Chapter 9

Lucius

I held Ava against my chest, our sweat-slicked bodies sticking together. Wetness coated her thighs, and our scents combined with those of sex in a heady mixture. I should get up to clean us, but I couldn’t seem to make my arms unlock from around her. That was a problem that should have gone away after our love-making, but it didn’t. Love-making—why was I even calling it that? It was sex, fucking, and tomorrow she’d be gone. Gone forever.

My chest grew tight thinking about the coming dawn, usually my favorite time of the day. I didn’t want her to leave, but what did I have to offer? I was cursed, doomed. The witch that had done it had long since died, and her bones had crumbled to dust by the passage of time. I didn’t know how to break the curse, and I’d been too angry to find out before she’d died. My life was marked by stupid mistakes; I couldn’t pull a fragile, beautiful woman like Ava into my mess.

Her long, sable-colored hair lay in waves over my pillows; it drew my eyes. It taunted me to reach out so I could brush it, feel how soft it was. She wasn’t asleep, but she was resting against my chest with complete trust. It was humbling to realize how brave she was, and how willing she was to reach out and grab hold of what she wanted with both hands. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a human would trust me, given my appearance. It wasn’t just the curse that kept me holed up inside my fortified home.

Eventually, I forced my arms to slide away. She had to be getting uncomfortable, and that was the incentive I needed to create distance. I slipped from the bed to the sound of her sleepy groan and mumbled protests. My wings snapped against my spine in a tight knot of tangled muscles, muscles that fought my control to complete this task. Everything in me craved to stay at her side.

The bathroom was a welcome escape, and I rushed to splash my face with cold water, water that evaporated into steam as soon as it touched my heated flesh. I glanced at the shower, wondering if I shouldn’t duck beneath a cold stream of water to cool myself down. No, I couldn’t keep her waiting, it was selfish if I didn’t care for her first.

My hands trembled when I grabbed a washing cloth and wet it under the tap. Ziv appeared on the counter, perching royally on a stack of clean towels with his fluffy black tail wrapped around his paws. His golden eyes glowed accusingly my way, and the crescent-shaped mark on his chest was glowing too, a mark of his power. “I know,” I said to him under my breath. “I know. But I can’t keep her. You know I can’t. It wouldn’t be right…”

I spun on my heel before my cat’s stare could swallow me whole. Ducking into the bedroom in a hurry, my feet carrying me to Ava’s side. She’d rolled over and taken the tip of a sheet to cover her side and chest, but she’d carefully avoided staining my sheets with the sticky mess on her thighs. The sight of her, and of the mess we’d created together, made my blood grow hot again, and my cock responded. Then she gave me a soft, inviting smile and I was lost. How could I possibly resist my mate?

What was meant to be a quick, thorough, but ultimately objective cleaning, turned sensual in a heartbeat. Her soft moan unleashed the beast inside of me, and damn it, why would she surrender to that so willingly? When I swapped the washing cloth for my tongue, lapping at her folds like a dying man, she clung to my feather-covered shoulders.

She shattered for me when I curled my fingers into her passage, her muscles clenching around my fingers like they had earlier around my cock. I wanted that again. I wanted that so badly that my control of my flames started to slip. They curled from my wings, dancing in the air around us, and that woman… My Ava was entranced rather than scared.

“If we only have tonight,” she murmured. “We’d better make the most of it. Don’t we?” That invitation was all I needed to sink myself into her welcoming heat and stoke the passion spiraling between us all over again. Yes, I needed to pack as many memories as I could into this one night, because it was going to have to sustain me for a long time to come.

We came together, the pleasure rushing through me so fast and hard that it caught me by surprise. I tumbled forward, landing on my fists, and only barely preventing crushing her beneath me. She reached up a small hand, stroked along my cheek, and pressed a kiss to my mouth so tenderly that I felt owned. This woman, I belonged to her now. What had I done?

I should be filled with regrets, worry, and fear for her future and mine. But when a little while later we lay curled together, clean, warm, and sleepy, all I felt was happy. That happiness tricked me into talking when I should have kept my secrets close to my chest; I shouldn’t burden her with them. At the same time, I wanted to know all of hers, and I hadn’t forgotten that she’d avoided an explanation of why she was hunted by shifters.

“You’re my first visitor in a very long time,” I whispered in the dark. I’d dimmed the fire and nipped out the candles a short while ago, and now a pleasant twilight ruled inside my chambers. At the foot of the bed, Ziv’s golden eyes were slits as he fought against sinking into a deep sleep. I could feel the warm weight of him against my ankle. “Without Ziv,” I heard myself say, “I would have gone crazy from loneliness. Maybe I did anyway. We shouldn’t have done this, it was selfish of me.”

