Bought By the Manticore

My blood is a poison that eats me from the inside out. But to the starving manticore in the shadows, I am a feast.
I came to the city of the dead seeking salvation from the fatal sickness ravaging my body. To the monsters of Asphodelia, my affliction radiated pure death energy, and the bidding went feral. But my mortal shell failed before a mate could claim me, and I collapsed on the auction block.
Now, I am confined to the healer’s wing. The city’s magic refuses to let me pass on, yet it feeds the agonizing pain in my veins. I am trapped in an immortal limbo.
Until he finds me in the dark. Skaros.
A terrifying Manticore, unwoven by fate and trapped as a creeping, sentient vine. His endless, forbidden hunger for flesh should be a nightmare. But when his thorns slide beneath my skin, he doesn’t hurt me. He devours my illness. He drinks my pain.
In his grasp, I am not a fragile, broken thing to be pitied. I am treasured. Craved. Adored.
But my failed auction left me unclaimed, and the laws of the city are absolute: an unbonded human cannot stay. If the beast in the stone cannot find a way to tear himself from the earth and claim me as his own, Asphodelia will cast me out—and the sickness inside me will finally win.