Page 83 of Lured By Shadows

“You’ve always had a sense for these things,” she murmured, her hand gripping the stone, fingers knuckled as though she held back her own demons. “The clouds are rolling in.”

I leaned back on my palms and tipped my face toward the sky, allowing the storm’s breath to scour my features with the indifference of tempests. The clouds churned low and heavy, swollen with violence, bruised and restless. They pressed down on the land as if the heavens themselves were impatient, mirroring the inexorable pull of fate drawing ever tighter around me.

Silence stretched between us.

“Restraining myself has been torment.” The admission left me as my tongue flicked over my fangs. “She is… tempting,” her essence a siren call resonating through the vault of my eternal solitude.

“Tempting? No, that’s too tame for what she is.” She glanced downward, flicking dust from her coat with languid fingers that betrayed nothing of her hunger. “If Rupert’s ramblings about Soroush hold any truth, then you, dear brother, are setting a new bar for restraint.”

A low sound escaped me. It wasn’t laughter, not quite a growl either.

I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, drawing in damp stone, old moss, and blood. And beneath it all, threaded through everything, was my Ira. The mate I craved and prayed into existence across barren centuries, a divine convergence that bound me with chains stronger than any forged in mortal fires.

I would never let her go. Just as I hoped she would do the same.

“Come,” Anna urged finally, her voice silk-wrapped steel. “Indulge a while longer. You’ll crave the power when you face her again.”

Her words curled around my heart like something inevitable.

I did not answer. I rose and stepped forward without hesitation.

The ninety-foot plunge swallowed me whole.

Wind screamed past my ears as the fall closed around my body, a violent communion with gravity that lasted only a breath before my boots struck the courtyard stones below. Flagstones shattered outward on impact, fractures spiderwebbing through ancient rock, but the force barely registered.

I rose smoothly, rolling my shoulders as if shaking off an inconvenience, and lifted my gaze to Anna’s silhouette high above, her form stark and crimson against the storm-torn sky.

To us, Caerwyn Castle was never a relic.

It was Mother’s domain, shaped by her will into something far removed from mortal curiosity. By day, it wore the mask of history. By night, it revealed itself for what it truly was.

Her gatherings were elaborate deceptions, illusions of refinement that dissolved the moment the doors closed.

Beneath them lay truth.

There was blood, excess, devotion, and hunger stripped bare. Romance twisted into something feral. Pleasure sharpened by danger.

I shoved open the massive oak doors, their hinges screaming like damned souls dragged from confession, and heat poured over me in a suffocating wave. The air clung thickly to my skin, heavy with sweat, blood, and the musk of bodies pressed together without restraint.

There was no music, not truly.

Only the low, relentless rhythm of flesh colliding, throats opening in surrender, hearts hammering themselves raw.

I moved through it all like a shadow given form, weaving through the throng with calculated precision. Bodies parted without thought, their minds too dulled by indulgence to recognize what passed among them. I inhaled deeply, the sharp bloom of arousal curling through the room, veins swollen with life, fear sweetening blood into something intoxicating.

It should have been enough. It wasn’t.

My fingers curled slowly into fists as the pressure inside me tightened. The chaos was meant to distract me, to scatter my focus. Instead, it sharpened what was missing, honing the edge of absence into something unbearable.

I did not crave the bodies surrounding me, their offerings pale echoes.

I craved distance from her pull, but in the same breath, I craved her close proximity.

The dilemma was overwhelming in its complexity.

I found Rupert before I had fully crossed the threshold, slumped on a crimson velvet chaise, his spine rigid, his jaw locked tight enough to splinter stone. Rage radiated off him in corrosive waves, his glare fixed on the writhing bodies before him as though their pleasure mocked something broken inside him.

“A beacon of joy,” I drawled, sinking beside him, the sprawl of naked flesh around us barely registering.