What did this mean?
She’d felt it before at certain times in her life. Especially when she walked the path of Silvane Forest. Like an otherworld whisper. She was close to the answer, to discovering the secret. One that held mighty power. Reaching out her palm to the heat, she tried to divine whatever mystery was glittering supernaturally in the fiery embers, somehow sending a line directly to her rapidly pounding heart.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
Remembering Lord Petrov’s tale of her birth celebration, of the white witch, of the hartstone, she knew it was connected to this supernatural stupor. Then the embers sparked wildly, crackling, sending up an eerie green flame that licked into the air in a straight line, snaking sinuously back and forth. A warning.
The tent flap crinkled, snapping her out of her trance. Just within the entry stood Gavril, his eyes cast to the ground. She stood slowly, sensing his unease.
“Gavril?”
His gaze shot to hers. She gasped. There was always a halo of emotional pain surrounding the quiet assassin Gavril. Mikhail had told her of some haunted past he still hurt from. But now, in his storm-blue eyes swirled a tempest of crippling physical pain. The knuckles in his fists were bone white.
“Gavril.” She rushed toward him. “Tell me. What has happened?”
Blood splotched his neck and soaked his dark shirt beneath his cloak, the pungent tang filling her nostrils.
“You’re hurt.”
She reached out to help him but stopped with her arms aloft. His head tilted to one side then the other in an unnerving movement, like a snake raising his head from the long grass, his eyes never leaving her.
She took a step back, realizing too late her danger. He was on her, twisting her body so her back was pressed to him, his hand clamped hard over her mouth, pinning her head to his chest. When he spoke in her ear, it was the voice of a man drowning in pain. It filled her so completely, tears pricked at her eyes as if it were bleeding into her own body. Her empathic senses quivering under such torturous pain.
“I’m s-sorry…my queen.”
Then he moved in a blur out into the cold, where the snowy gale howled in violence. She saw nothing as they flashed through the darkness, away from the camp. She couldn’t make out anything at this speed and in this storm, which seemed to breathe menace and violence, a pestilent air on the wind. Her hair, tangled by the gale, covered her eyes as Gavril held her in an iron-clad grip, speeding toward some unknown evil.
And yet, she knew what it was, who it was, before they even finally stopped on an outcropping of a cliff. Gavril halted so quickly she fell to her knees in the snow. He did the same but apparently of his own volition, as if in utter defeat, his chest heaving in great painful gulps of air.
They were in the foothills of the Novak Mountains, the northernmost point of Arkadia. Not far from the Glass Tower.
“Why have you brought me here?” she asked Gavril, whose shoulders slumped and head bowed.
Shadows materialized into men moving toward her on the snow-swept cliff. The largest of the figures sent her pulse racing in a maddening frenzy. He wore the pewter armor for battle, the red crest and black dragon emblazoned on the chest plate.
“No,” she gasped, looking up as he stopped before her.
“Yes.” King Dominik grinned in that feral way that had always given her shivers when he stalked her with those hungry eyes at royal assemblies. It wasn’t unknown to her that he’d watched her, tracked her like prey, even when she was betrothed to his brother. This man, this monster, obeyed no boundaries.
She was paralyzed, frozen from cold and fear, as he reached out and cupped her cheek roughly.
“Finally.” Even as the storm whipped around them, his black cloak billowing, he spoke in a low, commanding voice. “I like you on your knees, Vilhelmina. I’ll put you there often when we’re married.”
She jerked out of his grasp and glared at him as she rose to her feet, unsheathing her dagger beneath her cloak. She didn’t reach his shoulders, but she could aim well enough under his chin the way Mikhail had taught her, the way she’d killed that Legionnaire in the cottage in Silvane Forest.
“I will never marry you.” Disgust seeped from her every pore as she thrust up lightning-fast, his large hand clamping her wrist just as she nicked the underside of his chin.
He squeezed her wrist till she was forced to drop the dagger. His slash of a mouth broke into a cruel smile, canines thick and sharp. She flinched. His giant hand fisted in her hair at the back of her head as he pressed himself close. One of her hands flattened on his armor, cold and unyielding. The other grasped at his wrist, his ruthless hold stinging her scalp. She couldn’t look away from his eyes—those that had seen untold horrors done by his own hands. And would see more, she was sure of it.
He lowered his mouth almost to hers, his thunder-deep voice rumbling against her lips. “You’ll do whatever I want you to do, Princess.” He raised his brow in mocking surprise. “I mean, Queen Vilhelmina.”
Despite the sliver of dread and prickles of icy menace pouring through her veins, she glared back at him. “You have no idea what’s coming for you.”
Her dark prince.
He chuckled and pulled her head sharply to the right, finally dropping her wrist to clap his other beefy hand on her bottom.
“You have no idea what’s coming for you.”
“Ah!” She cried out at the stab of pain when he pulled hard at her scalp.
“You think I’m afraid of your little toy soldiers?” His mouth was at her ear. His tongue licked a slow line down her throat and back up. “You’re going to be my willing slave, Vilhelmina. Begging me on your knees nightly.” He scraped his sharp fangs down to her pulse.
“No!”
She struggled, powerless against a vampire as strong as him.
“Yes. Fight me, little dove. That feels so good.”
His rumbling laugh sent a spike of anger through her. She hauled back her hand and slapped him across his right cheek. Hard.
His expression darkened, hardened, shifted to more beast than man, his vampire eyes glowing like a burning comet.
“I think my bride needs to learn a lesson on who her master is.”
He opened his mouth wide and sank his fangs deep into her flesh, between shoulder and neck. She let out a choking scream, the pain so intense, sudden, violent. His elixir pumped hot and hard into her veins, flooding her, crippling her with his malevolent dominance and sinister control. Both her hands on his armored chest curled inward till she gouged her nails into her own palms.
He moaned as he suckled deep, his hand on her bottom squeezing and crushing their bodies together in some parody of a lover’s embrace. A tear finally slipped off her cheek, flaking to ice before it was swept away by the glacial wind.
“Please,” she whispered, the pain of his bite and elixir sending her to the brink of consciousness.