Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 115

“No,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sleep.” His voice was that of Hypnos himself—son of Night and brother of Death.

She felt herself floating away in his cradling arms. She was swiftly wrapped in the incense of ancient memories, and blood, and the warmth of his empyrean male spice. When she awoke from a nebulous dream, struggling weakly out of a thick haze, she felt as though she’d slumbered beneath the dust and earth for centuries. Her first cogent thought was that the world appeared saturated in a black and crimson blur. But the redness all about her was different to the venom-soaked vision of before. An indeterminate length of time elapsed before the shapes and colors revealed themselves to be a bed—the dragon’s colossal nest of red damask aglow in muted candlelight. The drapes at the window and those that hung from the bed were all parted to admit the starless night.

A silent figure was seated beside the bed, cloaked in penumbral gloom. Over steepled fingers he regarded her, farouche as the dragons that guarded his bed.

“How…how long have I been asleep?” she asked.

“One and twenty hours,” was the quiet reply.

She glanced down at her bandaged chest, amazed to be counted amongst the living considering she’d sustained both the bites of a snake and a dragon. No, he was no dragon and Emma was no harlot. She would give no more credence or power to the snake’s lies. “Thank you.” She tried to inject as much sincerity and regret into her words as could be mustered from a parched throat, but she feared her thanks would never be enough.

He made no reply.

“Did you”—there was an awkward pause as she briefly averted her gaze—“did you rest at all, or have you been keeping watch all this time?”

He gave a sharp snort, lifted himself out of his Tudor chair, and then prowled towards the foot of the bed. There the stuttering candlelight better described his towering frame and the hard angles of his face. He was all pale marble, his giant wings billowing like a demonic mantle behind him. He was wholly without his guise of humanity tonight. “Rest?” This was punctuated with another derisive snort. “If I was of a mind to rest, which I do but rarely, it would be a certain fool who would drop his guard to rest beside you.”

She flinched and pulled the counterpane up to cover her nakedness. “Let us speak plainly, Markus—”

“I rather thought I was,” he interposed with a black look.

She shook her head. “Why did you save my life?”

“Why did you seek to end mine?”

“I sought no such thing! Or I’d have smote your heart long before your eyes opened. It was the snake, not I!” She had been the unwilling marionette to a serpent. Surely he must know she was incapable of killing him.

“Ay, you allowed yourself to be poisoned against me in the first place. Witch venom is a tricky thing—whatever power it wields can only be vouchsafed by the mind of the possessed. Was it cowardice that stayed your hand? Or, dare I hope, some nobler sentiment perhaps?”

She folded her arms stiffly over her bandaged chest. “I haven’t the heart for murder, least of all yours. Especially not yours.”

“Ah, but you do. If I were now to lunge at your neck like the beast you think me, I rather think you’d warm swiftly to murder.”

She searched his face, descrying in it a fleeting glimpse of unguarded pain. “But you will not because you are neither a beast nor a dragon; at any rate, self preservation is not murder, so the point is moot.”

He shot her a dour look.

She gnawed her bottom lip, suddenly recalling afresh what she’d witnessed in the blood memories that’d come to her as she’d lain in oblivion. Perhaps straying to the brink of the Underworld had allowed her to look deeper and clearer into the realm of gods, for she had returned with a much altered perception of him. “Why did you save my life?”

“Because I love you!” The confession, though only a whisper, was fierce and heart fetched. “And for the first time in millennia, I know not how to proceed!”

“I thought you incapable of love?” Fat tears were already coating her lashes and confounding her vision.

He turned from her and moved towards the window with a terse shrug. “You judged from narrowed eyes.”

Ay, it was a fault lately realized. “Truly, Markus? You love me?”

“What would you have me say now? A pretty avowal? A ballad? You have doubted me at every turn and I am no maudlin jongleur to kneel before you with bombast and beg your trust.”

“Am I so mistook? You will forgive my doubt, seeing as you have jeered at love and omitted truths. The seeds of trust and love have been sown upon fallow ground. You neglected the former and eschewed the latter.”

“I have no faith in love, so of course I foreswore it!”

“I want to believe you, Markus…”

He turned to glare over his shoulder. “Believe what you will, you obstinate woman. Of the two occupants numbered in this room, I am not the one who undertook to kill the other.”

“I would not have killed you! Not willingly.”

“I want to believe you, Emma…”

She gritted her teeth at that.

He left the window and approached the bed again. “Would you have me trust you absolutely without the benefit of having the favor returned?”

“Then you have it, Markus.” She met his gaze directly. “I trust you with my whole heart.”

“Then…” He knelt down so that they were eye to eye. “You love me, Emma?”

“To death,” she said, cupping his cheek. Death was the least of her worries, however. She was afeared this love would cost her something dearer than life. She had a sister to protect and a soul to preserve. She took a deep breath and said the words anyway. “I love you, Markus.” She loved him not despite his darkness but