Moira didn’t dream. She simply dropped into a void and floated there. She had Hoyt to thank for the hours of peace, she thought as she began to wake. Hours of peace where she hadn’t seen a child’s face blurred together with that of a monster.
Now there was work to be done. The months of preparation had whittled down to days that could be counted in hours. While the vampire queen mourned, the queen of Geall would do whatever needed to be done next.
She stirred, sat up. And saw Cian sitting in the chair near the simmering fire.
“It’s still shy of dawn,” he said. “You could use more sleep.”
“I’ve had enough. How long have you watched over me?”
“I don’t count the time.” She’d slept like the dead, he thought now. He hadn’t counted the time, but he had counted her heartbeats.
“Your wounds?”
“Healing.”
“You’d have had fewer of them, but I was weak. I won’t be again.”
“I told you to go. Didn’t you trust me to deal with two of them, especially when one was
half my size? Less.”
She leaned back. “Clever of you to try to turn this into a matter of my trust in your fighting skills instead of my lack of spine.”
“If you’d had less spine and more sense, you’d have gone when I told you to.”
“Bollocks. The time for running is well done, and I would never have left you. I love you. I should have taken him with the sword, quickly. Instead, I wavered, and tried to find a way to drive him off so I wouldn’t be the one to end him. That moment of weakness could have cost us both. Believe me when I tell you it’s burned out of me.”
“And the misplaced guilt that goes with it?”
“May take a bit longer, but it won’t get in the way. We have only two days left. Two days.” She looked toward the window. “It’s quiet. This time just before dawn is quiet. She killed a young boy, and came to love what she’d made of it.”
“Yes. It doesn’t make either of them less of a monster.”
“Two days,” she said again, almost in a whisper. Something inside her was already dying. “You’ll go when this is done, if we win, if we don’t, you’ll go back through the Dance. I’ll never see you again, or touch you, or wake to find you’ve watched over me in the dark.”
“I’ll go,” was all he said.
“Will you come, hold me now, before the sun comes?”
He rose, went to her. Sitting beside her, he drew her against him so her head lay on his shoulder.
“Tell me you love me.”
“As I’ve loved nothing else.” He met her lips when she turned them to his.
“Touch me. Taste me.” She shifted so she lay over him, trembling body, seeking lips. “Take from me.”
What choice did he have? She was surrounding him, saturating his senses, stoking his needs till they burned. Offering as much as demanding as she pressed his lips to her breast.
“Take more. More and more.”
Her mouth was hot and desperate as she pulled away clothes, her teeth nipping at his jaw in sharp, quick bites while her breath shuddered.
She was alive now, burning and alive, with everything inside her rising, aching. How could she step back from this? The love, the heat, the life.
If she was destined to die in battle, then she’d accept it. But how could she live—day after day, night after night—without her heart?
She straddled him, taking him in, hips whipping as she fought to feel more, to take more. To know more.