“Purely hypothetically,” I said, fully aware of my tendency to leap first and look much, much later, “if I was to accompany you, it wouldn’t be alone. I have a security detail. They’re watching us, even now.”
“I should be disappointed in our host, were that not the case,” Klaud said. He offered me his arm, then pulled it back. “Forgive me. I forget the affect our touch has on your kind, with such infrequent contact. Will you follow me?”
I nodded, grateful to escape the sickening, numb tingling. “I will.”
His long, dark shape cut a path through the crowd to a secluded hallway of stained glass windows overlooking the moor. Their colors should have been dark at this time of night. Instead, moonlight set them aburst as if they were lit by silver flame. Klaud paused by velvet curtains rising to meet the hall’s indecent height. Could they absorb thoughts as well as they absorbed conversation?
“What has your valiant protector told you on the subject of how heirs are born?” Klaud asked when the din of the crowd had died away.
I felt a sudden stab of panic that soon Klaud would be whipping an illustrated guide out of his pocket and beginning with something like when a mommy werewolf and a daddy werewolf love each other very much…
“I know that heirs are all born of the same genetic line, and that if that particular heir decides to remain human, the genetic material remains dormant until the next of the line is born.”
“Correct,” he said, looking entirely too smug by half. “But did he tell you that not all heirs in the same line carry equal potential and power?”
“No,” I said, feeling irritation crawl up my spine on spiky insect legs. “He failed to mention that.”
His laugh felt like a slap stinging across my cheek. “Why does this not surprise me?”
That made two of us.
“The world of werewolves is governed by cycles. Cycles of the moon. Cycles of the tide. Cycles of birth. Cycles of death.”
This last word between us like an icicle. Cold. Jagged. Dangerous.
“True heirs,” he continued, “pure heirs are born in cycles as well.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.” My heart fluttered in the tight cage of my corset.
“The last true heir came to Castle Abernathy two hundred years ago.” Klaud paused, blue eyes milky in the moonlight. “That is, until you.”
The stone floor shifted beneath my feet. I reached out to steady myself against the wall. “What?”
Klaud scanned my face but failed to maintain eye contact, his gaze lodging squarely at my jugular. I tried not to enhance its pulsing by swallowing.
“Her name was Lily. She was to be Abernathy’s mate. He brought her here for the formal ceremony. The night before the wedding, she was nearly strangled to death. Following that incident, she was somewhat less interested in becoming the alpha female of the ruling clan. She left the following morning.”
The edges of my vision faded to a strange, smoky brown as I fought to drag air into my compressed lungs. Blood roared in my ears.
“Since she elected to remain human, all that she was, all that she might have been stayed dormant from generation to generation. Abernathy knew that, given time, the next true heir would be born. Which is why, I suspect, he remained near Cuxhaven, where Lily settled with her human family.”
Goosebumps spilled from the crown of my head all the way to my feet. “She settled in Cuxhaven?”
“Oh yes, she did. And for generations, they lived in secrecy, until your grandmother discovered some of the letters her grandmother had written to Abernathy. I suppose Abernathy told you your grandmother sought his assistance?”
“He did.” I said, deep melancholy spreading like hot tar through my middle.
“But not how she knew to seek his help?” Klaud’s face bore an expression of indecent pleasure as he delivered this revelation.
“No.” I let myself lean back against the wall, the rough-hewn stone, cool and surprisingly comforting between my naked shoulder blades.
“He was waiting. Or so, I imagine. Protecting your line against any interference would make infinite sense, if I were waiting for the love of my life to return.”
“But I’m not her,” I insisted. “She’s not me. We’re not the same.” I could feel the hard knot building at the base of my throat. The tears stinging my eyes.
That same, slow smile crept across his face. It should have been warning enough. “No. Not the same. But, the resemblance is—well I’ll let you be the judge.” He reached toward his pocket and withdrew a phone. His long, pale fingers danced over the screen before he handed it to me.
