I licked a line across Peter’s pulse point then bit down hard. He groaned the moment my fangs pierced his skin. I wanted to absorb the sound. His erection prodded against me as his hot blood met my tongue. I’d never drunk anything so intoxicating. Peter’s blood held notes and intricacies I hadn’t tasted before. Perhaps it was the intensity of his magic, or maybe it was merely him. His blood tasted like the finest wine because of what he meant to me, who he was to me.
Try as I might to ignore the feelings that had been building ever since the spell went wrong that night at Indigo, they persisted. The fact of the matter was I’d been falling for him for weeks, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him not feeling the same way.
I drank deeper than I normally did, mainly because I’d gone longer than normal without feeding. By rights, Peter’s survival instincts should’ve kicked in, but he was deep into it, too. His arousal clouded the fact that I was taking too much from him, and the chemicals released from my bite were giving him a high too blissful to want to stop.
I felt his blood in every inch of me, igniting my veins. I wanted to bathe in it, drown in him, and never, ever come up for air. I took one last gulp then forced myself to release him. My fangs snapped back, a trickle of blood rolling down my chin as I drew on every last ounce of willpower to stop feeding.
“Don’t stop,” Peter urged, pulling me back to him.
“I have to,” I regretfully murmured as I bent to lick clean the blood on his neck. The bite mark was more jagged than the ones I left on Angela. My attraction to Peter made me careless. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him.
His dark eyes shone bright with emotion. I was too raw to try and decipher what his look meant. He’d never looked more edible than he did at that moment, drunk on the high I’d given him. I was high, too, high on his magical blood coursing through my system. Peter reached out, his thumb brushing across my lower lip.
“You have something—”
Before he could finish the sentence, I sucked his thumb into my mouth. He hissed as I swirled my tongue around it, licking it clean. His eyes were alight with arousal.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he rasped, and my mouth fell open. I blinked several times, heart pounding. He didn’t mean it. He was just high.
“You’ve never been bitten before, have you?”
His brow furrowed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You don’t love me. You’re just high off my bite. There are chemicals in my saliva—”
He sat forward and gripped the back of my neck. I froze, fascinated by how he held me. “It’s not the high, Darya, intoxicating as it is. It’s the real reason I’ve been so quiet these last two days. I realised I’m in love with you, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Was this a dream? I was stunned silent for a long moment. Finally, I found the wherewithal to speak. “I don’t believe you,” I whispered. What I really wanted to say was, Prove it.
Peter cupped my face and pressed his forehead to mine. It reminded me of the time when he’d given me that peek inside his head. “Let me show you then,” he said, and his magic stirred to life.
A second later, I was inside his mind once more, and he was welcoming me over to the warm, wonderful place he’d pushed me away from the last time. A slideshow played out before me like an old movie reel. I saw a younger version of myself. I must’ve only been about thirteen. I realised it was my first day at St. Bastian’s, and I was walking into the school on my own. I was seeing myself from Peter’s point of view, and it was jarring because I felt exactly what he was feeling at that moment. Interest, curiosity, attraction.
The next snippet played, and it had skipped forward a year or two. I was sitting in the cafeteria eating dinner by myself, and Peter was watching me. He thought I looked beautiful and lonely, and he yearned to walk across the room and sit down next to me. Then, his father’s voice filled his head, telling him that if he ever so much as spoke to a Cristescu he’d disown him. I felt his inner turmoil, how he longed to approach me but feared displeasing his parent.
Next, we were in Mrs Kanumba’s class. I was sitting in front of him, and he was fixated on the way I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. My pen fell on the floor, but I didn’t notice. While no one else was looking, Peter used telekinesis to raise the pen and set it back on my desk before I realised it had fallen. My heart clenched at the small, unseen kindness.