CHAPTER 26
"Greater dark..." Her voice trailed off into the damp silence of the cave as she stared down at him.
He was a bloodsucker. An ancient predator. He was the literal embodiment of the dark, but right now, that darkness was being suffocated.
The relentless violet acid of the holy river had pushed his power back into his core, pinning it down.
He was a king being hollowed out from the inside, and he wasn't strong enough to fight it alone anymore.
He needed a conduit. Isabella knew that the blood-bond between a vampire and his marked was a tether of possession and shared shadow—a type of magic that had existed long before the holy wars began.
It was a bridge of shared life. She looked at her trembling hands. Suddenly, a memory of a page she had skimmed in the library flashed through her mind.
She had barely given it a second thought at the time, it was a text about mate-bonding, and since she'd never imagined having a mate, she'd treated it like a boring fairy tale.
