Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [738]
“I’ve seen your power, Andre. I’ve seen what it can do. But it hasn’t hurt me—-you haven’t hurt me.”
“Not yet,” he replied, his tone dark. “But now it’s stronger than it ever was before. It was reckless of me to summon the fires the night my Darkhaven was attacked. It’s more deadly than before, and each time the fury comes alive in me, it burns hotter than the last time.”
Claire saw his torment, but instead of rousing her sympathy, it stirred a biting anger. “Is your vengeance worth all of that? Is anything worth killing yourself in order to have it? That’s what you’re doing, Andre. You’re killing yourself with this awful power of yours, and you know it.”
He scoffed sharply, a wordless denial. “I’m doing what needs to be done. I don’t care what happens to me in the end.”
“I do,” she said. “Damn it, I care what happens to you. I’m looking at you now and I see a man who is destroying himself with fury. How many more times can you come out of the flames without losing yourself to them? How long before the fire consumes your humanity?”
He stared at her for a long moment, his square jaw held tight. He shook his head. “What would you have me do?”
“Stop,” she said. “Stop all of this, before you no longer have the ability to end it.”
The logic was so clear to her. He had an obvious choice here: Let go of his rage and live, or continue his pursuit of vengeance and perish—either by the power that she could see was destroying him, or by the war he was purposely stoking with Wilhelm Roth.
“There is no stopping it, Claire. I’ve come too far to turn back now and you know it. I’ve pushed Roth too far these past few nights and weeks that I’ve been hunting him down.” He exhaled a clipped sigh and his mouth curved into a humorless smile. “Ironic, isn’t it? That what drove me away from you then is now the thing that’s brought us back together, such as it is. But what you said earlier is right. You do deserve peace now… and I should leave you to it.”
He moved close and pressed his lips against her forehead, then dropped a tender kiss on her mouth. He drew back, then turned and started to walk away.
Claire watched him start up the lawn. Her heart broke a little with every step he took. She couldn’t let him go—not like this. Not when every fiber of her being was crying out for him to stay.
“Andreas, wait.”
He kept going, long strides carrying him farther and farther away from her.
She couldn’t have held back from him if she herself were chained and dumped and forgotten behind him. Claire ran up the grass and caught his hand. She turned him around to face her, so many words and regrets clogging her throat.
“Don’t go” was all she managed to say. It was threadbare, a plea.
His dark eyes glittered with sparks of amber. His golden skin seemed tighter in the moonlight, his mouth a stern, determined line that didn’t quite conceal the swell of fangs behind his lips.
“Andre, please … don’t go.”
Claire lifted up onto her toes and curved her fingers around his strong nape, dragging him down to meet her lips. She kissed him with all the passion she’d always held for him—all the desperate, impossible yearnings that had lived in her heart all these long years.
He kissed her back with even greater ardor. His arms went around her, crushing her to him so that she could feel the hard heat of his chest and thighs against her and the harder, hotter part of him that pressed like a length of thick steel at her hip. Claire reveled in his arousal, in the warm, rough moan that vibrated in her bones as he broke their kiss to bury his face in the curve of her neck and