Series: Lords of Rathe Series by Meagan Brandy
Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93354 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 373(@250wpm)___ 311(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93354 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 373(@250wpm)___ 311(@300wpm)
I’m fucking starved, aching for a fucking meal that will satisfy, knowing in the back of my mind nothing will.
Never again will I be satisfied by the taste of another, now that I’ve tasted what’s meant to be mine.
A low growl stirs in my chest.
No.
I fight back. She can’t be mine.
She’s not Gifted.
She will grow old.
She will die.
The Pixie jumps and I look down to find long, sharp claws have torn through my fingertips, shredding the skin there. Blood drips from the tips as the skin slowly heals itself around them, sealing them off into perfectly wrapped points.
I feel my brothers’ gaze on me because yeah, this is fucking new.
“Deveraux,” she breathes.
Deveraux. Not Knight or Sinner because she has no fucking clue whose chest her bare body is touching, no clue who she’s offering herself to. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t fucking care.
Creed steps up then, wrapping his fist in the Pixie’s short hair and giving it a little tug.
She moans and the sound has my lip curling.
Creed’s eyes find mine as he lowers his mouth to the left side of her neck, silently telling me to do the same. To get lost in the free pass before me and out of my fucking head.
I jerk closer until the girl’s naked body is flush against mine, dropping my lips to her neck. My teeth ache, so I press them into her artery and hot liquid erupts over my tongue.
My chest rumbles wildly and I fight a fucking scream when a sharp sting stabs into my fucking mind, like talons of a griffin digging into my skull, attempting to tear it from my body. I rip myself away with a gasp, stumbling from the group, from my brothers and the Pixie who tastes like rotten flesh. I trip over my own fucking feet, falling to my knees, and growl angrily as bile works its way up my throat.
I heave and spit and throw myself to my feet.
I hear my brothers coming, but I quickly snap my fingers and jump through the marbly haze, closing the portal before my brothers can jump through.
This is all her fucking fault.
I hate her.
I hate how fucking bad I need to see her.
Touch her.
Fucking taste her.
I’m not convinced the gods got it right, that they would gift me, a fucking Deveraux royal, with a weak little woman who will die some mundane death as humans do, but for now, that’s where I am.
At the mercy of a partial bond and everyone knows partial bonds make you fucking mad with need. Every kind of it, but the worst of it all is this unspeakable determination to protect and un-fucking-natural desire to love and earn love right back.
I don’t want to protect anyone but my blood.
I don’t have to earn anyone, and I don’t want to love.
I don’t even know how to love.
I love my brothers, yes, but this is not the same.
Nothing will ever be the same again, my mind screams, and I tell that bitch to shut the fuck up.
I will get to the bottom of this.
Figure out where the gods and fate went wrong.
But first, I need to set eyes on her.
No, I have to set eyes on her, like a weak bitch the deeper part of me, the part that’s almost clawed its way to the surface, has become.
That part of me is supposed to be demonic and cutthroat, painfully, unforgivingly fucking ruthless, yet it wants to crawl after a little nobody, and drop to its knees before her like she’s the superior being. She isn’t.
She’s destroying me by existing and I fucking hate her for it.
If only I wasn’t unequivocally obsessed with her, too…
Twenty-One
London
I’m deep down the fucking rabbit hole. Like…gone.
I locked myself in my room and scoured the internet, but people there are crazier than I feel, so I shut that shit down quick and stuck to the basics.
Harry fucking Potter.
I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I’m pretty sure that giant glowy thing Knight and creeper Knight stepped through was a portal of some sort. As in magic. Real fucking magic!
Tingles break across my skin, my fingers shaking at the thought, but I steady my wrist and finish putting on my mascara.
When finished, I toss everything into my bag and shove it back under the sink before gripping on to its edges.
I stare at my reflection, as I do for a moment each morning, usually wondering and waiting for a sign of significance to show itself, for answers to unknown questions to pop up and for my life to suddenly make half the sense Ben’s does to him.
Of course, that doesn’t happen, but there is something…different.
That hollow place that lived inside me as a child, the one I blocked out and pushed deep, deep down, it’s back, but it’s not the same. While it’s just as eager to find whatever the hell it’s been looking for, creating this knot of anxiousness behind my ribs, there’s also this strange softness there, almost like silk wrapped around a sleeping child. It’s almost as if my subconscious has been soothed; the overwhelming urgency I used to feel as a little girl gone, and in its place, patience. I don’t understand it, but I don’t understand a whole lot these days.