Claimed by the Flame of Faery: A Fae Dark Fantasy Romance by Mallory Dunlin

Author:Mallory Dunlin [Dunlin, Mallory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter thirty-one

Eighteen Hundred Years

His eyes opened halfway, hazed with what looked rather like bliss, and focused slowly on my face. "Why did you stay?" he asked quietly, his eyes searching my expression.

I rolled my eyes at that. "Because you're in rut, and you're probably going to be desperate for it again before I could manage to finish taking a shower."

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth and died. "I suspect you're correct," he said, still in that serious tone. "But I meant... when you saw me."

My brows drew together as I regarded him. "You mean when I saw your cocks."

Pain flickered across his face, but he didn't look away from me. "Yes."

"What made you so certain I was going to go fleeing for the hills?" I asked at last, not sure how to answer him without telling him my body was still pounding with desire.

"I had a life before I was like this. A paramour." His tail wrapped around my ankle as he took a breath. "You're not the first to see me like that."

I felt my eyes widening at the admission. But of course he'd had someone. He was wealthy and titled, the Flame of Faery, the sort of man people cultivated and wooed. Why wouldn't he have had a lover when he'd been injured? The surprise was that he hadn't had one since.

A harsh smile cut across his face before melting back away, eased out of his expression by longing and sorrow. "She tried," he said, his voice going dull. "We'd been together for eighteen hundred and thirty-three years, and it was all but miraculous that I'd survived long enough for Ayre to do... this. Keep me alive." He swallowed, his eyes closing. "People acted like she should have been delighted to have me back. That to leave because I was a disfigured monstrosity would be a cruelty." Pain crossed his face again, tension tightening the corners of his eyes as he looked into my face. "It was crueler that she stayed."

"Varis," I said, horror coloring the word.

He set one finger against my lips to silence me. "I wanted to believe it would work. That if I could endure the way she flinched when I came into a room or the way she always pulled away when I tried to touch her, she would get used to what had happened to me." His jaw clenched and his tail tightened on my ankle, an almost imperceptible shudder running through him at the memories. "She got better at hiding it, and I told myself that things were going to go back to the way they'd been. That love could conquer all, and that even a beast could be desired."

I could only stare at him, the unhealed wounds on his heart writing themselves across his face. Eighteen hundred years. I couldn't even imagine it.

"She tried to have sex with me on my birthday, ten months after I'd been hurt," he said, in that same dead, quiet voice. "She hadn't seen me naked.

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