Read Online Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 by V. M. Black - Free Book Online Page A

voice low. “When we agnates are alone, the burden of existence becomes crippling. So many years, one after another, days that feel like they have been lived before, when even the hours feel used, so heavy and empty at once....”
    He trailed off, then continued more matter-of-factly. “It wears on you until you chase the rush, doing anything to get a momentary thrill so that you feel, at least for a moment, alive. Or you shut out everything and everyone and slowly descend into the kind of isolation that you never come back from—the senility of the agnates is not something that is ever recoverable. The only escape for that crushing isolation is a cognate. A bond. The other, missing half. You. And the bond is never entirely one way.”
    Not me, I thought. Not me, specifically, but any cognate, any girl who didn’t die....
    But how many human men in the world might I fall for, if I were free from Dorian? How many chance meetings might, under the right circumstances, fill a human definition of true love?
    How different was I from him, really? Did it matter that he might have bonded to another if the one he ended up with was me?
    I didn’t even know whether I could trust that thought, whether it was truly mine at all.
    Dorian turned me away from him and untied the corset laces. This time, he worked them loose so that the hooks on the front could be slid apart. I sighed with relief as the garment dropped from my body, and he pulled me back against him for a moment and kissed the top of my head.
    He released me, and I turned back around. I was naked now except for his jewels in my ears, at my wrist and my throat. And I was increasingly aware of the wetness that was running down my leg.
    I cleared my throat. “Um. If you don’t mind, I need to use the bathroom.”
    He grinned then, an expression I’d never seen on him before. Standing there, with his hair tousled and that look on his face, he almost seemed human, as if he hadn’t been confessing his own atrocities just moments before.
    “Be my guest,” he said. “I will join you in a minute.”

Chapter Eight
    M y heart sped up, and I ducked quickly into the bathroom. I should have been acutely self-conscious, I thought. I’d felt that way on Wednesday, my first time with him. And what had happened in the study had been more intimate than that, more intimate than I’d imagined possible. But now any sense of embarrassment seemed to have gone.
    Could it be because he didn’t want me to feel it? I tried that idea out in my mind. I didn’t think so. I thought that I was changing on my own, or at least in my own response to whatever held me to him.
    But it didn’t matter why. Change was dangerous. He was dangerous, desperately so, a threat to everything I was or ever wanted to be. And yet when he’d grinned at me, I’d smiled back, as if he were an ordinary man. As if he didn’t threaten everything I cared about.
    I should be running away now, throwing on any clothes I could find and scrambling out of the window after what I had seen that night. The horror of the introduction had shown me just how bad Dorian’s world could be.
    But it wouldn’t do any good. I could run away, escape for a day or a week, but I knew that he would eventually find me. And worse, I knew that eventually, I would walk over broken glass to get back to him. No matter what it meant to me.
    As long as there was a bond between us, there was no way out.
    Already, I hardly recognized my reflection. My ash brown hair was still elegant, if haphazardly so, like nothing that I’d ever worn before, and though Jane Worth’s cosmetics had been smudged, they still gave an illusion of sophistication that I’d never had. A beautiful woman dripping with beautiful jewels in a beautiful house possessed by a beautiful man....
    It was all so desperately, dangerously seductive, and it came with a terrible price. I took the jewelry off quickly, setting it on the counter, but the woman in the mirror looked no