Page 240 of Marked By His Hunger
And tonight—one of them moved.
The moon was too bright.
Too close.
Too aware.
I narrowed my gaze.
Then I felt it.
Not hunger.
Not curse.
Blood.
Divine.
Silver and cold and sharp as a blade across winter ice.
I knew that power.
Had fought beside it once.
Long ago.
“Ivan,” I muttered.
The air before me fractured—not violently, but deliberately—and a tall figure stepped through the seam in reality like he owned the concept of crossing worlds.
He was pale in the way moonlight is pale—luminous, not weak.
Hair like spun frost. Eyes like liquid mercury. Runes glimmered faintly beneath his skin—not carved, but inherited.
Descendant of Máni.
Blood of the moon god.
He looked amused.
He always looked amused.
“Well,” Ivan drawled, hands sliding into the pockets of a dark coat that seemed stitched from shadow and starlight, “I leave you unattended for a few decades, and you go and break an ancestral curse.”
“I did not break it.”
He smirked slightly.
“Of course not. You found a girl.”
I did not correct him.
Because he was not wrong.
His silver gaze drifted past me, into the chamber behind.
Toward Serena.