Selfishness was exactly why I’d been cursed by that witch in the first place. She’d accused me of it when I’d refused to vanquish her foes, foes that had put her in mortal danger. Her curse had been cast on the heels of my refusal, and the next day she’d been dead, killed by those who hunted her. It was agonizingly similar to Ava’s situation, except Ava wasn’t even a witch with magic to defend herself.

“Why don’t you have visitors?” Ava asked quietly, a sad note in her voice that came awfully close to pity. I didn’t want her pity, but it was a pitiful existence. Only the advent of technology had broken me out of some of my solitude, bringing with it business opportunities and contact with someone like Aries. I’d never met my assistant in person, but I knew he was a good man—one who broke the silence when it became too much, even for me.

“Because I’m cursed,” I admitted. “A phoenix is supposed to be the truest of immortals that roam this Earth. If mortally wounded, we burst into flame and are reborn. Nothing can truly end us. Except that curse… It took away my ability to be reborn in flame. I can die because of that curse.”

When said out loud, it felt like I was unworthy. Look at how bravely Ava, a true mortal, had faced the shifters that chased her. She knew she’d die, and she hadn’t flinched, she’d stood tall instead. Defying her fate rather than hiding away from it.

“Oh, that’s awful, Lucius!” she said, full of empathy, and she turned in my arms so she could look me in the eye. “Is there nothing you can do to break the curse? How long have you been trapped in your home?”

She didn’t ask me why I had never left these walls. She understood it right away, the terror an immortal might feel when faced with true death. Or at least, the terror I’d felt at knowing I was now as any other death could take me at any opportunity. When you’d seen as much time pass as I had, you knew it could lie around every corner.

“A hundred and fifty years,” I said, as I contemplated that passage of time. I’d updated my home many times over those years, but I’d never left the safety of my lands. Until I’d become forgotten by the nearby town, just a myth of a strange house in the witch woods, and lately, the rich hermit on account of the deliveries.

“That is a very long time to be alone,” Ava murmured against my chest. The way she said it made me think she knew a thing or two about being lonely. My arms tightened around her in reaction, hugging her close against my chest as if that could take away those memories.

She didn’t say anything else, and I thought that maybe she was starting to fall asleep. After everything she’d been through, I should let her, she needed all the rest she could get. I knew that if I didn’t get my answers now, I’d linger over them in the morning, and then I wouldn’t be able to let her go. “Tell me why you were chased in the woods. Those shifters, why were they after you?”

My voice was rough with a growl that stuck in my throat, my body growing tense as a surge of adrenaline rushed through me. I was ready to fight for her when all I did was think about her foes. Her muscles also went tight, her back going stiff as a board, but I knew that was fear, not anger. I waited patiently for her to answer in the semi-darkness, not pushing this time, but not allowing distractions either.

“I saw something I shouldn’t have,” she said eventually, and after a short pause, she explained further. “I worked at a shelter in New Mexico where I focused on troubled youths, runaways, kids with no one to look out for them. The ones that fall through the cracks.” Her hands splayed against my chest, and I could tell she focused on the steady thud of my heartbeat to ease her mind.

“There was this guy, Calder,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of that, this guy? It was a loaded statement, and I instantly knew she’d dated him, even though she didn’t say that. “He’d come pick me up after my work or drop me off. Started making it a habit. I thought he was being nice…” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath that bordered on horror.

“He was using me to pick targets, kids he could then grab off the streets. I didn’t even realize it was him, but I started noticing the missing. I talked about it to him, I asked him for help even!” She sounded furious with herself now and I rushed to find words to reassure her, even if nothing I said would make this right. She was explaining something awful to me.

“You didn’t know. How could you know?” I said. “Ava, you tried to fix it, didn’t you?” That I knew without a shred of doubt, brave woman that she was, she would have tried to do the right thing, even at her own cost. I racked my brain trying to figure out why shifters would try to steal homeless kids off the streets. What use would they have for them?

“I did, but nobody believed me. Nobody cared,” she said bitterly. “And then last week I got out of work and Calder was waiting for me. He shifted, threatened me to stay out of it. But he let me go, and that was his mistake.” When she quietly outlined what she’d done the moment that bastard let her go, my admiration for her grew. Emptying her bank account to get every kid she knew a ticket out of town, only running in her car when she’d nearly been caught by Calder and his shifter friends.

Neither of us spoke after her story, and while she eventually sank into sleep, lying trustingly in my arms. My head kept spinning, filled with worry, with recriminations, and even shame. For the first time in a very long, I had no plan, and what I’d always been certain of, didn’t seem important any longer.