Fuery released his wrist and palmed his cheeks, keeping his eyes locked on him. The connection grew stronger, and he could almost feel Fuery willing the darkness to leave him, attempting to steal a sliver of it from him to spare him and allow him to regain control over it.
Hartt stepped back and severed the connection, shutting it down so his friend couldn’t steal this darkness from him. It was too dangerous for Fuery to do such a thing. It could easily push him over the edge. He would never forgive himself if Fuery lost himself to the darkness because he hadn’t been able to control his instincts and Fuery had tried to help.
“Perhaps you should get some air?” Grave finished checking on Asher and levelled a black look on Hartt, one that made it clear that he wasn’t making a suggestion.
He was issuing an order.
“I can come—”
Hartt shook his head, cutting Fuery off. “Remain here. Continue the meeting.”
He held his friend’s gaze, hoping Fuery would see what he couldn’t say in front of all these people—keep watch over Mackenzie. He trusted Fuery to keep her safe and keep other males away from her.
With one last look at Mackenzie, Hartt forced himself to leave the room, each step that took him further away from her a struggle. He fought the need to return to her, trudged down the corridor to the grand staircase and followed it downwards. As the distance between them grew, the need to pivot on his heel and hurry back to her, to teleport to her side again, became almost crushing, a weight inside him that felt as if it would kill him.
The vampire was right though. He needed space and air, time to cool off and wrangle his unruly feelings back under control.
He strode through an arched corridor that connected the interior courtyard of the main building of the bastion to an open space that was half training arena and half garden. He headed to his right, towards the wall that enclosed the garden, separating it from the more functional part of the large space.
Beyond an archway cut into the creamy yellow wall, he spied bushes in a series of curved raised beds that had been created using low sandstone walls only a foot high. A gravel path snaked through the garden, drawing his gaze deeper into it. There was even a dark green tree or two. When he spotted flowers, tiny colourful blooms that looked so out of place in the bleak black lands of this part of Hell, his pace quickened.
The need to feel a connection to nature, even one he knew would be weak given his location, had him wanting to sprint to reach those flowers.
Nature hadn’t rejected him in Rosalind’s garden when the darkness had been too much for him, and gods, he hoped she didn’t reject him now when he needed her more than ever. He pushed the squeaky black wrought-iron gate open and didn’t bother to close it behind him, made a beeline for the sparse patch of flowers someone was trying to grow beneath a gnarled dark tree.
The moment he reached them, he sank to his knees before them and pressed his palms to the rich brown dirt between the bright green stems and delicate leaves.
His eyes slipped shut as the connection opened, weak but there, a comfort he badly needed. He sagged forwards and breathed, focusing on each one, on the bond he shared with nature and how it felt as if she was reaching for him, trying to deepen the connection. Or maybe that was just him reaching for her.
The need to fight that had been raging inside him slowly abated as he sank into the connection, as he sat in perfect stillness, feeling only that bond between him and nature. Warmth spread through him, slowly at first, but it gradually built to ease the chill of fear from his blood and erase his worries.
He shifted his hands, hovered them around the bloom of the flower, and breathed in the subtle fragrance of it that struggled to reach him through the thicker scents of the town.
The flower smelled strangely of vanilla.
And sandalwood.
He opened his eyes and looked to his left, back in the direction of the gate.
Mackenzie stood there, and her beauty hit him hard, roused a thousand needs and desires that he was immediately a slave to as he stared at her.
“I’m disturbing you… I think.” She frowned at his hands and then at his face, a puzzled look in her eyes. “Stopping to smell the roses?”
He frowned too, shook his head when he realised something—she didn’t know as much about elves as he had believed. He looked down at the delicate flower, at the broad petals that were white for the most part but a deep violet near the heart of it. He supposed it could be mistaken for a rose at a distance.
“It’s a papaver.” When the confused edge to her bright golden eyes only grew, he added, “A poppy.”
Her dark crimson eyebrows rose. “Oh. It doesn’t look like a poppy. Why were you doing whatever it is you’re doing with it?”
He looked at the flower and let the tension drain from him, denying the instinct to protect his species by withholding information, something that ran deep in all elves.
“I have a connection to nature. It is not as strong as it once was. When I became corrupted… Nature does not like the darkness. She is the light.” He risked a glance at Mackenzie, feeling deep in his tainted soul that she was his light.
She smiled softly at him, utterly undoing him, making him ache with a need to be closer to her, to hold her in his arms for a spell and soak up how good it felt to simply be pressed against her in the hope it would give him the strength to make it through another day without surrendering to his instincts.
“Is your connection with her gone?” She looked genuinely concerned that it might be, her brow furrowing as she gazed at the flower and then looked into his eyes.
He gave a gentle shake of his head. “No. I thought it would be, but recently… after our fight… when the darkness took me… Fuery brought me to a witch to be healed. Rosalind. She lives in England, in a cottage surrounded by nature. I felt connected to nature there.”
And it had overwhelmed him.
“Does it calm you?” She angled her head to her right, causing her fall of scarlet hair to brush her burgundy corset on that side, something he refused to look at because he was having a hard enough time resisting the need to touch her without taking in her curves.
He nodded.
“I feel… not at peace.” His eyebrows knitted hard as he searched for the right word that would explain how he felt when he connected with nature. “Balanced, perhaps? Like the light and dark inside me finds an equilibrium, two ends of a scale that sit at the same level with me in the middle at the pivot point. Neither pull upon me, and I am calm.”
Her smile returned, gentle with understanding. “It sounds peaceful.”
“I suppose it is.” He managed a smile of his own.
When she went to take a step towards him, he shot to his feet and held his hands out in front of him, halting her. She frowned at him again, hurt accompanying the flicker of confusion in her eyes this time.
She was reading his intentions the wrong way again, mistaking them for something else. He wanted her close to him, wanted to narrow the distance between them and gather her into his arms and hold her.
Kiss her.
Only he knew it wouldn’t end there.
If he held her as he wanted in the hope it would calm his instincts, assuaging them with an innocent form of contact with her, it would lead to a desire to kiss her that he wouldn’t be able to resist, and that would lead to him wanting her, aching to be inside her and satisfy her, to feel the deepest of connections to her.