It felt unnaturally cool upon my palm. Even in the photograph, the painting caused me to gasp, and shrink. Those eyes. The auburn hair. The pale skin.
It was me.
Chapter 16
“Where did you get this?” The photograph of the painting looked to have been taken hastily, but the stones beyond the painting’s ornate, gilded frame belonged to Castle Abernathy. There could be no doubt of this.
“Under this very roof. In a section of the castle I suspect Mark has guarded against your entering. He has restricted your movements while you were here, yes? Under the pretense of some threat, I suppose. To think. You’ve been sleeping in her room. Remarkable how well he’s kept it. It’s been updated, I’m sure. But it was hers, all the same.”
“This isn’t possible.” I was backing away from him now, his phone still clutched in my hand. Shivering and hugging myself as I retreated.
“I can certainly understand why you want to believe that,” Klaud said, casually ambling toward me. “But lies wouldn’t sting so, would they? What you do with this information is entirely up to you, my dear. Leave him. Forgive him. Whatever you choose. Do what you will, but do it with your eyes open.”
His phone slid from my hand, broken pieces scattering against stone. The delicate sounds of breaking didn’t register in any ears but mine, and perhaps that of Klaud who laughed in my wake.
I ran from him then. Knocking bodies out of my way, tripping up the stairs, skirt catching on my shoes, lungs pressing against the contracted cage of my ribs, my heart drumming a terrified rhythm around a single word, repeated over and over again.
No. No No. No.
Down the hall I flew, the heavy tapestries a blur of ornate stitching in my peripheral vision as I threw myself into my room, her room and heaved the heavy wooden door shut behind me. The brass key was cold in my hand as I cranked the lock. Its landing was muffled by the plush carpets covering every pathway in this room. Her room.
Were these colors chosen for her? By her? These fabrics? Had she sat in the antique chairs facing the fireplace? Curled up in the window seats with a book?
The assault came from all sides, leaving me spinning in the room’s center, my only path of escape to fold further into myself until implosion felt like an inevitability. I fell to the bed, my body drawing itself into the smallest ball the yards of fabric cocooning me would allow.
She was everywhere.
I was nowhere. No one.
I pulled the pillows down over my head, grateful for the darkness and silence when the first sobs racked my body.
“I’m so sorry, Hanna. I’m so sorry.” Mark’s voice pulled me to the surface, helped me kick free from the undertow of unpleasant dreams. The room was dark and cold, the fire having died long ago. The velvet drapes had been drawn, blocking out even moonlight.
His body warmed my bare back. The immense weight of a large hand wrapped my naked bicep in a singular spot of heat.
“I should have told you,” he said. “I should have told you about her.” The hand slid down my arm and found my hand, which he brought to his lips, and kissed.
His apology and its attendant admission was more painful than a denial would have been. “So it’s true?”
“Yes. Her name was Lily, and I loved her.”
Another wave of pain crushed my chest.
“I loved her,” he sa
id again. “But not like I love you.”
And here, my breath ceased. Only when the pounding of my own oxygen-starved heart grew deafening in my ears did I take the next breath. “You love me?”
“Hanna, how could you not know that?”
Muffled voices filtered up from the great hall below. Was the party still going? How long had I slept?
“You’ve never said it before. Not even when—”
He pressed a finger against my lips. “Shhh. You know how I am. How hard it is for me to express my feelings.”
“Of course I know how you are,” I whispered. “But I didn’t know that you knew.”
His reply was anything but playful. “Of course I know. I want to tell you everything, Hanna. I do. But it will take time.”
“Time is okay, Mark. Finding this shit out from Nero’s creepy manservant is not.” I pulled away from him, as much to recover my wits as to communicate my displeasure.
“Which one?” he asked.
“Klaud.” I shuddered.
“Not Crixus?” Mark’s lips brushed the back of my neck, eliciting a shudder of an entirely different kind.
