The hot tension that was swiftly growing between us begins to evaporate in the cool night. Yes, he’s lightning, and I’m tinder. One spark too close and I’ll be done for. I’ll burn away, and all that will be left is this insatiable need to collapse the space between us into nothing.
“Well?” I demand, not allowing myself to lose focus. “What happens to us and our arrangement if we can’t break the curse?”
“I don’t know,” he admits.
“You don’t know because you don’t want to? Or because you don’t understand the magic that binds us?” I finally turn to face him and I wish I hadn’t. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen the brief flash of pain across his face. I wouldn’t have seen him swallow thickly. But I still would’ve felt the uncertainty, and that would’ve been enough. “You wouldn’t release me,” I whisper.
He is silent for a painfully long time. “Having a forge maiden here could prove useful.”
“I would never make anything for you again,” I swear.
“Keeping you from Hunter’s Hamlet, disrupting your family line, it could save generations of awakenings to come.” The words are uncharacteristically cruel. I can see from his expression that he doesn’t mean them. Yet, they still deal a glancing blow.
“You wouldn’t make a difference, keeping me here. My mother would teach someone else. My family line runs long. But we’re not so proud as to let the one thing keeping Hunter’s Hamlet from being overrun by vampir die with us. We’re too determined to survive for that.”
“Determined to survive,” he repeats with purpose, approaching. “Yes, you are a stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“You like me that way.” I speak before I can second-guess myself.
“I do.” He speaks so quickly that I know he hasn’t given much thought to the words, much less the sentiment behind them. My heart begins to race. The world narrows once more, focused only on him. On the vampir leisurely stalking toward me. As if he intends to devour me whole.
“Y-You do?” I take a step back and bump into a table; he has me cornered. The side of his mouth quirks up slightly. “Why?”
He tilts his head, assessing me, as if he’s still trying to find the answer to this question himself. “You…” The word hovers.
“Me?”
“I find you…intriguing.”
I can’t stop a burst of laughter. “Intriguing?” I repeat. “I intrigue you?”
“Yes, and I want to know you better. I want to see all the bits and parts of you.”
“I’m not a tool that you can inspect and use however you want.” I use Ventos’s word from earlier. That’s one thing I do know, I realize. Despite all my uncertainty surrounding my future, I know I never want to be seen as a tool or a trophy ever again. No matter what happens here, or back at Hunter’s Hamlet, I refuse to allow it to happen.
“I don’t see you as a tool.”
“Just an amusement, then.” I stick out my chin, glaring up at him and fighting to ignore the stirring within me as he comes to a halt, toe-to-toe. I grip the stone table for support.
“‘Intriguing,’ I said,” he forces out of a tense jaw.
“Hardly a compliment.”
“The best compliment I could pay,” he counters. That silences me long enough for him to continue. “My world has been monotony. It has been torture, day after day. My family, gone. Everyone I ever knew, dead or lost.” He laughs with such bitterness that I can almost taste it on my tongue, drying out my mouth. “Even something as simple as eating…what I wouldn’t give for decent food. Not rations. Food. To sit and savor. The smallest things are torture. A torture I hoped I would never wake to see, and yet knew I would. Torture I hoped—still hope—to end. Your presence here has been the first thing to break the endlessness of this unyielding pain that I have known for my entire life. To bring a glimmer of warmth, of optimism. I’ve already accomplished the impossible with you at my side. Maybe I wouldn’t release this bloodsworn oath because I want to see what else we can do together. I’d want you to want that, too.”
As he speaks, small tingles rush across my body, like I’m sinking into a too-hot bath. It envelops me, rushing to my head. He doesn’t remove his eyes from mine and the world narrows on us together. There’s more to what he’s saying than the bloodsworn. I know it. This—all he is saying, this pain, it’s all real.
I open my mouth, but words don’t come. It sounds like he resents me and yet also pays me a compliment in the same breath. It sounds as if I am the last thing he really needs, but he desires me anyway. And I know he is all the same for me. He is nothing I needed, or expected, or even asked for. And yet…
He’s all I could’ve ever wanted. As loyal as I am to his cause. A fierce protector. A deeply flawed, skilled, beautiful creature.
“Please, tell me you’re lying.” It’s the only thing I can think of to say. The only thing that I want to beg to be true.
“I can’t lie to you; and I never would.”
“I wish you were,” I whisper.
A stress fracture rips through the tension between us at my words. His arms are freed. His hands slam against the table next to mine. I’m pinned between them, leaned back over the stone.