Tempted by a Rogue Prince (21 page)

All the centuries after that prediction had been given to him, Vail had thought it to mean he would go crazy over her, not be insane when he met her.

When Kordula had used that prediction to spring her trap, he had lost all faith in it. He had spent millennia believing it had all been a trick devised by her kin to lure him to her so she could enslave him and attempt to steal control of his kingdom.

Vail cracked his eyes open and stared at Rosalind, deep into her eyes. Heat stirred behind his breast, warmth that eased his tired body and calmed his turbulent mind as it spread through his limbs. Peace.

Now, he believed in his prediction again, because she was standing before him, her dazzling blue eyes locked with his and filled with tender concern that triumphed over her fear, driving it back into the shadows of her heart.

He was insane, knew that without a doubt even though he despised admitting it and couldn’t bear to hear others say it about him, and now he had met a sorceress he recognised as his mate.

Perhaps everything he had been through and endured was so he could reach this moment, and had happened in order to bring them together in this dark place, but he wasn’t sure whether it had all been worth it.

He didn’t trust her, and he could never trust himself.

He didn’t understand her either.

She seemed troubled and refused to sleep. Why? He wanted to command her to tell him so he could do all in his power to help her, but she wouldn’t speak about it with him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what someone should do in this situation.

He might have once, but not now, not when everything that had once been normal for him and was normal for others was now alien and confusing, beyond his grasp.

He didn’t know how to be kind, or affectionate. He wasn’t sure how to encourage her to speak.

His only point of reference was Loren. He had watched over his brother whenever he was in the mortal realm with his ki’ara, Olivia. He had seen how they interacted with each other, a series of gentle touches constantly reaffirming their bond without them even knowing it. He had seen his brother’s love for his female, and his devotion, and his happiness.

He was glad Loren was happy, but that emotion felt foreign to Vail too. Unknown. It was something he was no longer capable of feeling.

He only knew the darker side of emotions. He knew pain and rage, fury and hatred. They filled him and ruled him, made him who he was now.

If everything he had suffered had been to bring him to this place at this exact time, to deliver him into the presence of his fated female, then perhaps it had also been for another reason too.

To bring Loren to his ki’ara.

It had taken a decades long hunt to find his brother’s fated female, and in that time Vail had secretly visited many male witches, seeking their knowledge to point him towards Loren’s future mate. Every visit had threatened to push him over the edge, had filled him with hatred as he had waited in their presence while they had used their magic to scry for Olivia.

Every visit had ended the same way, with him going out and killing in order to purge himself of his fury and his dark hungers. He had gorged himself on blood until he had come close to passing out, swallowed by his lust for it. It had awakened an addiction that he fought to this day, a terrible thirst for blood that would send him into the arms of the darkness that lived within him if he gave into it.

That addiction had been the sign that had opened his eyes to how close he was to becoming one of the tainted and he fought it as best he could, a part of him unwilling to surrender to it and the fate that awaited him.

He would become a savage beast, his powers fading with each life he stole during his rages, with every soul he consumed as he drank its host dry. He would become something worse than a vampire—one of the very creatures who had fathered that species.

One of the tainted his brother and he had left behind in the mortal world when they had withdrawn the elves to this realm to save them all from such a dark and terrible fate.

No elf desired such a thing.

Not even him.

So he fought the beast within him that bayed for blood and hungered for the kill, clinging to his pathetic existence and a shred of hope that he might somehow save himself or find death before the darkness consumed him forever.

His fangs itched at the thought of blood and he glanced at Rosalind’s neck.

His markings flared into existence, a hot prickly flush that chased across his skin and illuminated the darkness as they shone through the scales of his armour, throwing colours across her face.

He hungered for another taste of her. The thought of biting her stirred more than his hunger though. It stirred desire in his veins, a powerful need to place his hands on her hips and draw her slender body against his, until he could feel her breasts pressing against his chest and could capture her mouth with his. His blood caught fire, the intense heat rising rapidly and blazing through him, an inferno only she could quell.

