Exhaustion, not all of it from her own blood loss, turned Simone’s limbs to lead. Her hands shook as she ripped clean strips from the remains of her sheets to bind his leg and her forearm. After that she intended to climb off the bed and get a blanket from her chest so she could sleep on the floor, but Korvel’s arm encircled her waist to pull her down beside him. He did not wake, but when she tried to move away from his big body, his arm tightened and he shifted, tucking her head in the space between his shoulder and neck. The coolness of his skin felt good against her hot face.
Of course, he needed her warmth, she decided, too tired to fight his hold another moment.
The universe had become gray sludge.
Korvel no longer permitted himself to pass into the nightlands, where the Darkyn went to rest and recover from the brutalities of the world. Too much of that strange territory reminded him of Alexandra, whom he had lured there more than once.
Nor could he sleep as once he had during his mortal life, as one of the prices of immortality was perpetual awareness. Even when blood loss and injury shut down his physical form, his mind remained active.
Being nowhere, he sensed only what there was: nothing.
Korvel knew the brief battles in which he had engaged had not harmed him greatly, but the poisonous effect of the copper lodged in his flesh had rendered him weak and listless. In another time he would have fought his way back to life and his place in it, but his current apathy made it a difficult thing to desire. Why leave the dull gray void in which he lay suspended, only to return to a world that no longer held any interest for him?
His dismal thoughts conjured images of the young nun with the angelic face. She had been tormented and nearly raped; she remained alone on the other side. He suspected he hadn’t killed all of the men who had attacked the château, and if they came upon her while he was helpless…
Korvel reached for consciousness, and at once the void dragged at him, becoming a sea of muck through which he waded, one infuriatingly slow step at a time. He was much weaker than he had guessed, dangerously so; if he were to awake it would have to be by will alone.
Once more he thought of the green-eyed angel who had tended to his wound. Whatever faith had compelled her to abandon life and serve an uncaring God, she was still an innocent. As such she needed—no, deserved—his assistance. I will go to her and keep her safe.
He could feel her, close to him now, her presence like a muted caress. Even through the gnashing teeth of fresh pain, she calmed him. His weakness grew as his sense of her faded, and he reached out blindly, capturing her warmth and enfolding it against him. There she remained, unresisting and silent, until his thoughts dwindled and he entered a darker corner of the void to rest and heal.
Sometime later, the setting of the sun roused Korvel to consciousness. He sensed this time that he had more strength to draw on, and crossed the emptiness with only a brief effort. He felt her warmth slipping away, and opened his eyes.
Cracked hand-carved moldings framed a rough plaster ceiling spotted with small water stains and draped in one corner with the dusty remains of some long-dead spider’s trap. The soft amber light illuminating it came from fat beeswax candles set in crystal goblets half filled with pretty pebbles and shells, which had been spaced like treasures across a stone shelf. A muslin pinafore hung from the knob of bolted door, over which a plain wooden cross had been nailed. A basket with balled wool and knitting needles sat beside a shabby tapestry chair; a chipped blue stoneware jug sat inside a matching basin in an iron stand.
He turned his head to see a small shrine built atop an old secretary: flowers and votive candles in punched-tin holders surrounding a diminutive statue of the Virgin Mary in her blue robes and white headdress. A rosary of gray stone beads and blackened silver lay draped around the base of the statue.
If this were the cloistered cell it appeared to be, then the nun had brought him to her convent. If this were a jail cell, the French police had greatly improved the living conditions within their prisons.
A flutter of fabric drew his attention to the foot of the pallet, where the nun stood with her back toward him. She was in the process of undressing, and while Korvel knew he should look away, he couldn’t stop watching her. She pulled the bloodstained gray habit over her head to reveal the long line of her spine. She tugged at the drawstring of her only undergarment, a pair of loose cotton drawers, before sliding them down her legs.
Now naked, she went to the basin stand, where she poured water from the jug into the bowl and began to wash the blood from her body.
The tightening of his muscles didn’t distract Korvel from watching her, but the knotting in his groin did. His shaft hardened and swelled, inching back his foreskin from the tight dome of his glans.
Carnal desire racked him, demanding relief, and it stunned him. It had been so long since he had wanted any mortal female that his arousal seemed utterly alien, as if some unseen predator had burrowed under his skin and decided to amuse itself by infesting his cock.
