Page 82 of Claimed

I’ve used grave-binds on bounties. Having them used on me burns in a place pride cannot reach. As does the memory of his face.

Valentin’s eyes.

I stop moving and slam my palm flat against the wall, breathing hard.

He didn’t listen.

That’s where my anger keeps returning, circling and gnawing. He shut himself off completely, mind and voice. Then he looked at me with that terrible stillness vampires get when rage has refined itself into something colder, cleaner and far more dangerous.

Maybe he had already decided what I was the moment Rowan spoke and every second after that was formality.

Or maybe I gave him no other place to stand.

I hate that thought enough to push away from the wall so hard my shoulder smarts.

Because yes, he demanded answers and I refused. He pressed. I resisted. He wanted truth, and I gave him Eira Cross with every knife out and every door locked. I lied by omission, by design, by survival. I sent him in circles while he hunted a woman I buried six years ago.

If our positions had been reversed, would I have restrained first and sorted morality out later?

The answer comes so fast I bare my teeth at the empty room.

No. I would’ve done it better. I would’ve kept my head. Asked the right questions. Followed the evidence instead of behaving like a blood-drunk tyrant dragged straight out of a fever dream.

Even as I think it, rot spreads through the argument.

Because I understand his fury. I just don’t forgive it.

That is the part clawing at me now. He put me here, and some vile, traitorous corner of me can still follow the path that led him to it. He trusted something between us enough to lower his guard, even if he would choke before calling it trust; let me closer than men like him ever allow, fought beside me, protected me.

Looked at me in ways that had nothing to do with the hunt and everything to do with possession, obsession, need.

And I answered all of that with a lie carrying another lie in its mouth.

I push my fingers into my hair and laugh once, sharp and humourless.

Excellent. Wonderful. A spectacular job of making myself furious with him and myself at the same time.

Then my mind drags me back to Kessler’s pool house. To the savage, impossible rightness of moving beside Valentin while chaos detonated around us.

The way he tracked every threat in the room and still somehow tracked me too.

His presence at my back. In front of me. Beside me. The certainty of it.

The brutal ease with which he inserted himself between me and danger, every strike lethal, command edged in that dark velvet authority that made disobedience feel less like rebellion and more like invitation.

Worst of all, I remember how it felt.

Safe.

My eyes squeeze shut.

There are too many things about Valentin that refuse to fit where I want them. Monsters are easier when they stay simple. He protects with the same force he destroys, looks at me like he wants to devour me and shield me in the same breath. He’s impossible to trust and somehow more impossible to dismiss.

At the lake, when demon venom writhed through my veins and I drank from him, I felt it.

His fear. Brief. Razor thin. Real.

But still fear for me.