Free Web NovelChapter 205: Chapter 204: Eve Is Starved
She pressed her lips together, breathed carefully, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that Damian’s forearms were right there, the muscles shifting under his skin as he typed, and that she could feel the warmth of Silas’s body through the blanket even though they weren’t touching, and that Damon had just come back into the room and the particular combination of his scent and presence was doing something deeply inconvenient to her concentration.
The bond pulsed.
She felt all three of them go slightly....still.
Oh no.
They could feel it. Of course they could feel it. The bond went both ways, always, and whatever her body was currently broadcasting was apparently not subtle.
"Eve," Damian said, very carefully.
"I’m fine," she said.
"You’re....."
"Fine." She met his eyes with everything she had. "Raphael said three days. I heard him. I am going to be so incredibly good about those three days."
A muscle in Damian’s jaw flickered.
From the foot of the bed, Damon said nothing. His hands were very still on his knees.
Okay, Eve thought, staring at the ceiling while her body continued its deeply unhelpful campaign for attention. This is going to be a problem.
****
By evening of day one, Eve had developed a very sophisticated system for managing the situation.
The system was: don’t think about it.
This was, objectively, not working.
The hunger had settled into something persistent and low-grade, like a song playing in another room that she couldn’t quite tune out. Her succubus nature, apparently deciding that her near-death experience was an excellent reason to ramp up its demands, was pulling at her with the particular insistence of something that had been politely ignored for too long and was no longer interested in being polite.
The worst part was that she genuinely couldn’t tell how much of it she was keeping internal.
She thought she was keeping it internal. She was trying very hard to keep it internal. But the bond was a two-way channel and she had approximately zero training in blocking her own output, and every time she looked at one of her mates she felt the faint, terrible echo of the connection....her need touching their awareness, their response brushing back against hers....
Damian had excused himself to take a call two hours ago and had stayed on that call for significantly longer than any call required.
Silas was currently reading the same page of his report for the fourth time.
Damon hadn’t made a single joke in forty-seven minutes. She’d been counting.
"You should all go do....things," Eve said. "Pack things. I’m fine. I’ll sleep."
"We’re fine here," Silas said, not looking up from his report-that-he-wasn’t-reading.
"You’ve been on that page for....."
"I’m a thorough reader."
Eve closed her eyes. Breathed. Tried to think about something deeply unsexy. Tax returns. Dental work. The specific way fluorescent lighting made everyone look slightly deceased. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Through the bond, she felt Damon’s sharp exhale.
Right. That wasn’t working.
****
Damon’s POV
He was going to actually lose his mind.
That was where this was going. He could see the destination clearly from here.....complete psychological dissolution, probably starting around hour seventy-two of being in the same room as Eve while she radiated need through a bond that had approximately no mercy and no volume control.
Damon had spent a significant portion of his life being in full command of his own appetites. He was good at wanting things and choosing whether or not to act on it. He’d built an entire personality on that.....the easy control, the playful distance, the careful management of what he let himself actually feel versus what he let surface.
The bond had made that significantly more complicated.
The bond with Eve had made it completely impossible.
He could feel her. He could always feel her now, some low background hum of her presence that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat. But tonight that presence was....different. Louder. Warmer. Pulling at him with a specificity that left absolutely no room for misinterpretation.
She needed to feed.
Her body, rebuilding itself from the catastrophic depletion of the trial, was pulling every resource it had toward the healing process....and the healing process for a succubus apparently ran on the same fuel as everything else. The same energy she’d almost died from the lack of.
And he couldn’t do anything about it.
Raphael had been very clear. Three days of complete rest. No strenuous activity.....which was the most aggressively polite euphemism Damon had ever encountered, delivered with the particular grimness of a man who knew exactly what he was asking them to withstand.
Eve’s body didn’t care about Raphael’s medical advice.
Neither, increasingly, did Damon’s.
He was sitting at the foot of the bed watching her try to sleep.....she kept shifting, small restless movements, a faint flush high on her cheekbones that had nothing to do with fever, and every shift sent something through the bond that landed in Damon’s chest like a struck match.
He’d watched her bleed out on the arena floor yesterday.
He’d sat on this bed and poured everything he had through the bond trying to fill the void her body had become, terrified every second that it wasn’t going to be enough. Had watched Raphael’s hands shake with effort and heard her scream when the barrier broke and had not breathed, genuinely had not breathed, until her chest started rising and falling in something that resembled normal again.
He had not slept.
He’d sat at the foot of this bed and watched her breathe and had not slept, because every time he closed his eyes he saw the blood.
And now she was here, alive, healing, and the bond was pulling at him with her need and he was sitting approximately three feet away doing absolutely nothing about it and it was.....
It’s fine, he told himself. It’s three days. You’ve survived worse than three days.
Eve made a small sound.....not pain, not quite, something more like frustration .....and turned onto her side facing him.
Her eyes were open. Heavy-lidded, slightly glassy, that particular look she got when the hunger was getting loud. She wasn’t even fully aware she was doing it....he could tell. This wasn’t intentional. She wasn’t trying to push this through the bond.
Her body was just.....broadcasting. Louder and louder, the signal amplifying with every hour that passed without being answered.
