You’ll never be free of me, Miriella.
She wanted to loathe the pleasure that swept down her body at the words, but in her heart, she couldn’t. Miriella’s knees wanted to buckle then, and she wanted to cry out with relief as she threw herself into his strength and forced him to hold her upright or crumble down with her. It was the admission she wanted, no matter how possessively it was pushed through his lips. Miriella had been so afraid that their separation meant Vadim would no longer have any need of her, and she would be forced to face the consequences of acting as if she didn’t care about him.
“Chains,” she managed to scoff a few seconds later, and hoped he had been too wrapped up in himself to notice the brief softness in her blue eyes before her gaze turned hard again. “You were kept by a mare,” she pointed out, and if she could have, might’ve haughtily arched a brow as her eyes raked across his impressive mass.
(It was also an excuse to check him out - he looked as handsome as ever, if not more.)
“I struggle to believe you wore any chains in the Badlands, Vadim.” Miriella made her tone rather dry. She had always been rather good at it; at pretending to be bitchier than she actually felt. When she was young and bored she’d often pick on her brother Jasper until he cried to their father, but she’d never actually been fulfilled when she was doing it. Just like now, she wanted to keep poking and pestering at Vadim, because even fighting with him kept him close to her and that was all she’d wanted every day since they’d been parted. “Or at least any chains you weren’t capable of breaking free of, big and strong as you are,” purposefully the adjectives to describe him were purred, her eyelids briefly narrowing and a smile playing at the corners of her lips.
But that smile faded, as did the playful tone that’d briefly touched her words. Her ears flicked back and she blew an impatient breath between them, which came out like a soft fog of warm air that broke against his body. She remembered when Nahawi had told her of the Badlands heir who raided Vadim away from the Lagoon and, in his words, seemed determined to keep Vadim there. This faceless, unknown princess who had everything that Miriella never would, and had the audacity to take Vadim away, too.
Miriella didn’t even know her name, but she knew that she hated her.
“Who is she?” She found herself asking before she was aware of it, and despite her best efforts, there was a small vein of hurt somewhere there in the underbelly of her voice.
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