Page 84 of Lured By Shadows

Rupert’s gaze never shifted. “Piss off,” he growled.

“You should have stayed with him,” I murmured, my stare dropping to the polished marble beneath our feet.

He barked a harsh laugh. “He despises me when I hover. You know that. If I’d stayed, he’d rage, slash at his wrists once more. Tempt fate again.”

Silence fell heavily between us, thick and unyielding.

I inhaled slowly and straightened, elbows braced on my thighs. “Enough games. At least drink something. You shall fade.”

His eyes flicked briefly to the abandoned crystal goblet by his boot, its rim crusted dark.

“It’s not his,” he rasped. “Sipping that would twist my gut. Everyone’s taste after consummating your mate never compares.”

My attention drifted despite myself, caught by a subtle shift deeper in the room. A woman arched between two lovers, her cries tearing from her throat as they claimed her from both sides, her body glistening with sweat and abandon.

It was savage. Beautiful in its own way. A raw enactment of desires that had echoed through the bacchanals of antiquity. It stirred nothing in me.

My hunger was singular, fixated upon the one essence that alone could sate the void within.

Ira’s name carved itself through me again, widening the ache no indulgence could fill, a territorial imprint binding her to the core of my existence.

I could see her too clearly.

Her image was etched with unbearable clarity upon the canvas of my mind. The subtle contours of her demeanor. The way she tried to hide worry behind sarcasm. The silence she left when she didn’t message, a void louder than any scream.

She owed me nothing. I knew that.

And yet her absence scraped against something vital inside me, a primal undercurrent coiled beneath layers of composure, threatening the delicate balance between devotion and dominion.

“You should join them,” Rupert said, venomous amusement curling through his voice. “Could help take the edge off that infernal hunger you’re experiencing.”

“No.” The word left me feeling sharp and final. “I want what is mine.”

“She’s back home,” he said softly, almost sing-songy. “Waiting for you. Maybe even wondering if you’ll come back to claim her... or if the danger in you will keep you away.”

Something inside me tightened with fury.

“I shall be different,” I said, more to myself than to him. “She will never fear me. I will be patient… gentle. She will come to me willingly, and she will want me.”

Rupert turned to me, his voice dropping into something old and cruel. “You’ll break her.”

My hand curled, nails digging into my palms until blood welled up. The blood was not mine but from the meal I had been feasting on prior. There was no pain, but it steadied me enough to hear him.

“You think I wanted to destroy him?” Rupert continued, eyes locked on mine, burning with a haunted fire. “You think I wanted to make him flinch at my touch, to see terror where there should have been passion? I love him. But it doesn’t matter. I’m a monster… and so are you.”

His lips parted in a wicked grin, shadows playing across his features. “When you fuck her, she’ll cry out in agony, not in pleasure. You’ll be too much. You’ll tear her apart from the inside. You’ll make her hate you.”

He wanted to wound me. And he did.

The words sliced through whatever fragile hope I guarded, prying into the part of me that dared to imagine softness with her. The part that believed restraint could spare her from the worst of what I was, a calculated faith weighed against the inexorable truths of my predatory lineage, where tenderness had often been the prelude to inevitable ruin.

Before I even knew I’d moved, my hand had fisted his vest and shoved him against the stone wall with a growl that ripped through me like thunder. It was primal and unrestrained, an eruption from depths coiled tighter than the serpents guarding forgotten tombs.

The stone groaned beneath his weight as I forced him down, my strength a testament to the fury boiling in my veins. I could have shattered the wall with his spine if I’d let instinct reign for half a breath longer.

The desire to do so hummed beneath my skin like static.

“Erase her from that filth you call imagination.”