Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 112500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
“More, incubus!” she cried, pale limbs twisting against his ebony skin. When he’d first begun his seduction, she’d twirled her dark red hair and asked, “Do they call you Ink because your skin’s so black?”
Vapid dullard. She had no idea the name Inkletter carried twelve generations of scholars—historians who’d chronicled the Ubus Peoples and all the Lore before the Exile from Gaia.
She moaned, mind fogged, body moving on instinct alone as she struggled to steal the relief he cruelly withheld. To wrap her nether lips around the base and root him fully within.
Her copious arousal drenched his shaft, glistening along the veins. He frowned inwardly. Harder than usual. And we have hours yet to go.
The servants’ level around them was a bruise of damp stone and stale heat, the air clogged with bloodroot incense. He would have liked her own scent to season his incubus meal, but that smoke smothered everything, even down here. Thick enough to blind the gods.
One level below them, the weavers’ looms made a ceaseless hum—warp and weft, warp and weft. Every vibration traveled through the floorboards and into Nadje’s bed frame, making the whole wretched room shiver as if the castle itself had a pulse.
Despise this place.
“Please,” Nadje whimpered. “Incubus, please!”
“Not quite, little flame,” he murmured, and she shuddered at the endearment, as predictable as gravity. “Not quite.”
A new royal attendant, the fool hadn’t even connected the timing of her appointment with his sudden “interest.” Nights of patient seduction—slow smiles, casual proximity, the careful drip of charm—and now, in her moans, she’d already spilled secrets worth her weight in Berserker gold.
The bears would pay handsomely for this intelligence. Something was brewing in Bloodreach, a plot centered on Emilia, Neculain’s youngest. Ink meant to uncover it, one thrust at a time.
A bell clanged faintly as weavers changed shifts. Somewhere in the corridor, boots passed, then faded. No voices. No laughter.
Servants knew better than to laugh.
In the throes, Nadje’s dazed eyes drifted to his throat. Her tongue brushed a fang. The insult flared like heat in his gut.
Though he too fed on others, he reaped pleasure, not death. And this vampire was plump, probably drank her fill of blood every night. But her eyes were clear, so she’d never drained a being to the quick. Not yet.
Bloodreach was a place where “yet” was a countdown.
What am I doing with my life? The thought came uninvited, bitter as ash. His true calling—chronicling the past, decoding the patterns of history—burned brighter than this sordid work. He was Inkletter XII, master scribe of the Skein, and whoever wrote history directed the future.
“Aren’t you hungry, Ink?” she begged. “Feed from me! Please!”
Greedy, foolish female. He plucked her pouting coral nipples and shafted her core, but not too deep. “I’ll take care of you, sweet. Soon…” he crooned with a voice that made females spasm from the resonance alone.
He hardly needed to try. Incubi fluid called stav did much of the work. A tinge of it in his pre-semen caused euphoria, but doses of it over three penetrations would make a partner dependent on it for life.
A quiet chain. Invisible. Unbreakable once clasped. Everything about me sexually slays her.
He should take a vacation after this job, a palate cleanser to wash away his debasement. Umber’s vineyards ran purple this time of year. Demons like him—magnificent, moneyed, powerful—were always welcome. Even demonkin paused there, letting sunlight and sweetness convince them the world wasn’t always a battlefield.
“Gods, I’m going to come so hard!” Nadje clenched the rough woolen sheets of her squeaking bed, and her head thrashed as she neared her peak. “It’ll feed you well, incubus. I’ll feed you so good!” Her voice pitched into delirium. “So hard. So hot. Wet, wet.”
Bloodroot. Loom hum. Stone sweat. Nadje’s breath in broken little sobs.
“Not yet, my beauty.” He shallowed his thrusts with ruthless precision, making an immortal like her dance on the knife’s edge between release and carnal insanity. “I want to hear your voice in my ear. You said you’d tell me anything…”
Chapter 3
Meera Newteye
Strix Keep
These walls whisper of murder.
As Meera ascended the murky stairs, cold spots crept over her. Not from wind—no breeze dared stir the interior of the keep—but from memory.
Death left its own kind of draft.
Even someone as inept as Meera could sense them. She didn’t mind; witches collected hauntings the way other immortals collected talismans and flesh trophies.
Cobwebs clung like lace to gargoyles, and bats squeaked in the high spires. A skeleton or two inhabited most closets; sometimes those bones caught a stray hit of magic and reanimated for a midnight waltz. All good fun.
But tonight the keep’s humor had curdled.
As she neared the high priestess’s tower, Meera wondered if her boss’s office still held warmth. Or had it grown chilly like the surface of a gravestone?
Each step echoed her dread. How many times had she climbed these stairs feeling safe, proud to serve under Lazara the Worthy? Now she climbed toward a stranger—maybe even a murderous one.