Page 140 of Lured By Shadows

He met my gaze a second too late.

The movement of my hand was minimal, barely enough to disturb the sleeve of my coat, but it sent him flying across the room. His body smashed into the television with catastrophic force, glass exploding outward like shrapnel as circuitry burst and fizzled beneath him. The crash rang through the room like music, sharp and satisfying, and for one fleeting instant it almost soothed the savage burn clawing through my throat.

Then the blood followed.

It struck my senses in a violent wave: metallic, sharp, intoxicating. Even from these worthless bodies, the scent awakened my hunger, rage, and desperation. The leash I kept wrapped around myself strained brutally beneath the pressure, threads fraying one by one as the sight of Ira lying there dragged me closer and closer to the edge of losing myself entirely.

I had not tasted her. Not even once. My body had burned for her for months, every instinct inside me sharpened to the point of agony by wanting, but I had denied myself completely. And now she lay there sprawled across the mattress like something already lost, her warmth leeched from her limbs by chemicals, her voice stolen by fear.

My Ira.

My hands trembled as I bent toward her, not from weakness, but from the terrible strain of restraint. I lifted her into my arms as though she were made of glass, every movement unbearably careful despite the violence raging beneath my skin. Her body was cool. Her breaths were shallow. She weighed almost nothing, yet the emptiness of her weight gripped me tighter than any wound I had suffered in centuries. Rage clawed at the inside of my throat so viciously I could taste blood from where my fangs threatened to descend.

I had failed her.

Not because she defied me. Not because she tested me. But because I had been too careful. Too distant. Too consumed by terror over what I truly was. I told myself I was giving her time, giving her space, allowing her freedom to choose me willingly, but the truth underneath it was far uglier.

I was afraid.

Afraid that if she saw the monster lurking beneath my restraint, she would recoil from me in horror. So I watched her. Waited for her. Circled her like a starving thing pretending not to hunger.

I had spent years convincing myself I was nothing like Rupert. That his mistakes were not mine to repeat. But perhaps the difference was not the virtue I once believed it to be. Rupert controlled his soulmate. Soroush despised him for it, yet he lived untouched and unharmed. Mine lay drugged and limp in my arms while my restraint rotted around me like a failed prayer. And as that realization settled into the marrow of my bones, something inside me fractured beyond repair. The fragile illusion that I could love her gently split wide open beneath the weight of what nearly happened to her tonight.

As I carried her through the house, the air swam with stench: spilled alcohol, sweat soaked deep into the walls, cheap perfume thick enough to curdle the senses. Every mortal soul inside seemed to still as I passed. Their conversations faltered. Their eyes followed us in silence, instinctively recognizing something lethal moving among them, but I acknowledged none of them.

Except him. Carter.

He remained tangled around some vapid female, drunk on his own delusions, oblivious to the devastation unraveling around him. My gaze locked onto him across the room, and the beast inside me curled awake in anticipation. His scent was unmistakable, adolescent lust layered with deceit, spoiled from within by selfishness and cowardice.

He had not even noticed she was gone. Oh, he would, though.

I would ensure that everything he valued collapsed into ash between his fingers. He and the girl clinging to him would beg before it ended, and when they did, I would lean close enough for them to hear me whisper her name into their ears like a final sacrament.

Ira. It would be the last thing they ever heard.

The drive passed in suffocating silence. Every second stretched thin while I monitored her breathing, her pulse, and every sluggish shift of her body. I adjusted the mirror not for the road, but for her. I needed to see her chest rise with every breath. Needed proof she remained tethered to our world. The drugs still polluted her blood, stealing her strength molecule by molecule, and the thought of leaving her anywhere else tonight, of returning her to her mother’s home and pretending it had not scarred us both beyond repair, was unthinkable.

Taylor would ask questions. Questions that could not be answered without destroying everything. And even if they could, blame would settle exactly where it belonged.

On me.

I did not possess the patience for diplomacy tonight. Not when vengeance prowled so close beneath my skin. So I drove away from the wreckage of the party with Ira unconscious beside me, devastating even now in her fragility, and the decision settled itself with absolute certainty.

She would stay with me.

There would be no debate.

Distance was no longer something I trusted myself to give her.

When I finally laid her against my bed, the storm inside me did not quiet. It darkened. Deepened into something ancient and starving. But the instant her body touched my sheets, her scent unfurled through the room like smoke curling around my spine.

Hers. Only hers.

The lingering traces of alcohol and other males evaporated beneath the warmth of her natural scent, familiar enough to feel like madness itself.

I drew the covers over her with painstaking care, my fingers lingering near the hem of her sleeve as though even the small contact might tether me to sanity a little longer. Every violent instinct inside me strained toward the unfinished carnage I had left behind. The urge to return, to tear the creatures apart slowly and drown myself in the sound of their screams, pulsed through me with nauseating intensity.

But I could not. Not yet. Because if I surrendered to it now, I would not stop.