No such hope existed. I stroked that hated shaft, a groan escaping me—ancestors, that single tantalizing taste of her. The pounding of her heart beneath her soft breasts, the peaked nipples that made my mouth water.

If I could not have her in body, I would have her in mind.

For several glorious, freeing minutes, I thought of nothing but her. I imagined her spread before me, her scarlet hair like a corona, writhing under my claws, the wet warmth of her wrapped around my cock, and my hand sped up.

The ache in my sack became a molten flood, and I slowed my violent stroking to a tight caress.

It was the simple thought of her on my lap, so close and yet a thousand miles away, that brought me to the edge. Close enough to taste, close enough for my lips to touch her throat—

My cock jerked, seed bursting forth in thick white ropes. I sucked in a breath, holding back the groans of pleasure that wanted to escape, milking the last of the flood as the white hot, tingling release filled me.

Afterwards I sat panting, wondering why I tormented myself.

Moving slowly, still musing over these thoughts of Cirrien that felt strangely guilty and blasphemous—ancestors knew what she would think if she could see inside my mind, the ways in which I’d pictured her—I cleaned up. I resettled myself in my trousers, smoothed my shirt, and pretended to be a normal man for a moment.

I realized moments later that the strange sound I heard, the soft, resentful laughter, was me.

This bitter mood was unlike me. Most days, it was easy to push away the anger. I had believed I was strong enough—when I had decided to become a fiend, I had truly believed it was for the best. That I had the inner iron, the strength of will, to see this through without any true regrets.

I supposed it merely took having my deepest, innermost hopes run out of my bedchamber on swift feet to drive home how much there was to regret.

Behind one of the warg pelts, there was a door. I pushed the pelt aside and stepped through, moving upwards through the tower with silent steps. Few came here; the maids were forbidden from traversing this stair. There was nothing at the top of this tower but old memories, ones better left dusty and forgotten.

The moon shone full through the open windows, illuminating the stacked paintings with silver light. It occurred to me that I was spending my wedding night sulking in a tower, an overgrown bat roosting in his lair, but as the humans would say: to hell with it. She was not here to watch me pout like a boy denied his favorite toy.

No, she was safely in her chambers, with handsome Koryek guarding her door.

My lips curled back over my fangs at the thought. I could not be angry with her. She had not wanted this, nor asked for it.

I was only angry with the circumstances. I would have preferred a hateful woman who would take poppy dreams over reality, because it would be less painful.

“That’s a selfish thought, Bane.” There was no one else here to hear me; I spoke freely. “Why would it matter, to doom one woman over another?”

The paintings did not answer, of course.

I looked over the first one, a bloody scene. Every picture in this tower had been painted by one of the humans who had lived in Ravenscry before the end of the war, when the Rift was held by humanity.

The painter had been named Edda, a Veladari woman with an eidetic memory I’d envied. Everything she saw, she remembered in perfect detail; combined with her artistic talent, she had captured images of the Forian War as though plucking them from the minds of those who had fought on the front lines.

All of Ravenscry, human and vampire alike, had mourned when she was slain by a warg. Much of her work still decorated the halls of the keep, but the bloodier memories, the things no innocent should have witnessed, were kept up here in the dark.

All but one; a painting she had thought to give me as a reminder.

“You are still him,” she had told me, when the pain beneath my skin was still fresh and new, an agony of thorns. “This is to remember who you are.”

I clasped my hands behind my back, gazing into my own eyes, though not into a mirror. Edda’s memory had captured me perfectly, though I was twisting into a new shape as she’d painted it.

The man in the painting… he was handsome, cheekbones as sharp as knives, lips full and tilted in a smirk, amber eyes glowing, black hair a waterfall down his back.

How smug he was, how vainglorious, believing he was equal to this burden.

“You stupid bastard,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the painting, wishing for my claws once more. I wanted to destroy it so thoroughly it would be like it had never existed at all.

Instead I turned my back on him. He was a reminder, after all—not of better times, not of the noble vampire I had been, but of the cost of arrogance.

I turned away from the past’s mirror, looking out the window; Cirrien’s tower was opposite mine. Guardians traveled the shadows around it, leaving no weak points for a warg to slip through.

Her windows were almost perfectly dark, but for the single candle flickering in one. While I brooded in this tower, she spent her wedding night alone and…

And what? Cirrien had not said so much as an unkind word to me, despite her clear terror. Was she really in there cursing my name, begging the ancestors to release her from this burden?

No. She was not. Maybe I was being the fool, but I didn’t believe that of her.

She had said the vows with strength. She had planted the binding thorns with care.

From the moment we had come for her, she had met this fate with her head held high, and I was the fortunate one. I had no right to lurk about, moaning and whining to myself, when she was doing no such thing.

I stared at that faint candlelight flicker, wondering what she was doing. Perhaps… writing in the journal? Putting those obscured thoughts into words?

My greatest wish in the world, greater even than the desire to return to my old body, was to understand her with clarity.

Please be writing. Please let me hear you, I thought, not daring to voice the words aloud. It was too precious a wish to be spoken.

I thought of her hands when she’d come to me, the words moving through the air as gracefully as birds, as softly as whispers. What had she said then, before her hands had moved in terrified shapes, the meaning obvious even if the words were not?

No. She had said no in the end, and because I desired her, there was no choice but to let her go.

Let me hear you, because I want you, and I want to love you. 

I allowed myself to watch the candle for one more minute, and then I forced myself away. Away from the memories, down the tower steps, back into the room of the warg pelts where I had slept alone for many long years.

I couldn’t be the man she deserved, but I could try to be something she needed.

The keep was dark and still; the nobility who had chosen to travel by daylight were kept in the Tower of Summer, furthest from Cirrien’s room. Nobody was around to disturb me, the guards not giving me much more than a glance. They were well-trained to keep their attention on other shadows, deeper shadows that might hide a wolf rather than a fiend.

When I found myself straying too close to the Tower of Spring, which was now Cirrien’s from foundation to peak, I forced myself to turn away.

She had said no, and no it must be.

So I prowled restlessly, finally stalking outside the main doors of the keep to the cool wind atop the fortified wall outside. The scent of fresh pine on the breeze cleared my head, the mist drifting over the valley of the Rift like a white sea.

A small sliver of me wished for a warg to come; merely for something to do, something to kill. My release had satisfied only the lust, not the hum of frustrated tension in my veins.