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He closes the distance between us and his hands grip my arms. ‘No. And if I cannot compel you into rest, then I will fucking choke you.’
It’s absurd and thrilling that I know this magnificent creature enough to know it’s the last thing he’ll do. ‘I need my voice back.’
‘You have your voice. Do not… do not take it away from me,’ he rasps, and the words tremble.
Now I stumble, my hand landing on his chest. ‘No.’ My laugh scrapes raw. ‘Don’t you see? I only have the voice Selphine allows me to use.’
His expression changes. The fury comes back, but it’s aimed beyond me now. Through me. At a witch who’s not here to bleed for it.
‘Then I will find her. I will break her work, take every answer from her mouth and feed what remains to the Glass. You do not need to tear yourself apart for a truth I can wait to hear.’
‘You can’t wait.’ His eyes flare as I look at the mark crawling up his throat. ‘You’re running out of time.’
‘That is of little concern.’
‘We both know that’s not true.’
His jaw turns to marble, and we stare at each other, words striking the bond with the force of everything we’re not saying.
His power rolls through the room. The Glass answers, shrieking softly in a voice like glass dragged over bone. The younger reflection in the shard flickers. The woman I was. The girl I killed to survive.
I look at her. Then at him. ‘You told me once that blood knows.’
His face twists harder in agony. ‘Eira.’
‘It knows, doesn’t it?’ My voice shakes now, and I hate that, but I keep speaking. ‘Yours. Mine. The Tower. The curse. The fucking mirror. Everyone and everything keeps circling this like if we wait long enough someone else will force it out.’
He pulls me closer. I move back again, then out of his arms completely. And it says a lot that the vampire with a hundred times my strength still lets me go, his eyes burning, tracking my every move.
‘Stay there.’
His face darkens. ‘No. Do not ask me to stand aside and watch you bleed.’
‘I’m not asking.’
‘Then you are mistaken about who is in command.’
The old arrogance should enrage me. And it does. But beneath it, his terror burns so brightly that all I feel is the terrible ache of being cared for by a creature who learned love in the language of ownership. ‘You can’t command this,’ I whisper.
‘Wrong. I can command many things.’
‘Not this.’
He flinches. Because some part of him knows. Not the answer but the shape of it. The approaching ruin. ‘You do not know what you are saying.’
‘On the contrary, vampire, I know exactly what I’m trying to say.’
‘No.’ He advances another step, slower now, as if approaching a wounded animal or a bomb. ‘No, you know what Selphine’s spell is allowing you to think. You know pain. Panic. Guilt. You think martyrdom is choice because the old witch dressed manipulation in protection and called it care.’
My eyes burn. ‘Maybe. Or maybe I’m done letting everyone else decide when I get to be honest.’
Blood drips onto the floor and the sound is obscene in the quiet.
Valentin’s gaze drops to it, and something raw and shattered moves across his face. ‘Enough, Eira… tesoro, enough.’
‘No—’
‘I said enough!’