The dark beast within him snarled and railed against that dangerous desire, and Vail staggered back a step, horrified by what he had wanted to do.

He could not touch the witch.

He felt the ghostly press of her hands on his flesh, saw the cell around him again and her above him, her blue eyes roaming his body as she touched him.

Laid her hands on his body.

Her bare flesh against his.

Vail turned his back on her and struggled to focus on something else, anything other than the press of her warm hands on his skin.

He reached for the bond with his brother, needing the calm that flowed through him whenever he opened it, washing him clean of his sins for an all too brief span of time.

The tiny remnant of the man he had once been, a man who felt more like a ghost to him now or an illusion of a life he never had, turned against him and whispered that he didn’t deserve Rosalind.

She was too bright to look at, too beautiful and pure, and he was ugly and tainted, darkness made flesh.

On the verge of a descent into a black abyss from which he could never return.

She had felt that inside him through their bond. She knew how wretched he was and how close to the edge, that he was holding on with just the tips of his claws, in danger of becoming little more than an animal, like so many elves before him.

“Vail?” she whispered and he snarled over his shoulder at her, needing her away from him.

“Leave me.” He staggered forwards a few steps and his right shoulder hit the jagged black wall of the canyon.

He wanted her to leave, hoped she would never turn back and would slip out of his wretched life, safe away from him, even though she was more vital to him than air and he would die without her.

He could bear the pain of his memories and the weight of his sins, but he couldn’t bear her being gone. He couldn’t bear knowing he would never see her again, would never bathe in her light and sense her sweet emotions, or be blessed by her smile. It stole the breath from his lungs and squeezed his heart in his chest.

He growled and clutched at the obsidian stones, pressing his claws in deep, the pain in his heart eclipsing that in his fingertips as he fought the fierce need to grab her wrist and pull her into his arms, to hold her and press her close, and refuse to let her go.

She had bewitched him completely, but he feared this wasn’t a spell. This was something infinitely more dangerous.

Something that drove him mad with a need to spurn her at the same time as he needed to hold on to her.

Her magic swirled around him, stronger now, warning of her proximity and that she had ignored his request to leave him alone. Joy battled despair, a sliver of affection fought the overwhelming force of hatred, and all combined to claw at his limbs and pull him deeper into the darkness.

He clung to the cliff face, fearing he would harm her if he loosened his grip. He tried to fight the darkness back but it was too strong. He had refused to fight it, had wanted it to consume him and end his existence, and now that he wanted to overcome it, it was too late.

He chanted a protective charm beneath his breath as images crashed together in the black of his mind, a mash of Kordula and Rosalind, blending together until his memories became warped and he couldn’t distinguish between what had really happened and what was a lie constructed by the madness infesting him.

Little Wild Rose had never punished him, but a vision of her looming over him, black claws poised to strike and cleave his bare flesh, played out in his mind. She laughed, the mocking sound grating on his pride, tearing it to pieces, as he cried out his agony. Each searing laceration stole his breath, the pain so intense that black spots winked across his vision and she distorted, wobbling above him. She flicked her blonde hair over her shoulder and it turned red like blood, dripping over her bare breasts.

She leaned over him, her blue eyes holding jagged patches of ice and crimson, and her red lips parted as she pressed her hands into his chest, pushing him onto his back.

He tried to growl at her, tried to fight and shove her away, but he couldn’t move. Her hands roamed over him and she dipped her head and swept her lips in a trail across his skin that made it crawl. She lowered one hand, cupped and fondled him, purred as her magic poured over him, stealing command of his body.

Violating him.

A hand shackled his wrist and his claws scraped over stone, a black wall that loomed before him. Bile blazed up his throat and he bent over, emptying the pitiful contents of his stomach on the rocks. Rocks. Sharp as knives. Not a feathered mattress. What torture did she have in mind now?

