Page 54 of Hunted

This time, he doesn’t hold me. And I drop alone through open air, the city racing upward, eager to swallow me whole.

I expect terror. Instead, clarity arrives. A strange, quiet awareness that even in descent, something binds us.

He appears beside me midair, matching my fall without effort. His eyes are pinned on me, not the ground. Darker now, stripped of silver, almost human in their intensity.

And what lives inside them is not possession.

It is hunger.

For blood, yes.

But for something deeper too. Something that could rewrite a soul.

‘I should’ve claimed you that night,’ he says, his voice rough with fury and regret.

The words echo as the pulse burns hotter, the thread between us tightening hard enough to split bone.

I reach towards him, disconcerted by the hunger burning through me.

To touch.

To stroke.

Holy fucking fuck.

To yield.

The instant our hands meet, the air fractures around us, the city dissolving into darkness that feels less like absence and more like waiting.

And somewhere above me, in a tower of black glass and ancient blood, something stirs in response.

Valentin

Sleep does not take me gently.

Unsurprisingly.

The mark burns beneath my skin as I lie in darkness, not enough to wound, but enough to remind me that time is no longer theoretical.

It is moving. Towards me. Towards her.

I do not intend to dream but the dream finds me anyway.

It begins with a door.

Lyra’s bedroom.

Old wood. Moonlight. A threshold I crossed once and should have claimed entirely.

She stands by the window, dark hair loose around her shoulders, youth and defiance braided through the line of her spine. I remember this room with cruel clarity. The scent of her fear. The tremor beneath her pride. The way she looked at me as though I were both executioner and answer.

‘I gave you time,’ I hear myself say. My voice, but wrong. Less controlled. More exposed.

She turns, and there is no submission in her eyes. Only fire. ‘You don’t own me.’

The words strike harder than they did that night, the mark pulsing as the room tears open.

Bedroom becomes rooftop… Moonlight becomes city glare.