Page 13 of Claiming Starlight
Taking the shirt from him, her cheeks heated at the idea of undressing in front of him. “I don’t want to sleep with you. You can’t just touch me, tell me what to do. I need to go home, back to Hyde.”
“Hyde and the vampir? Them ice-fangs know you left their territory. They already have your punishment planned. You know that, right? May be best you stay here.”
She shook her head. “No. I have to get back. No one pays attention to me all day. I usually don’t break rules. I have to be there before Katya finds out I left.”
“You have a pass, don’t you? One of those plastic cards?”
She nodded, taking it out of the back pocket of her jeans. It was emergency vampir credit and identification all in one. She’d never used the credit—Sophie avoided debts to the archon—but the ID was necessary, protecting her from other vampir and their allies.
He didn’t touch it. “Turn it over. Look there, on the back, that thin raised spot. That is a tracker. They knew the minute you passed through their wards that you left Hyde.”
Familiar with the chimes of passing through wards, Sophie thought back to where she heard them while driving with the troll. There was so much utility magic out there that she thought nothing about it, but Micah was right—she heard the sound at least twice. However, the other thing made no sense. “This isn’t magical.”
His sensual mouth turned up at the corner. “No. It’s not. It has a magnetic frequency, coded to with all your information. The card is mundane red-blood stuff, only the wards are witchy.”
She couldn’t believe it. “They know already.” Sophie whispered.
His eyes were unrelenting, observing all her reactions. Seeing too much.
“Now you understand, don’t you, little girl? You get it?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Gimme’ words. You hear what I’m saying? They know you’re not where you should be.”
Sophie admitted it out loud. “I will be punished. Katya will be furious, and even though she was at the brood house, she’ll be punished too, because she didn’t control me better. When Alexi lost his virginity, the archon…” She let the words trail off, unable to say it.
The archon used his sorcerers for many things, torturous pain spells included.
“Yes. I just bet he blew a vein out when he got that news. Your brother disrupted the ordered plan. And so have you.”
Sophie suddenly felt exhausted.
“I’m not going to let you hide behind the vampir. Not gonna let the little lost girl hide from herself. It’s all truth here, all the time. You are in my territory, and I will do whatever the fuck I want to you. There is no one to stop me. No one. Baby has herself in quite the situation, doesn’t she? There is a big bad wolf that wants to eat her up.” He snapped his teeth at her. She jumped, her whole body clenching tight.
Wet dampened her panties.
Nostrils flaring, Micah sniffed the air. Sophie wanted to cry in shame. He didn’t miss anything. “Put the fucking t-shirt on, Sophie.”
He left.
Without another option, Sophie did what he said, changed out of everything.
The shirt felt big and loose and covered her to her knees. Underneath, her nipples were painfully tight and cold. She sat down on the toilet and tried to put off what was coming, refusing to move until Micah called her name again.
She knew she had to obey. It was inevitable.
She came out to find him sitting on the bed, shirtless, with his back to her. So much warm gold skin displayed just steps away, right there, all of it artfully marked up with tattoos. An ancient-faced sun on one shoulder and sea of stars on the other, with an old-fashioned scale set in between, the center iron of it lining up perfectly with his spine and naturally drawing her attention up. She knew she shouldn’t be looking, admiring. She should look away, but didn’t really want to.
She took a step closer. The light shifted, moving over bumps and valleys that shouldn’t exist like that on his back. Even the tattoos couldn’t hide the thickened lines of horrific scars spreading from the sturdy column of his neck to his narrow waist. The ink was good, unspelled as far as Sophie could tell, but there was only so much mundane ink could accomplish.
How did he get those? She thought shifters were impervious to lasting damage.
Turning at the sound of surprise she made that Sophie didn’t even realize she’d let slip, he treated her to the sight of more skin, more muscles, more tattoos.
Ethereal and full of mystery, his prime-of-life eyes lit up, returning her perusal. His nostrils flared, and he smirked. Apparently, he liked that she was uncomfortable.
This blue-blood shifter bothered her too much. Not a single person in all her life had made her feel like this man did. No human, no vampir, no blue-blood. No one. These feelings were new and explicit. Every nerve in her body tingled and pulsed with want for something she didn’t understand.
