Whoa. This had to stop mainly because it felt so good. Too good. Fairytale good.

“Noctorno –”

His teeth nipped my ear and I shivered.

I liked that too, way better than Salem shuffling closer to me.

“You’ve been calling me Tor.”

I had because he was becoming a Tor. But I had to remember he was Noctorno, always, always, always.

“I –”

I stopped talking when his arms squeezed and his tongue traced my ear. I stopped talking because my body trembled and heat rushed to very specific parts of me.

“Forget what I said in the village. I’ve changed my mind. Play this game, my love, I want you to,” he murmured. “Let me take you to my castle where you can play it. Let me make you heavy with my heir and I’ll treat you like a queen while you play it. You give me an heir, you can name your price, a bigger house, more land, jewels, whatever you want, by the gods, it’ll be yours. Just open your legs, convince me you’re enjoying it, settle a son on me and, before you leave, I’ll hand you the world.”

My body started trembling but for a totally different reason.

“Before I leave you’ll hand me the world?” I asked quietly.

“Anything you want,” he assured me, his arms getting tighter, his body pressing into mine.

“Leave you with my son.”

“My son,” he stressed.

“Our son,” I corrected.

His teeth nipped my ear again and he whispered, “My son, Cora. My heir. My country’s future king.”

Dear God. Was he serious?

For sanity’s sake, I moved to another subject. “Convince you I’m enjoying it?”

“Yes.”

“So I won’t?”

“You let go, I’ll make you enjoy it. That’s a vow.” His thumb moved in, stroking closer to my nipple and I bit my lip. “Let go, sweets,” he coaxed into my ear.

“Let go so you can f**k me, get me pregnant and take my child?”

His head came up and he asked, “Fuck you?”

“Screw me. Boink me. Nail me. Tag my ass. You know, have sex with me, sex with no meaning, no love, f**k me,” I explained acidly.

He turned me in his arms to facing him and one hand sifted into my hair, clenching gently but making a statement nonetheless while his other arm caged me in.

“I take it… in your world… that’s not a nice thing to say,” he remarked.

“Nope,” I agreed.

He was silent but he didn’t let me go.

Finally he sighed and said, “You’re clever, I’ll give you that.”

“So clever, you’d think I was from a different world,” I noted sarcastically.

“Now, wouldn’t go that far, love.”

No, of course he wouldn’t.

“Whatever,” I muttered to his shoulder.

“I think you missed it, Cora.”

“Missed what, Noctorno?”

I heard him pull a sharp breath in his nose then he stated, “The part where I gave you permission to play me.”

“That’d be hard to do since I’m not a player.”

I watched him tip his head back before he muttered, “Gods.”

“Got that right,” I muttered back.

He tipped his head down and his eyes locked on mine in the moonlight.

“You know, love, I go to bed and lay awake before sleep claims me wondering what it would be like to have the other half of my soul in Rosa.”

Oh my God.

Ouch times, like, a thousand.

“I asked Dash how he felt,” Noctorno continued. “He said the minute he met her, it was indescribable. The instant connection. The pull. Now it’s constant. He can barely stand to be away from her and she feels it too. I know he’s wounded, bleeding deep somewhere no one can see because he told me that being separated from her is like what he would imagine it felt like having a limb removed. You need it there. You can’t live without it. When it’s gone, the phantom of it remains and when you notice you don’t have it close enough to touch, it drives you slightly mad. She can leave him for hours, days, even weeks but any longer, he starts dying inside. Minerva has her, she has her and while she does, my brother is dying inside.”

God, that sounded beautiful. I wished I had that.

It also sounded awful.

Poor Dash. Poor Rosa.

“We should have that,” he informed me.

“We don’t,” I informed him.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” And I sure as heck didn’t, except the part that I wasn’t from this freaking world!

“I do,” he replied.

Really? He did?

“You do?”

“Yes, Cora, I do.”

“Then why don’t we have it?”

“Because to have that pull you have to have a heart. You have to be able to fall in love. He fell in love with her the second he saw her and she the same. And, as you know, the minute my eyes hit you, I fell in love with you.”

Whoa! Wait.

What?

What, what, what?

Before I could verbalize my question, he kept speaking. “But you didn’t fall in love with me because you have no heart and then you proceeded to kill my love for you and twist it into something else entirely. And you keep doing it. Every bloody time I see you. Every time I speak to you. You twist it until there’s nothing in it to recognize as anything even close to what it once was.”

“You loved me?” I whispered, looking into his harsh, moonlit face.

“Don’t,” he clipped shortly.

“Are you saying you loved me?”

His arm got so tight I couldn’t breathe and his hand in my hair twisted so it wasn’t gentle anymore. Not even a little.

And as he did these things, he barked in my face, “Don’t!”

“I –”

“Play your game but don’t you ever, ever, Cora, play with that memory.”

Oh.

My.

God.

He used to love me! And, obviously, he’d told me. And, just as obviously, I’d spurned that love.

Or, more aptly, the other me spurned his love.

Oh. My. God!

His arm gave me a shake. “Am I understood?””

“Tor –”

He lost it and I knew it when his hand twisted in my hair, I cried out at the pain and he roared, “Am I understood?”

“Yes!” I shouted.

At the same time I shouted, Salem threw his mighty head back and whinnied loud.

Noctorno’s head shot to his horse, his body went statue-still then he looked over my head to the mouth of the cave.