The nun’s body beckoned to him, an oasis of pleasures yet to be had, but he could resist her by thinking of her innocence. She belonged to God, not him. It was when she took down her braids and unraveled them, combing through the long, bright strands with her fingers, that he crumpled the bed linens in his fists. Once free, her hair fell in luminous waves all the way to her hips, glinting like fiery gold in the candlelight.
Korvel had not seen a woman with such hair in centuries, not since mortal females had lived out their entire lives without once cutting a single hair from their head.
He frowned as he saw that the light had also chased the shadows from her skin, and revealed a collection of odd, pale marks all over her. The random positions of the marks and the fact that she was a nun made it highly unlikely they were tan lines. The marks themselves formed a variety of shapes; on her left hip one narrow stripe curled like a lock of hair, but a few inches above it a broader, straight slash bisected her shoulder blade.
Only when she dried herself and went to kneel before the shrine did she come close enough for him to see the faint ridges of the marks, which made Korvel realize at last what they were.
Scar tissue. Someone had grievously abused the nun, so harshly and often that they had left her scarred from her nape to her knees.
Lust ebbed, scoured away by shock, shame, and an empathy he had never felt for a mortal of the modern world. As she took down the rosary and began murmuring her prayers, Korvel recalled the years of punishment he had once endured, the dismal human life he had never been able to forget. Small wonder she had turned her back on the world to cloister herself. Perhaps, like him, she had never received a single kindness from her birth family.
As Korvel pushed himself into a sitting position, the nun glanced over her shoulder and then kissed the rosary before replacing it. Instead of scurrying for clothing to cover her nakedness, she fastened a silver chain around her neck and came to the pallet, climbing up onto it and pushing him back against the pillows.
Shocked anew, Korvel stared at her. “What are you doing?”
“Attending you.” She pushed her hair back over her shoulders and produced a small folding knife, opening it and plying it against her forearm.
Her body heat combined with the blood scent and slammed into him, as merciless as it was enticing. Korvel managed to turn his head away as she brought her arm to his mouth. “No.”
“Take it.” She pressed against his cheek with her free hand, guiding his mouth along her thin skin until his lips parted.
As hot as it was luscious, her blood coursed inside him as if it were molten sunlight, eating away at his coldness and flaring in every shadowy corner of his soul. He wanted nothing more than to roll her beneath him and take her completely, his teeth piercing her throat, his body pushing into hers, drinking from her and moving inside her until she knew and wanted nothing but him.
He was descending into the thrall of bloodlust, which seemed as bizarre as his sudden desire for this mortal. Never had he been tempted to drain a human upon whom he fed, for he knew the act that would send them both into the nightlands. There she would die, and he would be trapped, senseless and unmoving, for days. Now at last he understood the terrible temptation of that thrall and rapture, and how it destroyed all reasoning, all will.
Korvel wrenched his mouth from her, and for an instant it was if he tore the heart from his own chest. “Stop.”
A line formed between her brows. “Am I not to your liking?”
Her taste had nearly reduced him to a beast, not that he would frighten her by saying so. “You have given enough to restore me. That is all I can ask of you.” Because his voice sounded so harsh, he caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “I am grateful for your kindness.”
“Kindness.” She seemed bemused, and ran her fingertip across the tight line of his mouth, wiping away a trace of her blood. “You have a very strange way of speaking, Englishman.”
“Korvel.” He wanted to hear his name on her lips.
She tilted her head, spilling a cascade of rose-streaked gold over her bare shoulder. “I am obliged to call you ‘my lord,’ or at the very least ‘Captain.’”
He couldn’t keep his hand from brushing back the fine flax of her tresses, or from curling around her nape. “Call me any damn thing you wish,” he murmured as he brought her head down to his.
Kissing her was his worst mistake, for while she had the face of an angel he discovered her lips were all fiery softness and womanly delight. She made a faint, astonished sound in her throat as he used his tongue, stiffening one moment and then opening for him the next.
Korvel’s eyes closed as he savored her, his hand clamping over the back of her skull as he slanted her face for better access. The wet heat of her mouth was made for sex, for making a man ache with all the things he might teach her to do with it.
He would take her back to Ireland with him, he decided, and install her in the castle as his bedmate, so that he could have her whenever he wanted her—
Simone pressed her hands against his chest, lifting up and gazing down at him, the cross around her neck swinging gently. “Do you want me?”