“Ruan,” she whispered into his mouth. “I didn’t expect to feel . . . I mean, I’ve never felt something like this before. This has never . . .” Her breath hiccupped as he bit her bottom lip and sucked it into his mouth. She quivered beneath his touch. Trembled under his kiss.
He lowered his mouth to her breast again, his fingers dragging out the pleasure beneath the thin fabric of her gown. He could kiss her body for eternity. Touch her forever. He planned on doing just that.
“What do you want?” he asked, as she reared up, moaning, her core beginning to clench around him. He’d give her anything. Everything. If only for another second to give her pleasure any way she desired.
She shook her head, fanning her long mane of hair over the stone. “Not want . . .” She forced out in a single, panted breath. “Need. I need you.”
“No,” Ruan said, lifting her off the stone and dragging her to the floor. Ripping the chemise from her body, he unzipped his pants and shuffled them to the floor. He needed this more than he needed air in his lungs. He needed to be one with her in this life. He poised himself over her center, arms planted on either side of her body, and rammed into her in a single, earth-shattering stroke. “You need this . . . I need this. I need you.”
Her hips bucked as he pounded a single breath out of her. “Yes.” And then another. “God, yes . . .”
She was a tight fit. A perfect mold for his body to pleasure hers. Their bodies moved in rippling waves against one another as the chamber shook and rumbled from blasts outside the walls. His world had been blacker than night until this moment. The last hundred years deprived of all color. An abyss from which he thought he’d never resurface. But now . . . even the dingy walls in the chamber had beautiful rods of amber and mahogany striking through them. Eve’s hair wasn’t simply blonde . . . it was golden. As bright as the sun’s first morning ray.
Ruan’s stomach tightened and his fangs dropped. He bit down on his lip to hide their menacing white tips and squelched down the rising need to pierce her flesh by burying himself in her deeper.
She moaned loudly, arching up, on the verge of her own release.
God, he was going to lose it.
Pulled as tight as he’d ever been, his body shaking violently with anticipation, he shattered into a thousand directions as he emptied himself into her. He thrust deeper. Harder. She screamed, shifting beneath him, riding her own pleasure to climax.
Arms trembling and energy spent, feeling completely and utterly content for the first time in a hundred years, Ruan collapsed on top of her. He buried his face in her locks of blonde. He breathed deep, rejoicing in the satisfaction sweeping across his body—satisfaction he hadn’t felt in what seemed like an eternity. The only kind that could come from finding his soul mate once again.
Realizing he was still sheathed inside her, he pulled out. The sweet smell of warm, fresh blood assailed his senses. He looked down. His shaft was completely covered in red, beautiful, shimmering blood. Primal need clamped his gut.
“You’re a virgin?” he croaked.
She nodded slowly, biting down on her bottom lip.
“Why didn’t you . . . I shouldn’t have . . .” Oh Lord. “This shouldn’t have happened this way. I’m so sorry, Eve, I thought that since we’ve already—”
She shushed his mouth with the length of her finger. “You were right. I needed this. I needed you.” She kissed him squarely on the mouth. He couldn’t breathe. “I’ve been sheltered by Lilith for so long. Too long. She’s spent her whole life protecting me from the outside world. Do you think it’s possible to be looking for something your whole life without knowing what that thing is?”
He nodded, memorizing the ocean-blue specks in her eyes.
She sighed. “All my life I’ve felt like there’s been something missing. Like someone’s been waiting for me. I know it sounds crazy but I think that’s you.”
What was left of his heart constricted. “Eve, I love you so much. Forever.”
As she shifted beneath him, the scent of her most succulent blood hit him like a sledgehammer, knocking the words from his lips. He hissed, lurched back, instinctively poised his mouth on her neck.
She lolled her head back and giggled, completely unaware of the war raging inside him. “Another go, already?”
