Chapter 423:

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Admitting it aloud for the first time was like shedding twelve heavy cloaks Daemonikai hadn’t known he was wearing.

“Oh…dearest, I know.” Evie gave a kind, watery smile. Taking his hand, they walked along the shore, the waves lapping gently at their feet. “I know you better than you know yourself, Daemon.”

He breathed deeply, the air suddenly feeling lighter, fresher. He could finally say it without drowning in sorrow, without the rain of guilt.

It was exhilarating.

“I don’t know what I ever did to deserve a woman like you, Evie,” Daemonikai said sincerely.

“I was the lucky one,” she exhaled a slow breath. “Always have been.”

“Galilea made me feel strange things. But I was okay with it, for it distracted me from my misery. That was, until I found out why she made me feel that way.” He stared out at the ocean. “I felt so angry, deceived. Guilty. I thought sending her away was the best thing to do.”

“But it wasn’t, was it?”

At first, he felt nothing but emptiness. Then his nightmares came more frequently, followed by dreams of her in his arms, in his life. It was torture.

To his left, he saw the family he had lost, the empty pit that was once the center of his universe. On the other side, he saw the soulbond he had lost—a female whose body he craved, whose scent he was addicted to.

Daemonikai had drifted into a new version of hell.

“Those memories…” Evie spoke softly. “The ones you recovered from your feral time… they didn’t make things easier, did they?” As if that hell wasn’t enough, those lost memories came.

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Daemonikai recalled the night they flooded his mind. Vivid, fragmented images.

Emeriel patiently hand-feeding him.

His beast mounting her again and again.

The surge of rage he’d felt as he tore apart the slave master who dared to touch her.

He remembered how she had summoned him to court, and he had answered, driven by a need to protect her, a need to possess, and a need to keep her safe from harm.

Finding a strange contentment in her presence, Emeriel had been his beacon of light in the face of his mindless instincts.

He recalled holding her in his arms in the dead of night, as she bravely cuddled against his fur.

Memories flooded his mind—how she had risked her life repeatedly to be with him, satisfying his lust, coming to him during her heats. And he, in turn, plunging into his ruts, even in his feral state. His instincts screaming, Must take her, must make her mine.

“I don’t want you to die,” he remembered her crying as she said those words. She had hugged his beast form in the hallway after he saved her from armed assassins. “They are going to kill you, and it hurts me so much. Please, don’t die.”

“Here,” she had whispered, baring her delicate throat to him. “Drink from me. Take what you need.”

He remembered the sweet nectar of her blood, the heavenly sensation sliding down his throat. He remembered her tears, her pleas for him to stay alive and return to his male form.

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