“I don’t understand,” she whispered, tilting her head so her cheek pressed into Stolas’s chest and she could make out the lower half of his jaw. “It’s so different now.”
He angled his face toward her. “Your familiar is driven by your emotions. Your desires. It feeds off your pleasure and, when properly bonded, will do anything to please you even at great cost to itself.”
She flicked her gaze back to her familiar to discover it hovering over Stolas’s bed, inspecting the sheets. The pillows. The furs. Toying with the golden tassels on the pillow shams like a cat.
It spent an inordinate amount of time on the bed . . . but only when the shapeless thing began to rub itself over the covers—like a dog rolling on its back to mark its favorite spot—did Stolas’s words finally have meaning.
It’s driven by your emotions. Your desires.
Goddess kill me now.
Was that a chuckle she felt vibrate her shoulder blades?
“Obviously we’re not bonded yet,” she said, mentally trying to will it to another part of the room.
“Obviously.”
Even without looking she could tell he was smiling. Wonderful. “So will it become part of my consciousness?”
“No. They are influenced by your will—and some Seraphians form such deep bonds with their familiar that they can sometimes see through their eyes—but your familiar is a separate entity.”
“So I was . . . born with it?”
“They are very rare, only found in incredibly powerful darkcasters almost always from the Darkshade lineage, so there is very little known about their origin. Some scholars say they’re souls of beasts from another realm trapped in the Nether, and only royal Seraphians are powerful enough to harness them. Others claim they’re gifted by the Shadeling himself. The only thing we all agree upon is that their souls are eternally tethered to their darkcasters’.”
“How do you know they have a soul?”
“I believe that every creature, however small or hideous, possesses a soul. Those who claim otherwise do so in order to justify their brutality against them.”
She remembered the pixie. How all the creature wanted was territory of its own, and how, when Bell brought up the idea, the mortal lords laughed in his face.
“Careful, Shade Lord, or I might start to suspect you have a heart.”
He was still holding her—she’d unpack that detail later—and she felt the muscles of his chest and arms go rigid around her. “Don’t let my words confuse you. I’ll never be the good guy, Beastie.” A long pause followed. “I’ve always been very careful not to make you think otherwise.”
“Then what are you?” she teased, trying to ease the sudden tension she felt between them.
“Merciless, Haven. That is what I am. And to those who would hurt the people I care about, I am worse. An unfathomable evil.”
“But you are capable of caring,” she persisted, thinking of the way he sacrificed himself for Nasira. “Which means you’re not quite the villain you claim to be.”
“I would argue that’s what makes me the most dangerous. To protect those I love, I would do all manner of cruel, vile things. Things that would make me exactly what they say I am.”
A monster.
You love a monster.
He was being painfully honest—that much she knew, but if he was trying to scare her away, it wasn’t working.
Yet it didn’t feel exactly like that. She had witnessed him right before he fed. Had given him permission. And while she suspected that barely scratched the surface of the savage nature he kept hidden from her, the fact that she hadn’t cringed from the act was huge.
Maybe he was trying to prepare her for what he might have to become if things spiraled into war?
If that were true then he was wasting his breath. They would all be expected to do horrible things if it came to war, herself included.
“When I trained to become Bell’s royal guardian,” she said, resting her head against his chest, “they kept a brown bear in the barracks, locked inside this sad little cage. All the other students took turns poking the poor creature with sticks to make it growl like it was a toy for their amusement.”
“I’m assuming there’s a point to the story? Or am I the bear and you the stick?”
She rolled her eyes. “The point is, one day, the bear got tired of being poked and did what bears do. It killed four cadets and maimed countless more before escaping.”
His arms tightened around her waist. “I like this bear already even if