Ruan felt his eyes flush red. His shaft swelled as he pushed inside her again. His fangs elongated until they brushed against the curve of her neck. Hyperconscious that her blood was mixing with her sex and his, and his cock was covered in all of it, bloodlusting orgasms rippled through his body. He sank his teeth into the vein on her neck and pulled, gently at first, then hungrier. Greedier.
Eve gasped. Her body became a live wire, shooting adrenaline though her blood stream. The reaction drugged him, overwhelmed him. She melted into the floor as he dragged the blood from her body into his mouth and down his throat with deliciously long draws. Her blood was intoxicating, full of adrenaline and ecstasy. Before he realized it, the primal beast in him had taken over. He was full. Satiated. On every level.
He unsheathed his cock from her core, his fangs from her neck, and raised himself to look at her face. Would there be shock in her eyes? Horror? Pleasure?
Eve was ghastly pale and . . . expressionless. Lifeless.
No . . .
The metallic taste of blood surged in his throat, revolting him when he realized what he’d done. Horror froze the breath in his lungs. Ruan was off Eve’s body in a flash. He ghosted trembling hands over her. Whispered words of love and awe in her ears. Pinched his eyes shut. Screamed to any gods who would listen. Prayed for the nightmare to end.
It didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“If and when the time calls for it, fight to the death to protect what you know to be right.”
San Francisco Haven Rule #10
THE SCREAM THAT jolted Ruan back to the present had him gasping for air and clutching his chest like he was dying, succumbing to the eternal night, rather than reveling in the memories unlocked by Lilith’s touch.
He could still taste Eve’s intoxicating blood on his lips.
Lilith, red and pale in all her sinful glory, pinned him down on the roof of his apartment complex as rolling mist ghosted over the rooftops, releasing scattered droplets of rain. How they got to the roof, Ruan wasn’t certain, but he didn’t care.
He sat up on his elbows, remembering—for the first time—murky details from his four hundred years on this earth. He’d woken from a dream . . . a terrible dream . . . only to realize his worst nightmares had come true while he slept.
“I killed her,” he breathed, bringing his knees to his chest. “I killed Eve.”
Lilith sat beside him, letting the rain dust her bare shoulders. “You killed your wife in the eighteen hundreds, dragging her soul to the Nether Realm. You killed her again in the chamber that night in 1912. And you would’ve done the same to Eve Monroe, your soul mate reincarnate, had I not stepped in when I did. It’s in your nature, Ruan. It’s time you accepted that. No matter how good your intentions may seem, things will always end for the worst where you are concerned.”
Silence hung over their heads like thick city fog.
Ruan swallowed down the bile rising in his throat as images of what really happened that night turned his stomach again and again. The guilt of killing his soul mate not once, but twice, was too heavy a burden to bear.
And he’d come so close to letting history repeat itself a third time.
“What did you do to me?” He rubbed the spot on his chest where she’d hit him with his past in the lobby. “Why couldn’t I remember what happened all these years? Why was she blocked to me?”
Lilith licked her ruby-red lips, then let a single puff of warm air evaporate in a huff before them. “I couldn’t stand by and let you drain her a third time, Ruan, but that’s beside the point. You’re
asking the wrong questions. Eve is gone. Savage has taken her. Only you know where they’ve gone or how we can get her back.”
He shook the cobwebs out of his brain. “I don’t. How could I possibly know?”
“Think back to 1912. Try harder this time and focus on that night . . . only that night.”
“Wait.” He slid away as she reached out. “I want to remember all of it. Everything. Right now.”
She laughed, brushed a fiery lock over her shoulder, and replaced her hand in her lap. “Unfortunately that’s not how it works. Memories will continue to surface for some time as long as you’re open to them.”
He faced Lilith, ready to give everything he had if it meant he could remember every last memory with Eve in it. “Bring it all back. I don’t care if you have to carve into my chest with a power drill. Do it.”
She sighed. “That’s not how it works, Ruan. Think of your brain like a flowing body of water. Now think of my maware like a punctured can of motor oil that’s been tossed in. As the can settles on the silted bottom, oil will continue to bubble, seep out of the tin, polluting the water for days, years, but the first kerplunk! into the water will produce the heaviest oil flow.”
