems more than okay. I look away as though the weight of my gaze might break the spell.

I’m watching the lights that frame the stage, smiling a little at the DJ mixing songs and beats I’ve never heard. I’m thinking about the notes my voice could add when I feel it.

The hum that rises in my blood is just like the magic of music. It has a tempo. A melody.

I smell ink. I smell unsmoked tobacco warmed by the sun. I hear one heartbeat just as slow and powerful as mine, the cadence of the pulse almost as familiar as my own.

“You were right,” a quiet voice says in my ear, just loud enough to carry over the music. Heat envelops my back. I resist the urge to lean into it and I close my eyes as a trace of a smile rises on my lips. My fingertips graze the dagger strapped to my thigh, but a hand flows down my arm, making a slow procession across my skin until it pulls my palm away from the blade. His fingers interlace with mine.

“About what?” I ask as he steps closer, his chest pressing to my back. He pulls my hair from my shoulder, dragging his touch across the nape of my neck as he sweeps it to the side.

“Betrayal,” Ashen says. His lips brush my throat. “It tasted like copper. But it smelled like you.”

The lights cut through the darkness of the room and find me just like his words illuminate the shadows within my soul. Heat twists low in my belly. “Good to know. I wouldn’t want it to smell like another woman. That would be awkward. Oh wait-“

“Vampire…” I feel a low growl rumble through his chest and my smile broadens. Ashen keeps his voice steady despite the demon that stirs beneath the surface. “Come outside with me.”

Well. I guess he still likes to make demands. And thus I will still delight in telling him:

“No.”

“Please.”

“No, thank you.”

Ashen sighs against my skin, igniting an electrical current through my flesh. He traces a finger down my exposed back. My heart riots like a thundercloud with every inch of skin that his touch consumes.

We start to sway to the beat of the music, but it’s like we’re on a different dancefloor than everyone else. I think they’re missing the real music. The real music is slow. It’s sensual. It’s the rhythm of Ashen’s heartbeat against my spine when his hand draws our interlaced fingers to rest low on my stomach, pulling me closer. It’s in the cadence of his caress on my arm when I reach up behind me and run my fingers into his hair. Music is in his breath that heats my neck, in the warmth of his lips as they whisper across my skin.

For a moment I just want to forget that we’re an executioner and a bounty, a soldier and a weapon. A hunter and the prey that won’t go down. Whichever one is which I’m not sure I know anymore. I don’t want to untangle it or even try to figure it out. I only want to believe we’re a man and a woman on a dancefloor, and nothing more.

“Come outside with me,” Ashen says in my ear, this time soft. Seductive.

“No,” I say just as softly, still swaying with him to the music.

“You cannot avoid me forever.”

“I can try.”

Ashen’s teeth graze the shell of my ear. My own words echo in my head in my husky, unfamiliar voice. I can try. But I don’t want to. Not yet.

Ashen’s arms tighten around me. His fingers trace my jaw. His breath follows my pulse. A moan drifts past my lips. It’s so quiet that even I can barely hear it, but Ashen feels it in the vibration of my throat. I know it in the way his kiss turns to fire on my skin. My body melts into his in the music that swells around us.

“Come with me, vampire.”

I sigh, a little from his persistence, a little from his touch. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“Neither do you. You are the most stubborn creature to ever exist among the realms.”

“I’m surprised you’re only figuring that out now,” I say, and the whisper of Ashen’s laugh warms my skin. “I’m pretty sure I made myself clear, Reaper. I’d rather die than be dragged back down to the Shadow Realm.”

Ashen’s grip on my hand tightens as my other arm drifts back down to my side. “I have no intention of dragging you there.”

“I mean every offense when I say this, Reaper. I don’t fucking believe you.”

“Hmm,” he hums against my neck. A flush of heat rushes to my core and blush colors my skin in reply. “How about I make you a deal? I promise not to take you or let anyone else take you from this club, unless you ask me to.”

I laugh, a genuine laugh that turns a little acidic as it fades. But Ashen seems undeterred. His fingers are still laced through mine. He rests his chin against my shoulder.

I can’t say I’m making any moves to pry myself away from Ashen’s touch, but I’m not super keen on following him into the night either. The idea of us being just a man and a woman feels like it’s slipping away from me. It’s evaporating like fog in the sun. “You? A promise? You’ve broken nearly every one you’ve ever made to me,” I say, my voice too sweet and innocent for the hurt and malice that lurk beneath it. “Besides, Reaper, you should know by now. The only promises worth anything among immortals are paid in blood.”

Ashen’s free hand lays across my wrist, flowing up my arm, past my elbow. It’s slow and careful, as though he savors every second of the touch. My chest turns to fire when his warm palm drifts across my shoulder. Goosebumps follow his fingers like a comet tail as his hand slides across my collarbone and pauses above my heart.

“Then I will pay with blood,” Ashen says, his lips grazing my ear with every word. He lifts his touch from my skin to turn his wrist toward my lips.

I close my eyes. My throat burns with desire at the smell of the network of veins beneath his skin. But it’s not just that. It’s the suggestion. It’s the act of offering that compels me as much as the smell, or the taste, or the way I know it would feel to have his essence coursing through my body. It’s more than the power of secrets and time in his blood. It’s the magnetic pull of him, like we’re meant to find one another through any distance, any realm, any measure of time.

Bloodfated, I hear Bianca say in my mind. The more you take, the more your fates intertwine.

Those words settle like a hot ball of molten glass in my chest. It’s like they expand to fill every empty cavity, coating me with the truth from the inside out. And the truth is that this bloodfate is nothing but cruel. It shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t need something so sacred from the one person left to betray me. I’ve killed nearly everyone to sell me out across the millennia. Yet, the one that hurt me most deeply is here, with his arms wrapped around me, a Reaper holding his wrist out in an offer I can barely refuse. And I’m letting him. I can’t seem to stop.

No, it shouldn’t be this way. Not with this enemy. Not with the man who should never be mine.

The kind of sorrow I feel when I think about these things, it’s like quicksand. It’s like a place I’m not supposed to be. Like a desert that pushes me away from the sea and consumes me. Dry and desiccating. Endless. Unwelcoming and unmerciful. It sucks me under and leaves nothing behind, coating my world in coarse grains until it drowns me, killing even the will to fight back.

I slow my motion. One by one, my muscles solidify. In no more than a few beats of the music, I’m little different than stone.

“What do you want,” I demand. My voice is low and strained. There’s no trace of amusement in it, no flirting or banter. The music continues on around us as though leaving us behind on a cold and empty shore. “What do you want,” I say again when he doesn’t answer.

Ashen pulls away a little but keeps his lips close to my ear and my hand encased in his. I feel it tense around my fingers. His wrist still hovers in front of me in the offer of a promise. “To talk. Alone.”

I close my eyes for one deep breath, filling the bottom of my lungs in the hopes of distracting my heart with something real. “Fine,” I say as I push his offered wrist away. I turn my head enough that I know he’ll hear every word clearly, yet not enough to see his face. “But I don’t want your fragile vows.”

Ashen’s fingers loosen around mine, but it’s me that finally lets go.