Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 727(@200wpm)___ 581(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 727(@200wpm)___ 581(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
He nodded. His gaze never left hers. “I know there isn’t, so when she pulls that one on me, I can breathe easy.”
“How does she contact you? You no longer go to the underworld. How is she able to get to you?”
He frowned and rubbed at his temples. “She would become a woman preyed upon by vampires. She’d be in a village that was set upon by a master vampire with lesser vampires or a puppet. She would look completely different, and I would have no way of knowing who she was until I got close enough to her. The battle was always fierce, and I would sustain many injuries before I reached her. Everyone else was dead, so getting one person alive from the village seemed a victory. Then I would get close and know that it was Lilith and that she had orchestrated the entire event. All those people in the village dead just so she could try to persuade me she had nothing to do with my mother’s torture. Or mine, even.”
“When was the last time she did this?”
“It has been well over two hundred years. Maybe more. I have been in the monastery. She could not find me there.”
“You sleep in the ground every night, and the soil heals you. It welcomes you, right?”
He nodded, puzzled, pressing his fingers against his temples, trying to figure out where she was going with her inquiry.
“You are Dragonseeker and also a child of Mother Earth. Did it occur to you to ask for healing from the constant headaches you have?”
He pulled his hands from his temples. “I don’t have headaches.” He looked puzzled. “Do I?”
“You have a headache because Lilith is trying to make entry into your mind. It’s the drumbeat from that night. You have a trigger, and it starts to play in your head, re-creating that scene over and over so she can call you back to her.”
Afanasiv sat back in the chair, his strangely colored eyes drifting over her face. “I do not allow myself to think of those memories. I told you they were lost to me until I forced myself to remember them in order to ensure your people—and you—were safe.”
“There is such a thing as the subconscious, Afanasiv,” she pointed out as gently as she could. He never lost his calm exterior, but she could see that the headache was becoming worse. “You do revisit that terrible nightmare and you get headaches. You’ve had them ever since your parents died, but because you lost all emotion and you don’t feel or recognize pain, you never acknowledged that you had headaches. You don’t acknowledge that you feel them, so you don’t see that they’re triggered by something outside of yourself.”
Afanasiv was suddenly out of his chair and flowing across the room, his power filling the space until the walls expanded and contracted as if they couldn’t possibly hold him in.
“Why did you cut yourself off from me?”
Vasilisa hadn’t expected him to ask her point-blank. He had his back to her, but he suddenly turned to face her, his strange eyes staring directly into hers, piercing every shield she had so that she felt stripped bare and vulnerable.
“You are still holding yourself away from me.”
Twice she opened her mouth to answer him, and twice she swallowed down what she was going to say. What could she say? That he was the only person she truly feared? That he made her weak? That she was obsessed with him? She’d always been her own person and went her own way, and suddenly she couldn’t think without wanting him right beside her. She wasn’t that kind of woman. She feared she was losing herself. And then hearing that he’d been lovers with Lilith . . . She’d grabbed at that as an excuse to run from him. Only she couldn’t run far, because all she could think about was him.
All she wanted was him. She ached for him, but the truth was, she didn’t respond to men. She didn’t respond to women. Even during the full moon, when the heat was on the Lycans and they were all crazy for sex, she could pretend, but she didn’t feel anything. Until Afanasiv had kissed her. She touched her lips. She thought about that kiss way too much. She felt his kiss deep, melting her where she was nothing but a solid glacier of ice. Still, she was terrified she wouldn’t respond, and he would be disappointed in her. She couldn’t bear to see disappointment on his face.
His eyes narrowed and then focused completely on her like a laser beam. He took a step toward her. For some reason, he looked huge to her. Afanasiv was a big man with broad shoulders and a thick chest. He had muscles on his muscles, and they rippled whenever he moved. He was hot. Gorgeous. And somehow he got to her. She felt threatened on a level she’d never felt before. Her entire body went into some kind of excited frenzy. Every single cell was aware of him.