His stomach rebelled again, the feel of a hand on his wrist sending him deeper into twisted memories that overlaid onto the present.

He managed to look at the delicate hand holding him. Not tipped with black nails. Dirty and small, and fair.

But it was touching him.

Spreading vile magic over his flesh together with heat that scorched him.

And her scent spoke of hunger and need.

Hunger that rose within him too.

He looked up at her and she laughed, a flash of white teeth between red lips, and twisted his arm, pinning his back to the jagged black wall so the sharp rocks bit into his naked flesh. She writhed against him, her power too strong for him to overcome, and then pressed the full length of her bare body into his and kissed him. Her taste flooded his mouth, a sickly sweet poison that drugged him into complying and shattered the last of his will.

Shudders wracked him and his throat burned until he gagged and shoved her away. He bent over and vomited again, his whole body heaving as he tried to expel her toxic taste. Cold sweat trickled over his skin, no longer bare but covered with his armour. Armour that felt too tight and confining. He clawed at it, his throat burning and tightening, desperate to get it off him. His knees shook, muscles turning to water as he retched again and again, bringing nothing up.

His legs gave out and he collapsed onto the black ground.

What had she done to him?

He had commanded legions. He had run a kingdom. He had scored countless victories on the battlefield. He had been strong and powerful. A prince.

She had stripped all of that from him, leaving him weak, scarred and broken. A pathetic creature. He lost his mind when he needed it most and retained it when it only offered him pain, a terrifying replay of four thousand years of that woman’s touch, of claws scraping, teeth nipping, palms kneading and fingers stroking.

A hand encircled his wrist.

Restraining him.

Vail yanked his arm away from her, rising at the same time and stumbling onto his feet. He turned on her and snarled when he saw Kordula before him.

“Vail.” Her sweet sing-song voice cranked his fury up to startling heights.

He wouldn’t let her cast a spell on him. He would kill her. He would put an end to her and she would never be able to hurt him again.

He laughed and launched himself at her, his claws ready to sink into her flesh. A male appeared between them, a handsome fae who pulled her out of the path of his blow, leaving him clawing at thin air. The fae brandished a sword, pointing it at him.

Vail would kill the male too.

He turned on them and bared his fangs.

“Rosalind, keep back,” the male said.

Vail staggered backwards, those words hitting him like a physical blow, and fell against the rocky cliff face.

He stared wide-eyed at the witch.

Not Kordula.

Rosalind stared back at him, her eyes enormous and her fear flooding the link between them.

Vail looked down at his hands where they clutched the cragged stones behind him, at the black serrated claws that covered his fingers, weapons he had come dangerously close to using on her. He lifted his gaze back to her, and then shifted it to her right, to the incubus male who was still touching her, grasping her upper arm.

Laying his fingers on her bare flesh.

Darkness descended again, filling him with a fierce need to tear the male away from her and gut him.

A flicker of understanding crossed the witch’s face and she pulled free of the male’s grip, and advanced a step towards Vail.

“Vail?” she said softly, her gentle voice calming one part of him while it enraged another, his dual natures tearing him between giving his female what she desired by stepping towards her and slashing his claws across her throat before she could utter a spell to pull him back under her command.

He pressed back against the wall, despair rushing through him as his heart pounded hard against his ribs, driven by the fear that he would harm his Little Wild Rose.

He did the only thing he could to spare himself, and her.

He teleported.

R
osalind stared at the place where Vail had been and was now gone, disappeared out of her life. She didn’t know what to do, or how to combat the sudden emptiness inside her, a space that he had filled in her heart. He had shut her out again.

His behaviour had frightened her and she knew that he had sensed it through their bond, and she had tried to fight her fear for that reason, not wanting him to believe that she was afraid of him or she thought him a monster. He had caught her off guard though, his demeanour changing abruptly and his eyes gaining a crazed and dangerous edge as his power had risen.