Empire: The New Protectorate Stories: Volume Two by Abigail Kelly

Author:Abigail Kelly [Kelly, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Zia woke up the next morning feeling… different.

Not massively, of course, but there were definitely a few things she noticed. Firstly, she slept past sunrise. That was unusual for her, but not altogether surprising considering she spent the better part of the night trying to stay awake with her vampire. It didn’t necessarily mean that she was already shifting her sleep schedule to match his, but her stomach still did a giddy little flip at the thought.

The second thing she noticed was the ache in her thigh.

It wasn’t terrible — like a charlie horse, maybe, or the strain of a muscle slightly over-used — but when she skimmed her fingers over the two small wounds, Zia was surprised to feel feverish heat radiating from her skin.

If she held very still, she thought she could feel her pulse beating there.

She lay in bed for a long time, her palm cupped around the bite mark, as she went over the events of the night again and again. It wasn’t the same as if she woke up curled up next to him, but the heat against her palm made her feel like he was there. It captured just a tiny bit of that intimacy she craved.

Zia rubbed her thumb over the puncture wounds as she pressed her free hand against her chest. Her heart beat a quick rhythm. Magic popped and fizzled under her skin at the memory of Harlan’s touch, his raw voice, the way he tucked her possessively against his chest as she finally succumbed to sleep.

Is it normal to want to bond with someone so soon?

Of course, she was getting to the age when most witches bonded with a partner — romantic or otherwise. Human bodies weren’t adapted to process magic without significant degradation over time. For witches with a lot of power, a bond was an essential thing. It passed their magic through another being before cycling it back to the original host, nullifying the effects of magical overload.

Her parents had begun to worry about her finding a bondmate, but Zia hadn’t been in a hurry. She was only a hundred years old and not so powerful as to be at risk of burnout, the overload of magic that fried witches from the inside out, anytime soon. She could wait for the right person to trust with her magic.

None of her boyfriends so far had so much as aroused even the thought of a bond, and Zia had always assumed that whoever she chose would be someone deeply steady, even boring. Who else would she trust with her magic? Her life?

Her breath hitched as she smoothed her palm over the soft skin of her thigh. Was it crazy that when she thought of her bondmate now, all she pictured was Harlan?

He was a criminal. An assassin. He was also twice her age and a vampire.

Absolutely none of those things were on her list for traits a good bondmate should have.

And yet she felt so acutely alone without him

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