“It’s not deliberate.” He turns, and he’s erect. It tents my cloak out, and if I survive this catastrophe, I’ll have to burn it or I fear I’ll sleep wrapped in it. “I’m forced to lie with the female who comes to me, and with each coupling she is absorbed.”
“Until…” I trail off, tension vibrating through me.
“Until she’s nothing.”
I harden the walls around my heart. I don’t understand. I don’t.
“Yes, you do.”
“Get out of my head,” I growl.
He laughs, and I’m not sure I’ve heard a sadder sound. “Then do a better job of keeping me out. Your thoughts shout so loud they might split the night in two.”
I swallow. “You’re taking what doesn’t belong to you.”
“Some might escape a life they don’t want, and others…”
“You take them.” I look at that handsome face, carved perfection in moonlight. “Each one?—”
“Yes,” he says. He turns back, coming to the dais, and runs his fingers along it. “I try to take the willing, or the ones who seek to manipulate another’s heart.”
Those last words cut deep into me for reasons I don’t understand. Just like I don’t understand how I can feel the weight of wings on my back neither of us have.
“A lost love is a loss everyone shares,” I say. “It’s a risk, to offer your heart to another, Rowan. It can always end badly or bring immense joy to your life. You shouldn’t be the judge of that.”
He stops, eyes seeming to glow as he takes me in. “I don’t want to be. I’ve done what I need to survive.”
“How can you live with yourself?”
“You’re a child,” he says, loathing thick in the air. “You know nothing of love or loss.”
But he’s wrong. I lost my parents. I know that pain. I gave up a world of possibilities for the discipline of the Order.
My point remains. His loss and curse shouldn’t stain our part of the world.
“Or punishment.” He stares at me, but I get that, too. That’s why I’m here, and what would’ve been a marriage to Solarre’s pig of a son.
Rowan frowns, but either doesn’t read the thought or ignores it.
“And what would you do, if you were cursed like me?” he asks.
“Die.”
“I see.”
I can breathe in that sweet scent like honey that’s all him, and once more, my loins pull and the urge to lose myself in temptation fills me. I swallow again. I have to get rid of him. I must. Apart from it being my job, it’s right.
“Then why don’t you just kill yourself?” He approaches me slowly and reaches his hand out. I’m frozen in place. “It would stop my heart as well. And your mission will have been successful. Your village will see you as a hero.”
Rowan’s fingers dance light and electric over the skin of my cheek, and he shudders a sigh.
“Do you know how much I’ve longed to touch and not take?” His words are mine as they weave through me, and I want to sink down into them, lower to my knees and take him down with me.
“Do you know?”His voice bounces around my head.
Too long…I answer internally, answering the question for myself as well.
“To feel the warm silky skin of a woman without the fear, the need to devour…”