Ashes of Midnight by Lara Adrián Page A

hit he took to the chest earlier tonight. He was no longer in control of his thirst; it had overthrown his will now. It was all he knew as he moved toward Claire, everything about him that was Breed and male trained wholly on this woman.
     
“Why did you leave me?” she asked as he neared her.
     
He grunted, savoring the vanilla sweet scent of her blood as it raced beneath the surface of her delicate skin. “To protect you.”
     
She frowned, dubious. “From what?”
     
“From the worst of me.”
     
She gave a slow shake of her head. “I was never afraid of you, Andre. I’m still not afraid.”
     
“You damn well should be … Frau Roth.”
     
He bared his fangs and pinned her in the amber glow of his transformed eyes—one brief moment’s warning, enough for her to back away from him or hit him or scream. She couldn’t know how hard it was for him to give her even that much. He moved closer to her, crowding her with his body, even as he told himself he still had honor, that the fire living inside him hadn’t yet burned away all of his humanity.
     
But that was a lie.
     
He felt the bleak hollowness of that hope crumble the instant his fangs bit into the tender flesh of Claire’s throat.
     
She gasped. Her hands came up between the hard press of his body against hers, her palms flattened across his sternum. He felt her sudden tension, her jolt of shock and adrenaline as he caged her in his arms and drew the first taste of her warm, rich blood into his mouth.
     
At first, he fed with mindless hunger. Gulp after gulp, driven by the primal need for nourishment. But through the haze of his blood-fevered mind, as he drank from Claire’s vein, he began to feel something… else.
     
Her blood scent swamped him, filling his head like the sweetest intoxication. The rapid beat of her pulse against his tongue now blossomed into a visceral pound that echoed in his own blood. Possession rose within him, dark and dangerous. He held her fast in his bite, savoring the taste of her as his body went rigid with the need to claim her in a more carnal way, as well.
     
He felt her fingers digging into his back as he drank from her, breath rasping in soft, shallow pants against his ear. His senses filled with her. A low, humming power flowed into him, power he felt roaring through his cells and into every fiber of his body. Deeper still, into the fabric of his soul, the core of his entire being.
     
Claire was the first, the only Breedmate he’d ever drunk from, and now there could be no other for him so long as she lived. All that was Breed in him came alive as though he’d been asleep all his life and now overflowed with a profound awareness of this female—now and forever. An eternal stamp, a bond of blood.
     
A connection to her that he could not undo except by death, hers or his own.
     
“Andreas.”
     
Claire’s soft cry of distress tore through him like a knife.
     
Horrified at what he’d just done to her—to both of them—he sealed her wound with a quick sweep of his tongue and reeled back on his heels. Her cheeks were flushed dark rose, her breath sawing through her parted lips as she stared at him in abject shock. Reichen felt her dread like his own. Every intense emotion she felt from now on would be his, as well.
     
“Andre,” she whispered, lifting her hand up to touch his healing bite. Her face was twisted with a miserable sort of confusion. “Oh, my God…What have you done?”
     
He took a step backward, leveled by shame.
     
Claire belonged to another male. Not him. She had given herself to Roth, whether Reichen liked it or not. She was already blood bonded, as Roth was blood bonded to her. Now, with this unconscionable breach of that sacrament, Reichen had imposed himself on that bond.
     
In drinking from Claire, he had irrevocably linked himself to her.
     
He would be drawn to her always. Aware of her always. It was the most sacred gift a Breedmate could give one of his kind, and he had taken it from her—stolen it—in