Page 47 of Marked By His Hunger
Not tempted.
Not distracted.
Undone.
It struck me like a blade through the spine—clean, precise, inevitable. One breath of her, carried on the storm as she crossed the threshold into Asgarheim, and something inside me shifted… aligned… recognized.
That this creature—this female from Earth—would be the cause of my absolute ruin.
There was no question.
No doubt.
Only certainty.
So I did the only thing I have ever done when faced with something I cannot control.
I withdrew.
I vanished.
I swore to remain apart. To bury myself deeper in shadow. To become nothing more than rumor and warning as she moved through the Institute unaware of the destruction she carried in her wake.
It should have been simple.
Isolation is my nature.
Distance is my discipline.
But discipline fractures under the right kind of pressure.
And she?—
She was pressure made flesh.
Days passed.
Or perhaps they dragged.
Time had always been a distant thing to me, measured more in hunger than in hours—but since her arrival, every moment stretched thin, sharp, unbearable.
She walked the halls.
And I followed.
Not openly.
Never that.
I kept to the shadows, slipping between torchlight and stone, a ghost of something darker, something far less merciful. I watched from archways, from rafters, from the blind corners where the Institute’s magic did not quite reach.
A predator without permission.
A creature without restraint.
A thing that should have fled.
Instead—
