“Don’t,” I protested, my eyes snapping wide just before he clapped his palm against me.
My heart ceased to beat all over again, the ringing in my ears drowning out all sound as I swayed forward. Still, Caldris pressed my hand tighter to his chest, his lips moving despite the grimace on his face. “Feel,” he mouthed, and I dug my fingertips into his skin.
His heart didn’t beat, his chest lying still but for the slither of something moving slowly within his breast. I watched the skin move in a slow wave as something inside of him caused a rippling in his flesh.
My mouth dropped open in shock, with no air for me to draw past the overwhelming feeling of death hovering on the edge of my awareness. It threatened to pull me under, to take me to the calling Void waiting for me.
Caldris clapped his hand against my chest once more, starting my heart all over again and pulling me back from the foggy edge of existence. From the place between life and death, waiting to cross the river.
I drew my hand back with a sharp gasp as something inside his chest rattled. “What is it?” I asked, my voice conveying every bit of horror I felt.
“One of Mab’s serpents,” he answered, dropping his head back to rest against the bedroll as if his own exhaustion was too much to bear. “Wrapped around my heart.”
“You meant she had your heart, literally?” I smacked my palm down against his chest as I scrambled to disentangle from his lap. The fucking asshole had to know how I would have perceived that. How much it would have broken me.
He raised a hand to his chest and the reddened skin where I’d slapped him as he reached up with the other to me back down until I sprawled across him. Rolling me beneath himself, he shoved my thighs wide and inserted his hips between them.
Rolling himself against me, he left me with little doubt as to what he would choose if forced to make the choice between my body and my secrets. “You thought I meant I loved Mab?” he asked, his voice shocked as a chuckle resounded from him. “Why would I love a monster when I have a perfectly beautiful, sweet mate lying beneath me?”
“There was someone you loved. You said it was complicated even though you didn’t miss her anymore. If it wasn’t Mab, who was it?” I asked, staring up at him as he filled my gaze.
He smiled down at me sweetly, lifting a hand to cup my cheek as he looked at me with so much affection and longing that I lost the ability to breathe. “You, Estrella. It was complicated because I couldn’t reach you, but I spent every day missing you, anyway. Waiting for the day when I would get to know you,” he said. My heart stalled all over again, no supernatural reason for it aside from the way he made it flutter and skip a beat with his admission.
While I’d been talking about the man who took my virginity, he’d been waxing poetic about… me?
I swallowed, biting the inside of my cheek as he grinned down at me. “I told you it was a good thing he was already dead. Your Viniculum eased his suffering. If I could hunt down every man who touched you in your previous lives and end them permanently, I would.”
“Unless you plan to allow me to reciprocate with the women you were with while I was trapped in this endless cycle of reincarnation, that hardly seems fair,” I said, turning my head away to try to comprehend the reality of what he’d said.
Of the way it made me feel.
But he wasn’t done shaking my world and turning it over, it would seem. He grinned, leaning forward to tease my lips with his. “Your list would be mercifully short, my star. There has been no one since the moment you came of age in your first life and the bond snapped into place.”
I paused, trying to think past the ringing in my ears. “What?” I asked stupidly, blinking up at him as I turned my face back to him in shock.
“So that you cannot try to say I twisted my words, I’ll be clear. I have not kissed a woman. I have not touched or fucked or allowed any to touch me in that way since the moment I knew you existed. I would never disrespect my equal in that way,” he said, running his nose along the side of mine. “I was no innocent in the centuries before your creation, but I would have waited a dozen more for you.”
“So that night in the spring beneath the stars, you hadn’t had sex in…”
“Over three hundred years,” he admitted, sitting up beneath me. His stomach flexed with the motion, and then his face was directly in front of mine. His features were open, nothing shuttered in his expression as he willed me to see the truth of the words.
“Have all the Fae repressed their…” I paused thinking over the words to properly convey what I needed to say. “Urges if their mate was on the other side of the Veil?”
“Not all of them, but some, I’m sure. It is a difficult thing to convince yourself to be loyal to your mate when you know that, somewhere out there, she is taking other men to her bed. There were times when I wanted to punish you for doing so,” he admitted, reaching out to cup my cheek. “But I couldn’t, because I knew it wouldn’t be fair to you. You didn’t know about me, but I knew you better than I knew myself.”
“I don’t know what to say to that,” I admitted, sighing as I stared into his eyes. I’d never considered that he might have been celibate for so long. He’d remained loyal to me when I couldn’t have been to him: the man I didn’t even know was out there waiting for me.
The image of him with two human women kneeling at his feet flashed through my mind, a reminder of all that he could’ve had if he’d so chosen. It made his celibacy hit harder, knowing there wasn’t a single man I’d met in all my life who would have done such a thing for me.
“There’s nothing you need to say. I did it because I never would have been able to stomach the touch of another woman on my skin,” he said, leaning forward to nip at the tip of my nose. “Now, tell me about the twilight berries.”
I blanked, staring back at him in shock. I’d thought he would choose the physical intimacy that he craved from me. “What?”
“You said if I told you what power Mab holds over me, you would tell me why you cannot stand the taste of twilight berries,” he explained, reaching forward to tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. He huffed a little laugh as realization set in, the sound bittersweet as it reached my ears. “I will always choose you, min asteren,” he said, his brow creasing as he stared at me in something akin to confusion. “Your body is just the packaging that gives the other half of my soul a home. I have failed as your mate if you do not already know that.”
“I think I should have known that,” I said, the breathy whisper escaping even though I didn’t want to speak the words aloud. Caldris grinned at me, his smile shining in the darkness surrounding us. In the enclosed tent, there were no moon and stars above to offer any light in the night. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be able to see as well as I could.
At least not when I’d been human.
“Lord Byron liked to make me sit on his lap so he could feed them to me while he tended to the wounds on my hands that I earned picking them during the harvest,” I said simply, watching as Caldris’s gaze dropped to the thin white scars on the backs of my hand.