Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [631]
“What about blood?” She watched as every muscle in Nikolai’s body seemed to tense up the moment the words left her lips.
“What about it?” he asked, his voice wooden, unreadable.
“You asked me earlier if I’d ever taken Sergei’s blood. Would I be healed now if I had?”
He lifted his shoulder in a vague shrug, but the tension in his big body remained. When he lifted his gaze to hers, there were flashes of amber burning into the wintry blue of his irises. His pupils were thinning by fractions as he stared at her.
“Would I be healed now if you gave me your blood, Nikolai?”
“Are you asking me for it?”
“If I were, would you give it to me?”
He exhaled sharply, and when his lips parted to draw another breath, Renata saw the sharp points of his fangs. “It’s not as simple a question as you might think,” he replied, a rough edge to his voice. “You will be bonded to me. The same way Yakut was linked to you through your blood, you will be linked to me. You’ll feel me in your blood. You will be aware of me always, and it can’t be undone, Renata—not even if you drink from another Breed male down the line. Our bond will trump any others. It can’t be broken, not until one of us is dead.”
This was no small thing; she understood that. Hell, she could hardly believe she was considering it at all. But deep down, crazy as it might be, she trusted Nikolai. And she truly didn’t care about the cost to herself. “If we do this, will I be well enough to walk out of here tonight and search for Mira?”
His jaw was clamped tight enough to make a muscle jerk in his cheek. He stared at her, his features going more feral by the moment. Bit by bit, the blue of his eyes was engulfed by a fiery glow.
When it didn’t seem like he would answer her, Renata reached out and laid her hand firmly on his arm. “Will your blood heal me, Nikolai?”
“Yes,” he said, the word sounding strangled in his throat.
“Then I want to do this.”
As he held her gaze in an intense silence, she thought about all the times Sergei Yakut had fed from her veins, how degraded and used she’d felt… how revolted she’d been by the idea that her blood was nourishing such a cruel, monstrous being. She would never have considered taking any part of him into herself, not even if it had been a matter of her own survival. It would have killed a piece of her soul to willingly put her mouth on Yakut’s body. To drink from him? She wasn’t even sure that her love for Mira could have overcome something as vile as that.
But Nikolai wasn’t a monster. He was honorable and just. He was tender and protective, a male who was feeling more and more a partner to her the farther they traveled down this uncertain road. He was her best ally right now. Her brightest hope of retrieving Mira.
And deeper still, in a place that was all woman, with needs and wants she hardly dared to examine too closely, she craved a taste of Nikolai. She craved that more than she had a right to.
“Are you sure, Renata?”
“If you’ll give me your blood, then yes,” she said. “I want to take it.”
In the long silence that followed, Nikolai sat back from her on the bed. She watched as he unbuttoned the big oxford shirt, waiting for her uncertainty—her apprehension— to worsen. It didn’t happen. As Nikolai stripped off the shirt and sat before her bare-chested, his dermaglyphs pulsing, every arch and swirl saturated with variegating shades of wine-dark colors, she felt no misgivings at all. When he crawled up toward her and lifted his right arm up to his mouth, baring his huge fangs, then sinking them into his wrist, she felt nothing even close to fear.
And when, in that next moment, he placed the bleeding punctures next to her lips and told her to drink, Renata had no inclination whatsoever to refuse.
The first taste of Nikolai’s blood on her tongue was a shock.
She’d expected to be swamped by the bitter taste of copper, but instead she tasted