The blush sizzling to my cheeks at the mention of that name had me grateful for the dark. “What about him?”
“Did you like it when he made you come?”
A little bubble of panic rose in my chest. “It was an accident,” I insisted. “I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mark said, tracing my earlobe with his tongue. “He has that effect on women.”
“What is he, anyway?” I asked, somewhat alarmed that Mark wasn’t more upset about this.
“Many things. A demigod. A Roman gladiator. Most recently, the stakes in a blood oath sworn to Nero.” His lips found mine in the darkness. The tongue that had been seductive and gentle moments earlier now invaded as fiercely as any Roman legion. He groaned into my mouth as he shoved a hand down my corset, pulling my breast free. He rubbed a rough thumb over the nipple, swallowing my moan.
He threw his leg over mine, capturing my ankle with his heel to slide my legs open. The gown rustled in the darkness as he pulled the fabric upward, Gathering it in his hand. Cool currents of air slid up my bare legs followed by his fingers. He found the waistband of my panties and slid under them.
“So soft,” he growled against my lips, before biting one, and then the other. “So beautiful. Even better than I imagined.”
I stopped short, planting a hand against his chest. “What did you say?”
He crushed his lips to mine in answer. An electrical current slid down my neck, through my heart, and followed every vein and blood vessel downward, where blood pooled and began to throb.
I fought against the sensation, even as fighting became yet more energy dedicated to the cause. “Stop,” I panted. “You’re...you’re not Mark. You’re...Crixus!”
The door to my room exploded open, the splintering boards making a crack like thunder cleaving the sky. If I had a cheese wedge for every time that happened lately…
Light pouring in from the hall revealed two silhouettes at once. Mark’s broad body, filling the doorway.
And Crixus, leaning over me on the bed a split second before he vanished. Like the Chesire Cat, the last thing to disappear was the ghost of his impish grin.
In a flurry of activity, Mark surged toward the bed as I pushed my dress down my legs and tugged the corset back into place. Rage burned in his amber eyes, twin flames in the half light. They caught the light in a thousand different ways daily, but never before had I actually seen them glow.
“Mark,” I said, hoping to snap whatever trance held him with the sound of my voice. “Mark, I thought it was you. He sounded like you. He felt like you!”
An arm snaked around my chest and I was flying backward into darkness. The hand clasped over my mouth trapped the scream in my throat. I thrashed within a world without sound, feeling air surge over my skin as my body hurtled through space. We crashed through a door and up a set of spiral stairs to a place I had never been before—Castle Abernathy’s attic.
Thrown to a mattress, my body sent a cloud of dust up toward the exposed wooden rafters. Ghosts of paintings, sculptures, old furniture lurked in the shadows created by the light of the full moon through the dust-caked windows. I squinted through silvery wash to find the glowing amber eyes of my captor. A mockery of the setting sun’s glory set in a face I knew, and didn’t know.
Mark, but not Mark.
Mark’s face, Mark’s body, but an animal’s instinct.
The words came, but I didn’t speak them. They would not be heeded.
Hands gripped my ankles and pulled me to my back. Teeth bared, he caught my hands and pinned them to the mattress above my head as he brought his full weight down on me. Springs pressed into my back as the mattress groaned beneath us. Mark’s face hovered above mine like the specter of every sinful dream I’d barred from the light of day. He held my gaze, even as his powerful thighs forced my knees apart. Both wrists fit easily in the grasp of his one, large hand, which he brought down against my stomach, freeing him to move lower.
With his wide shoulders between my legs, I could do naught as his face slid up my thigh. He found my panties beneath the flared skirt of my dress with a grunt of pleasure. Heat from his breath bloomed on my skin where he rubbed his nose and mouth against me through the silky fabric. Vibrations tingled through me as he hummed a mixture of approval and hunger.
He nudged my sensitive flesh, nipping at me, letting his tongue dampen the fabric where he amplified my scent by the addition of a secondary sense.
