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“Keep searching, asshole,” Vesper rumbles darkly in the quiet spaces of our shared mind, his fangs sliding out of my skin with a wet, agonizing pull. “Bellamy is mine now, and you’ll never fucking touch what’s mine.”
Gregory shines his light directly at the gate once more, his eyes passing right through us. Before they can turn away, I drop to my knees. A sharp gasp escapes Vesper’s lips as his crimson eyes flare violently, glowing like open flames against the night. “What are you doing?”
Rather than replying with words, I unzip his pants and pull out his throbbing cock.
Right there, illuminated by the pale moonlight and the blood-red glow of his eyes, I catch the wicked, sexy glint of a piercing. Holy fucking shit. Vesper’s cockhead is pierced.
I wrap my lips around his thick girth, moaning at the taste of his precum. I don’t bother holding back. I go to fucking town, sucking and swirling my tongue with a feverish need. Pleasure and shock vibrate across our brand-new bond. It’s only then that I realize I feel his pleasure as if it were my own. That shared overload drives me completely insane, leaving me intoxicated with pure lust.
It’s too much.
Too intoxicating.
Too filthy.
Too consuming.
One more flick of the tongue, and we both crash together, my body pulsing into a second, blinding climax.
Vesper jerks me upright by my waist and pulls me into a hard, desperate kiss. His tongue tangles with mine, sharp and greedy, his flavor unmistakable on my tongue.
I lean limply in Vesper’s arms, my chest heaving, my neck throbbing with the sharp sting of his bite. A physical reminder of what we just did. Off in the distance, Gregory and Jake make their way down the ridge.
Vesper wraps his wolf pelt around me and presses a lingering, possessive kiss directly over the fresh wound, his low voice a vicious promise against my ear. “You’re claimed now, little bird,” he whispers, his hands tightening around my waist as he lifts me effortlessly before melting the two of us into the shadows.
Glowing blue eyes trail after us. Warmth begins filling that hollow ache in my heart. I burrow my face deeper against Vesper’s chest. What the fuck did I just do? And why the hell am I so happy about it?
Chapter thirteen
Bellamy
Exhaustion hits as I sink into a deep sleep, but the usual nightmares I expect never come. Instead, my mind is ripped away from the manor, dragged backward through time and space into a memory that doesn’t belong to me.
I’m standing at a desolate, abandoned dirt crossroads where rain pours from an amber sky, and the air tastes of ash. Through Vesper’s eyes, I see a ruined, jagged archway of obsidian stone, and chained within it, a creature of nightmares. The cryptid. It’s massive and clearly half-starved. But rather than fur rippling with shadows, the Devil Dog’s coat is solid, matching the same ash-gray color of Vesper’s wolf pelt. It thrashes in agony, its glowing blue eyes dimming and growing almost lifeless against the dark.
Not only do I see the beast, but I can also sense what Vesper felt in that exact, agonizing second.
A crushing, suffocating wave of soul-deep loneliness. A lifetime of isolation, of being hunted, of knowing what it means to be locked away in a cage by a world that fears your power. A life’s worth of memories slam into me. The way Vesper was abandoned in the demon court. His own family betraying him. The torture. The regret.
I stumble back, clutching my chest and gasping for breath. Is this why we’re so drawn to each other? Are we just two kindred souls searching for someone who is willing to care? No…not two souls, but three.
Vesper’s thoughts cut through that vast, aching void with a fierce surge of determination. “I will never let you suffer alone again. I bind my soul to yours. No matter what, little cryptid, you aren’t dying here tonight.”
The memory changes, swirling past certain memories as if searching for something specific.
There.
The memory shifts, not in human thoughts, or thoughts of a demon, but in the aching pulse of the beast. It’s no longer flesh and blood but made of shadows. Adapting to what life is like after Vesper saved it.
Three years. Three years of shadow and chain, three years since the blue demon bound its wild soul to the beast. The tether burns, constant and deep, but tonight, the forest air carries something far sweeter than infernal magic.
Sugar. Flowers. Fire smoke. Ocean air.
The Devil Dog moves through the woods without a sound, its heavy paws crushing pine needles. Then the scent hits its snout, sharp and magnetic. A signature that vibrates straight through its bound ribs.
Important. Sacred.
Through the dense brush, a small campfire flickers. Sitting on a fallen log is a tiny, fragile figure. A ten-year-old boy. The child’s skin is pale in the firelight. Tiny. He stands, leaving the campfire and wandering into the woods.