“So you’ve giving my memory back a drip at a time? Is this what you’re telling me?”
“Guess you could think of it that way.”
“Any way you could speed the process a bit? It’s not like my memories aren’t important or anything.”
Lightning illuminated the sky and the oppressing cloud cover overhead. Lilith’s face flashed luminescent white. “Maybe we should go in.” She scanned the rain-battered rooftop and rose to her feet. “We can talk inside.”
Feeling drunk with the pouring rain and the memories creeping to the surface, Ruan lifted his face to the sky. Thunder vibrated the air around them. As Lilith started to walk toward the stairwell, he yelled, “I have to know . . . why’d you do it? Why’d you wipe my memory of her?”
“How did you know where to hide the Grimorium Verum?” She stopped. Turned back.
What the devil made her think he knew what happened to the tome? It was on Eve’s lap when he barged into the chamber, he recalled easily. Eve had been toying with that ball of light. She had set the tome down on the stone. She’d said she had a role to play. That Lilith had charged her to release elders’ shades to the Ever After. Wouldn’t the tome have remained in the chamber after he . . . after they . . .
The rest of the night was a blur—the answers just out of reach. “I’m not sure what happened after . . .” He couldn’t speak the words.
She stalked to his side, knelt before him, her velvet dress pooling around her feet. “This time, try to push past the pain and remember where you hid the tome and exactly which incantation you used. You have to. Eve’s life depends on it. You, and you alone, know what the future holds. Let yourself go into the waters of your subconscious, past the point when you killed her. Sink deeper into the abyss, Ruan.” She scooted beside him. Close enough that the sugary sweet musk of her natural perfume pulled him into another trance. He heard her whisper, “I think you’ll like the dark,” on his way under.
This time he didn’t see the blinding white light. He experienced it from the inside out. His chest constricted, then exploded with rippling waves of heat. Raw energy blasted through his middle, firing through his fingers and toes. Thanks to Lilith, Ruan now knew what an electric fence felt like. Limbs hot and tingly. Barbed wire tearing through his stomach lining. Total brain fry.
He peeled his eyelids apart and stared into a poorly lit chamber much like the one he’d found Eve in. Except this chamber was made of floor-to-ceiling brick, not stone. There were no windows, not even a tiny slat for the shaft of a gun barrel, and only a single door. No sacrificial tablet stood in the middle of the room. There were tables. Chairs. Gun racks. Gunpowder barrels. Piles and piles of scroll shelved against the wall.
And there, in the center of the room, leaning over a chunky wood table was Lilith. He didn’t see her as much as he smelled her. Sugar-sweet cinnamon wafted through the stagnant air. His eyes were still adjusting. He rubbed his hands over them and blinked hard. He could make out Lilith’s shadowed curves, her molten-lava hair sweeping mid-back.
But there was someone else in the room. A dark figure leaning back in the creaking wooden chair behind her.
“Kill him and be done with all of this,” a gravelly voice said. “What does that peon matter anyway?”
Ruan slinked into the shadow of the entry, straining to hear every word.
“I can’t kill him and you know why. It says right here, in the blood of our ancestors,” Lilith pointed to the scroll splayed out over the table separating them, before continuing, “that he must live for Eve to access the mawares in the amulet. She has the purest soul—the oldest. With what he continues to do to his so-called love of his life, his soul just might be the most tainted. Together they balance the sin of this earth with the purity of the Ever After. Don’t you see? One cannot reach full potential without the other.”
“Yet Eve isn’t going to reach any kind of potential from the grave. We clearly can’t let them be.”
Lilith sighed. “And their souls seem to be on a collision course with each other no matter how much I try to keep them apart. Maybe if you hadn’t put Ruan in front of that chamber door we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Ruan winced at the mention of his name and listened harder.
