38. Alaric

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

ALARIC

Gideon: That is a crazy plan, but I love it. I’ll be at the castle first thing in the evening. Together, we can persuade the Lady of Agony to accept this bonkers scheme.

Oh, and Allie, watch yourself. I’m not concerned about your stabby matriarch as much as I am about your fragile little heart around that human not-wife of yours.

W innie has staged a hostile takeover of my side of the pillow fort.

In all my years as a vampire, that is not a sentence I ever expected to think aloud. But that’s precisely what’s happened.

First, she says those things to me, and leaves me aroused and starved and wanting while she slips into slumber. Then, she creeps towards me in her sleep until she’s fully on my side of the wall, my arm trapped beneath her head, giving my hands nowhere to rest but her tiny, breakable body. She is so deep in sleep that she doesn’t know she’s crept into the clutches of a monster.

The things I dream of doing to her while I watch the vein in her neck pulse are beastly .

I remain as still as I can, fighting an internal battle against my darkest desires, certain that the tiniest movement will awaken the beast inside me that hungers for her. My shaft jabs against her thigh in an unseemly way, and my fangs have dropped. They itch terribly as they taste only strawberry-scented air.

I will not. I cannot.

What if I want you to?

She didn’t mean it. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.

We’re not supposed to be doing this. We are only pretending. We have rules .

But the rules didn’t say anything about biting.

And the hunger raging inside me is all too real.

The nightmares have threatened to claim her twice already. During the first one, she made her initial assault on the pillow wall, kicking it over and inching her way across the bed like a homicidal caterpillar. But as soon as she settled against me, she calmed, and fell deeper into sleep.

“I’ve got you, Winnie,” I whispered. “I won’t let anything hurt you, not even in your dreams.”

The second nightmare was worse, and she thrashed and whimpered in my arms, slapping her body as she cried out. I held her and sang softly the words of an old Germanic song Hrodebert taught me – a song of forlorn love – and she settled once more.

There’s a pool of her drool on my arm. I’m transfixed by the vein in her neck, the ebb and flow of blood being pushed through her body…

I can’t lie here a moment longer, or I will do something we both regret.

I need to take all this raw, inhuman need and channel it somewhere.

She’s so heavy, so settled in sleep, that she doesn’t wake as I pull my arm from beneath her. I fly from the room, down the stairs to my study, and back again, my arms filled with supplies and my ears pricked for the sounds of my mother’s Thralls. When I return, Winnie is where I left her, her beauty unchanged, immaculate.

As silently as I can, I move my chair away from the spear of sunlight piercing the gap in the curtains into the darkest corner of the tower. I sharpen my favourite charcoal and fill page after page with sketches of her sleeping form. In all of them, I draw a ring around her finger. Each image I toss away the moment I’ve finished it, for none of them are quite right. I’ll take them down to the priest hole before she wakes.

I know that I’m not supposed to draw her. I’m not supposed to hunger for her. It wasn’t in the rules, but that’s only because Winnie doesn’t know about my secret project, my desire to capture her heart in my work as I have not been able to have her in life. But now that I’ve vowed to make her mine, my need to make this work perfect has increased tenfold.

She may be here for professional pride. But I am drawing her even as the rising sun saps my energy, because I am utterly under her spell.

Loving her will destroy me utterly. But I am more than ready to be ruined.