Terrific heaviness gathered beneath my bound hands, drawing in its wake a rush of moisture. A rough, low growl erupted from Mark and I was in motion again, shoved face down on the mattress. He jerked my hips upward, backward. My panties gave way with a brief sigh of protest as they were rent in two and tossed aside. I felt the crisp material of my skirt shoved up my back and the silken slide of Mark’s hair as he shoved his head through my thighs. His neck turned at an owlish angle beneath me as hands dug into my hips to open me to him.
His tongue was rough. His lips were smooth.
Sandpaper and silk, working in concert to wrench the sanity from me in controlled undulations and feather light flicks.
I forgot to fight.
Delicious friction caught fire on my flesh. His tongue was unnatural in its control, unyielding in its punishment, unhurried in its exploration. A gasp tore from my throat as the cupped tip began a relentless circle around, but not on, the place that throbbed in time with my heart’s erratic song of want. Fingers trailed the curve of my hips, finding the flesh made slick by the combined efforts of tongue and time.
He split me with the length of his middle finger and fastened his mouth around me in one concerted stroke. My back arched away from the sudden, intense onslaught even as my cry of pleasure echoed through the darkening attic. He gripped my dress, holding me fast, even as he shoved his hand harder against me, driving his finger deeper, lifting me with the force of his thrust. I felt myself contract around him, a shockwave warning of the coming storm. His pace catapulted from hungry to savage, his palm abrading sensitive folds of flesh as hands that had killed on my behalf now sought to cripple me with pleasure.
Unable to move with its own undoing, my body shot the pleasure up my spine where it erupted outward in a ragged scream. Head thrown back, fingers tearing into the mattress, I felt a final searing rush between my thighs.
Chapter 17
“You are going to be the death of me.” Mark stared toward the ceiling overhead, unblinking. His words were neither expression nor hyperbole.
“That’s less than flattering.” It was an effort to force levity into my voice. In our shared silence, I’d been drowning in unwelcome revelations. Crixus had apologized to me. Crixus had told me he loved me. Not Mark. What little comfort those words brought had been torn away with my panties. Stripped from me along with any hope for resolution.
Two beings sharing the same space, and occasional pleasure, but nothing more. Worse than that. Combatants with opposing sets of neuroses. The living illustration for the intersection of weakness.
“What do you want from me, Hanna?”
I sat up on the mattress and tucked my knees under the shredded remains of my skirt. “Rhetorically speaking, or is this an actual invitation?”
Mark did not rise, remaining prone as he stared at the ceiling. “Actual invitation.”
Love?
I swatted the word away as quickly as it had arrived.
Love was not something I was willing to ask for.
“I want the whole story. My whole story. Just when I think there’s solid ground to build on, it crumbles, and I learn I have further to fall. I’m tired of falling. I’d rather it was just as bad as it can be. That would be somewhere to start, at least.”
“It’s not just your story, Hanna. It’s my story. The story of people long dead and gone, and others still living in danger. You have no more claim to it than anyone else. You’re not the only one I’ve made promises to.”
“You mean her?” A childish tactic, I knew, and told more than I intended of hurt feelings and jealousy.
Mark sat up. After re-buttoning and buckling his clothes, he grabbed my wrist, hauling me to my feet. “Come on,” he ordered.
“Where are we going?” Digging my heels in to slow the progress would do no good, so I let him tug me over to a corner of the vast attic where he flipped a switch, bathing those dusty environs in a rosy glow. Directly in front of us, a spiral stair climbed up to a loft, where shapes obscured by old sheets gathered like a congregation of ghosts. Dust muted all the objects like the fine sprinkling of snow.
Save for one spot.
“Look,” Mark said, holding an open-palmed hand toward the one sheet puddled on the floor.
I walked past him toward a painting leaning up against the broad silhouette of an armoire or portmanteau.
Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Page 17