Pure Destiny (PureDark Ones #12) - Aja James Page 0,16

one else.

Strangely, she’d always felt “close” to the Creature, as close as a being like her could feel, in any case.

There was only one other who ever made her truly feel. Even love. When he was taken away, everything good inside of her died with him. Instantly. Irrevocably.

The Creature was different.

Sometimes he was like a playmate. A pawn that tried to become a chess master. Though she never showed it, she rather enjoyed his cutting wit and sarcasm. Fascinated by the turnings of that devious mind.

Other times, he was her monster. Her creation. Almost like a child. More hers than anyone or anything else in her life. After all, her love had become the vampire queen’s whore. Her daughter…

Strange, but she never thought about the offspring she engendered with her leopard Mate. The child only mattered when they had been together. The simile of a family. She had loved the girl because of her sire. Once she lost her Mate, the child no longer mattered.

“Or Lilith, I suppose would be the modern translation,” she continued to inform her subject. “Not the one from the Hebrew bible, though I suppose I might have inspired those imaginings. I am the original, and I have existed in one form or another since almost the beginning of time. I will always exist. Just like life and death.”

She stroked long, elegant fingers through the Creature’s sweat-matted hair, glancing sharp-nailed fingertips over his cold cheek and bluish lips.

“You asked before what my end game was, beautiful Creature. That is an unanswerable question, I’m afraid. For there is no end. Only the game.”

She leaned over his prone, naked shell in his snug container, no better than a form-fitting test tube, and licked a long, forked tongue across his throat from collar bone to chin.

“I am the game master, and you are my pawn,” she hissed, savoring the unique flavor of his skin.

“You will be my greatest creation yet. An earth-bound dragon. Man-made. Created solely by me, for me, with no other external spark.”

Unlike what she herself had to use in order to regain and transform her strength and power—the blood from the beating heart of a King of Beasts.

“You will be everything I want. Perhaps even a partner worthy to sit beside me as we rule this new world together.”

She opened her mouth as serpent fangs descended from her upper gums, and hissed before striking:

“Or you will die trying.”

And then she struck, sinking the dagger-like teeth into her subject’s throat, filling him with nothingness.

*** *** *** ***

When Rain came for the daily health check, Sophia was awake and decent.

Although, it depended on how one used that term. The way she’d taken advantage of Dalair in the state that he was in was hardly “decent.”

At least, Sophia was no longer wrapped around his prone, wounded, naked body like a starfish. Her greedy, wet core pulsing relentlessly around his sex, milking his life force into her body even though she should have been the one to give him strength.

But even as she hated her own selfishness, she couldn’t regret what she did. As much as his body needed hers to heal, she needed him just as much. If not more. At least, she also made sure Dalair was covered with a larger, clean towel from the adjoining bathroom before the healer entered.

That she had to count these civilities like a miser hoarding coins to make herself feel better was something Sophia chose not to dwell on.

“He is improving,” Rain commented as she commanded the zhen to retract from the warrior’s pores back into their shackles around Dalair’s limbs, after checking his vitals through the sentient needles.

“Whatever happened over the last twelve hours seemed to help him quite a bit,” the healer said carefully, regarding Sophia with her shrewd gaze.

Sophia swallowed before telling a half-truth, “He rested well. I…laid myself on top of him. The contact helps.”

Rain gazed at her quietly for some moments, and then observed, “Yes. The physical skin-to-skin contact from a female who loves him should help a Pure warrior heal. More importantly, it is the touch from someone he loves that matters the most.”

Sophia nodded numbly.

Though they’d both slept for most of the past twelve hours, wrapped around each other, intimately joined, she didn’t feel refreshed. She was weighed down by an invisible force.

It felt like grief. As if she was in mourning. For the male who looked, smelled and sounded like Dalair, but who was not really there. Everything vital that made him who he