“Maybe if you’d lend me a little trust I would’ve known that Ruan was the sucker you wanted to keep away from her.” The grumbling form stood, towering over Lilith, and went palms-down over the table. “Don’t you think that information might’ve been valuable to me? You’ve tried it your way. You failed. Now how ‘bout we try it mine.” He unsheathed the dagger in his belt and spun it in his hand. “It’ll take me two seconds to slice his heart in two.”
Ruan suppressed the hiss in his throat and glared down the shadowed son of a bitch on a death mission. The more he peered into the dim room, the more a dark groove slashed across his cheek came into focus.
Kane. Savage. One in the same.
“We may only get one chance at this. If you kill him, that may be it.” She clicked a long, witchy finger against her teeth. “There might be another way. I can make Ruan forget her, body and soul. If I can somehow convince him to let me into his mind, I can wipe her from him completely. When her soul resurfaces again, he won’t remember her from Jane.”
“But he thought she was dead this go-round. He wasn’t looking for her, yet he found her and history still repeated itself. What’s to say that wouldn’t happen again?”
“Because I won’t merely be erasing the memory of her, you untrusting fool. I’ll be erasing the spiritual connection between them. Ruan and Eve will be no more kismet than you and me.”
Kane paused, the long silver blade tapping against his leg. “Why didn’t you just do this to begin with?”
She walked around the table and fingered through stacks of rolled scroll. “The risks are high. If he doesn’t let me in, if he holds back any memory of Eve, it won’t work. When her soul resurfaces, their connection will be stronger than ever before. And we won’t get a second shot if this fails. Scrubbing his soul a second time would most definitely kill him. The strain would be too much to bear.”
“Then how can we make sure he’ll let you in completely?”
She smiled. “He’s just killed the love of his life. Wouldn’t you pay a pretty penny to forget that pain? I’m offering my services for free.”
As they continued to spew sinister plans from their tongues, Ruan backed away from the room, picking up bits and pieces of their conversation until their voices droned to nothing. He sprinted down the hall and down another corridor. He needed to breathe. This was too much to take in and the air in this damn fort was much too thin. He nearly forgot there was a battle going on somewher
e within the walls until an explosion rocked the southernmost tower.
Needing to run, to breathe, to escape his fate, he stormed up a winding flight of concrete stairs. Down a narrow corridor. Through a set of heavy wooden doors. Turned right. Left. Down another eerily familiar hallway . . . and froze.
Through a partly-open chamber door, Ruan spotted Eve. Lifeless and bloodied atop the sacrificial stone. His heart ached until he swore it broke in two. He walked into the room, struggling to hold his composure. Brushing her hair away from her forehead, hearing Lilith’s voice ring strong in his head, Ruan realized that this was their twisted and tragic destiny.
She would live. His soul would find hers. She would die. He would live in agony.
“Eve, I’m so sorry.” Ruan’s gaze settled on the purple plush of her lips. On the cold curve of her neck. “You deserve so much more than I could have ever given you.”
She deserved to live a full and happy life. She deserved someone who could give that to her—someone who could give her more than a swift meeting with Mr. Grim.
Ruan sighed, rubbing his fingers between hers. “I know what I have to do, Eve. It’s for you . . . for us.” He raised her hand to his mouth and pressed a soft kiss upon the bridge of her knuckles. “I swear to you I’ll never love another for as long as I live.”
Despite the aching in his heart and the yearning in his soul to hold her tight and not let go . . . he must forget her. All of her. Forever.
As he moved a sweeping piece of her gown over her legs, putting it back to its proper place, his eye caught on the corner of the Grimorium Verum. His thoughts raced. Eve had said her future was dictated in its pages. She’d said his path was likely to have been outlined as well.
Lilith and Kane mentioned the duality of their spirits being written among its prophecies. If the connection between him and Eve was severed, and the Grimorium Verum was studied and deciphered as it had been for ages, then their entire race would know what had become of them. They would know of his sin. Of her purity. And he would get wind too, eventually. Wouldn’t he? If Lilith was right and Eve had a crucial role to play in releasing elders’ shades to the Ever After, Ruan would surely know her in her next life.
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