CHAPTER 137: ONE HUNDRED & THIRTY SEVEN

(Seriously. More Violence)

Valka

But he responds just as swiftly. In the next moment, he isn’t in front of me anymore and I am being hoisted off the ground and flung across the room. I hit the wall in a crash, but I am past feeling pain. Adrenaline flares hot and hard, and when he reaches me, I am up on my feet, swinging again.

Cheek, jaw, collarbone, chest, eye. The wood snaps an edge on his skin with an unclean sound. He stumbles backward clutching his bleeding face. "Back to raging like an animal, I see." He lets his hand fall and I see the excitement in his eyes. "Gods, but no one else makes me feel so... alive."

He punches me. I hear something crack in the back of my head as I hit the wall. I don’t feel it. I swing. He catches my wrist and twists it. My cry is not one of pain but outrage as he wrenches the wood from my hand and smashes the side of my head in with it.

I stumble, but I don’t fall. I take a wild, leaping run, meeting him with a madness I cannot control. I land on him like a mountain cat, legs wrapped around his torso, and he jerks his head back, preventing me from biting his neck. But my filed teeth close around his left ear.

And when he tears me off him, I take his ear along with me.

He howls in outrage, the cry shaking the walls. He touches his ear and fury bleeds the grey of his eyes to molten gold, swirling in black. "I’m going to rip you to pieces," he tells me.

Rafael beats me with the sole devotion of a man whose only purpose on earth is to inflict pain. He breaks my arms. He breaks my legs. He bashes my skull in. My jaw cracks. My lips torn up. And when he believes himself done, he tears off my dress, pressing me against the ground.

"I’m going to fuck you to fucking death, Valka," he snarls, breath hot against my cheek. "I’ll do it while your mate tears apart this castle looking for you."

I should be gone. I was gone. My body was a map of broken lines, every path leading toward an ending.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I could barely remember where I was or where my limbs are.

I don’t fully understand what happens next as he undoes his britches. He lowers his weight onto me--and my body responds.

Not my mind. Not my will. My body.

It snaps back.

Not gently. Not cleanly. Not in any way a body should.

Bones grind and shriek as they realign. Tendons whip tight. A wet, electric crackle races through my limbs, folding joints back into place with a violence that rattles the walls. My spine arches in an impossible bow, then slams straight. My jaw clicks, then knits. My ribs climb back into their rightful shape like hands dragging themselves out of a grave. My canines lengthen into fangs and My fingers curl against the stone as claws threaten to burst beneath my nails.

The pain is incandescent, so sharp it circles past agony into something euphoric, primal, divine. I scream. My vision whites out. My hearing dims to a single ringing note.

I can’t breathe. Then I breathe too much. Too fast.

The shift tries to take me. I feel it rising like a tidal wave under my skin. Something beneath my skin glows hot and furious, as if I’ve been set alight from the inside.

Rafael’s hands freeze. He feels it. He feels me changing beneath him, and he scrambles back from me, eyes filled with horror. He’s had that look on his face before. It’s the same one from the war camp, when he’d called me a monster.

Something ancient and merciless looks through my eyes. My lips peel back from my teeth. A snarl tears out of me, guttural and wrong and perfect. I’m so... hungry.

He stumbles backward, but my body moves for me in jerky responses as my limbs shatter and reform, only to shatter again. I catch the front of his shirt with bloodied fingers and pull him back to me. The ease of it is fascinating. My eyes fixate on his pounding pulse, the movement of the little apple in his throat as he swallows.

"I’m thirsty," I say aloud, and kiss his neck softly. My jaw yawns wide and my teeth pierces through his skin. He bucks, roaring, but I clasp his head in place, feeding the thirst inside me. But he tastes wrong, his screams too loud. And it makes me angry enough to push him off.

My head shakes, my vision hazing red, and a sweet scent tickles my nostrils. My head snaps up towards the ceiling. The cries coming from above, the bellow of a man yelling my name, looking for me. Yes, I think, rising without stretching. Him.

I start for the door. I don’t remember why it is important to kill... Rafael. In the next second, even his name ceases to exist in my mind. I don’t remember anything other than this ravaging thirst and hunger for... something I cannot name. All I know is that the silver-haired one will give it to me. And I need to find him.

A menacing snarl cuts through the air, making my head snap back. I’m not the only one changing. The grey-eyed one. Red fur is spurting from his skin and the skin where I’d ravaged his neck is healing rather swiftly. "Do not turn your back on me!"

I cock my head at him and obey him, only because he seems so eager to die. And then, he runs for me, his clothes ripping as he continues to transform. And I grant it to him.

It doesn’t happen swiftly. He is fast, but I am faster. I raise my hand and slash his pretty face. He aims for me, snarling, but he misses. Because he is mad and I am focus on gifting him a very slow death. My claws rake along his skin, slicing it to ribbons. I am covered in his blood and he is backing away. His face is disfigured. His eye... is somewhere on the floor, I think.

I kick his foot out from under him. I call him a pathetic little bitch as I catch his ankles and rip them from his legs. He begins crawling. He’s pleading. That makes me very mad. Why do the vile ones always beg when they die?

So, I grab the forgotten wood on the floor and begin to hack.