The Warrior King (Inferno Rising #3) - Abigail Owen Page 0,8

come to genuinely like this man—a fact that she saw as a good start.

If Meira was honest with herself, Samael intimidated her more. Something about the way he held himself—leashed violence. Leashed emotions, more like. Then there was the way he looked at her. Only twice since she’d been here had she caught that particular look, gaze full of an emotion she couldn’t pin down—or maybe didn’t want to identify, because she suspected it too closely mirrored ones of her own that she’d cut off and buried deep. Even so, those emotions in his gaze had reached out and twisted around her. Binding. Compelling.

Stop it.

Gorgon must’ve seen her expression through her sheer veil, lips pinched with nerves and gaze perhaps a bit twitchy, because his eyes crinkled at the corners in a smile meant for her alone. He smiled easily. She’d come to like that about him. However, he held his ground, a strong dragon shifter king who waited for his prize to come to him.

Maul cocked his head, giving a doggie whine she took to mean a sort of support for her. However, he didn’t show her any images with his telepathic means of communication, merely stood quietly.

As she took those final steps to Gorgon’s side, he took her by the hands. Quickly she remembered to douse the fire on her skin there. Kasia had said Brand could touch her fire before they’d mated, but, then again, they’d mated successfully. Better not to risk it in front of all these people.

Gorgon rarely exhibited any emotion around her, not that Meira could sense, anyway, almost as though his emotions didn’t run deep enough, or were held so tightly in check none leaked out. Different from the wall his captain put up, though.

Even now, she could only make out the faint traces of power that lingered around him. And something else. An astute kind of judgment, maybe? Patience? She still wasn’t sure. All she knew was—regardless of today’s bout of nerves—around Gorgon, she personally felt calm. As though she could lay her troubles at his feet.

“You wore my color,” he murmured.

Meira managed to smile and nod. No sacrificial, virginal lamb all in white. “My color now.”

A blip of satisfaction reached her as he squeezed her hands in appreciation. “Are you still sure?” A question he’d asked her several times over these months of preparation.

Meira shored up her own mental blocks against the emotions swirling throughout the room, including her own, and smiled back, trying her best to make it appear confident. He would care for her, be gentle with her—that at least she knew. “I’m sure.”

He searched her gaze, she wasn’t sure for what, then with a nod, turned them both to face the sacra, the obsidian urn that featured in the start of an hour of various rituals, rites, and oaths.

After presenting her mate the chest of gifts, which he would open later, she and Gorgon each burned sacrifices of their old lives to the gods—a lock of hair, vials of blood, old letters from loved ones. Meira said a symbolic good-bye to her family, making eye contact with Angelika at the back of the room with the wolf shifters even as she kissed the foreheads of the two sisters allowed to stand up with her. Ladon and Brand led their mates away, no longer part of the ceremony as Meira joined her new family.

Finally, after other traditions were observed, Gorgon gently lifted the veil over her head and kissed her. Again, she doused her flames over that swath of skin. A pleasant kiss, tender, if not exciting.

At her back, a blast of darkness, like a bomb had been set off in the room and the shock waves struck only her, made Meira gasp.

As though a wall had collapsed under the onslaught, Samael’s emotions pummeled her like a hurricane that had beaten down on a tiny island where her family had lived for a short time when she was a child, whipping at her, threatening to peel away every layer of protection to expose her, raw and vulnerable, to the elements.

Confusion, rejection, need, desperation, despair, possessiveness…but also determination and resignation.

A combination that didn’t make a lick of sense.

She dared to flick him a single swift glance to the side to find neither his expression nor the set of his body showed an iota of what was going on inside him. Totally blank. Before she could shut out the emotions screaming at her, just as fast as his wall had crumbled,