Read Online Bitten by Ecstasy: 2 (Dark Judgment) by Naima Simone - Free Book Online Page B

pushed herself upright. “Believe me, I didn’t know the consequences at the time. I had no idea that one act would leave me like,” she flitted her hands in front of her, “this.”
    “So why? Why give me your blood? What made you do it?”
    Confusion and not a little frustration welled inside her. What did he want from her?
    “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she huffed. “I already told you, I didn’t know—don’t know. You were almost eviscerated, losing so much blood and close to death.” She caught the minute tautening of his mouth and the slight whitening of his scars, but he remained silent. Sinéad sighed. “You’re the doctor,” she reminded him, unable to keep the exasperation from her tone. “When someone is leaking blood like a sieve, the procedure is to first stop the loss then replace the fluid. Like a transfusion. So after the first couple of days, when your body hadn’t begun the healing cycle on its own, I thought…maybe…my blood would…”
    Her nails bit into the nap of the upholstery as she was flooded with not-too-distant memories of that time. The helplessness and vulnerability that had been as alien to her as the frail body she’d suddenly inhabited. The crushing loss of her wings and freedom of flight. She’d been grounded—literally—and imprisoned to the earth in a structure that was both weak and as strong as the most impenetrable cell.
    “I had no clue I was sacrificing more and more of my immortality with every feeding. No idea when I left you I would no longer be…me.”
    Powerful. Invincible.
    She hadn’t meant to utter me . Hadn’t meant to reveal something so…exposing.
    “Would you do it again?” he asked, his voice a quiet murmur. “Knowing the repercussions, would you give me your blood again?”
    Staring into his face, the marks of the pain he’d suffered etched into his skin, yes hovered on the tip of her tongue. It was the civilized thing to say. The human thing to say. Of course if I could save your life I would do it all over again.
    Except…would she? Would she deliberately consign herself to this shell dying around her with the passing of every day? She shook her head, meeting Bastien’s steady gaze.
    “I don’t know,” she whispered. Regret echoed in the words yet she couldn’t hold in the truth.
    Bastien didn’t blink and his steady gaze held her captive. Finally, he nodded.
    “I don’t know if I’d want you to.” The low, harsh admission took her aback. She cocked her head to the side. Maybe she’d misheard him. Maybe her mind had mixed up the words in a dyslexic jumble. But the bitterness stamped on his scarred, beautiful face informed Sinéad she hadn’t misunderstood. “I’m a hippogryph. Yet I’m not. I’m a man, but I’m not. I have fangs, red eyes and a hunger that hunts me even when I manage to sleep.” His expression hardened, his pupils widened, the emerald orbs nearly swallowing the ring of bright jade surrounding them. “A hunger for cruxim blood.”
    Long, obsidian lashes lowered, hiding his intent, pulse-jacking stare. “I belong nowhere. To no one.”
    A sensation, not unlike the gentle rapping of knuckles on a door, tapped at her skull. Unlike when he touched her, this light contact was solely his emotion, held none of the overpowering, turbulent mixture of his and hers.
    Without hesitation, she lowered the natural walls of her mind. Immediately, tendrils of grief and pain borne on zephyrs of confusion, hate and fear streamed into her consciousness. The force of the emotional gale dragged at her mind, her soul, threatening to bury her under its intensity. Inhaling, she closed her eyes and deliberately pictured a sliding, steel door. She slowly eased the door closed, reducing the speed and concentration of the tumultuous psychic flow into her head. The torrent of his emotion decelerated to a controllable current. Like a centrifuge separating blood and plasma, she filtered and sifted the strength of the