The Stars are Dying : (Nytefall: Book 1)

“Where are we going?” I asked after too long in giddy silence.

“Always so inquisitive,” he mused.

I watched him as we walked. Nyte had never felt like a stranger. He’d never treated me like one either, and I couldn’t place what it was that made me gravitate toward him. He slipped his gaze down, but there was something pained in his irises at whatever he found in mine, and it dissipated my growing thrill.

“I didn’t think you would object to a climb,” he said, stopping, and I followed his line of sight.

We stood in a dead-end alley, and the climb he indicated was a rather precarious venture up the side of a building. My mind mapped the route too easily.

“We won’t have much time if you stare at it,” Nyte called—from above now.

I grumbled a curse since I was the only one needing to put in physical effort to scale the building. But as soon as my legs were stretching to find the next ledge and my fingers were grappling with each crevice and stuck-out brick, freedom became me.

I spied Nyte standing on the roof across from me and realized the jump it would take to join him. I’d hesitated on Rose’s balcony, but this jump I was somehow more confident I could achieve. So I ran.

I cast out my arms, and in those seconds I felt nothing but air. An overwhelming sense of what it would be like to fly higher, soar longer, made me tumble to my landing. I caught myself on my hands and knees, breathing deeply but wanting to do it again.

“Are you all right?” Nyte crouched, examining me for any injury.

I was more than all right. Straightening, I looked over the distorted array of rooftops, wanting more than anything to fly above them all.

“Come,” Nyte said gently, and I felt the brush of his hand against mine.

I watched our palms meet. My fingers slipped through the spaces between his, and though he didn’t grip me with the realness I wanted or emit the warmth I craved, I was glad when he didn’t immediately pull away. Instead he continued to lead with my hand locked with his, and I ignited inside.

“Try not to fall,” he whispered from behind me, bracing his hands on my waist when we came to a small wooden ladder attached to the outside of a tall tower. “I can’t really catch you if you do.”

I nodded, bracing my hands to climb, but Nyte pressed himself to me closer, his phantom form so tangible I wanted to lean back.

“It’s killing me,” he added in a low murmur against my ear. “I wish I had the strength to stay away from you.”

My head turned, and our lips came so close I should have been able to feel his breath, but all that embraced me was the cold winter wind. I ached inside—more than what was safe to feel for him. “I don’t want you to stay away.”

In my next blink Nyte was gone. On instinct I looked up, finding him perched in the opening, but he didn’t look down. I began to climb, though a part of me was crying out not to follow him any further. What sped up my heart was sure to shatter it, but I didn’t think it belonged to me anymore.

Nyte wasn’t waiting for me at the top when I finally gripped the ledge and hauled myself over. I didn’t expect the warmth to hit me with the open archways as windows. My breath was stolen by the space.

“We’re in the city bell tower,” I observed, walking around the perimeter of the huge brass bell in the center.

“Yes,” Nyte said from within a break in the stone, and when I found him, he dipped into the shadows.

I followed after him. The height down from the narrow plank I walked across turned my stomach. I wondered about the magick that was keeping the outside chill away. Daylight broke again at the end of the hall, and I walked into a room set out like a person had lived here. A large four-poster bed took up a lot of the floor. Black silk sheets and cushions dressed it with dark beauty. There was a bathtub and a fireplace, humble but with a personal touch it felt wrong to intrude upon. Though nothing could steal my interest like what I found positioned by the large open archway window.

“What is that?” I breathed.

It pointed to the sky, a large cylindrical invention on three legs.

“I would show you, but it’s for the stars. It’s called a telescope. I have a great depth of field through the stars without it, but this is unparalleled.”

“So can I.” Wandering around the telescope, I laid a hand on it, wishing it were night. “See through the stars, I mean. Sometimes I wonder if others also stare for long enough to feel pulled between them.” My eyes were drawn to him in the silence. He watched me so thoughtfully I wondered what was on his mind.

“You were born for the sky,” he said, so quietly it was like a slipped thought.

I took a deep breath at the skip of my pulse. “The owner might come back,” I said.

Despite my concern, Nyte sat on the edge of the bed. My gravitational pull to him became so strong as he watched me. Turmoil swirled in his golden irises.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

I couldn’t be certain of what he was thinking or feeling, only that it was something vulnerable I wanted to discover more of. I crossed the space to him. Reaching out, I slipped a palm across his cheek, and my stomach flipped when his went over mine—not to reject my touch, but as though he longed for it to be true as much as I did. His brow drew tighter as his eyes closed, and I’d never seen him look so heartbreakingly lost.

“You can tell me,” I whispered.

“I told you not to give me your soul, Starlight,” he whispered.

“I haven’t.”

His eyes closed and an arm circled around me, drawing me closer to him with a sigh. “Do you know what a soul is?”

I could hardly think with his palm flat on my back, coiling slowly around my waist.

“It is the very core of what we are. The truest form of our emotions. It is always reaching for something lost. The beholder can refuse what it reaches for, but not without a lifelong depression for their denial.”

My fingers slipped over his neck, feeling the soft back of his hair. “How do we know when it’s found?”

I drew a shallow gasp when he looked up at me and pulled me in gently. One knee eased onto the bed beside his thigh. Our lips hovered shy of touching, and I wished I could feel his heart under my palm to know if it raced as much as mine.

“When you turn the key on the past and stop looking to the future. Because there is nothing but now to be found. There is nothing more certain than the need to treasure every second of the now as if there won’t be a tomorrow.”

I nodded, the need for release swelling in my chest. Nothing but now.

“I need you to cast me away,” he said. “You know how to do it. To my dismay, you’ve been getting damn good at it.”

He felt so real against me, his chest firm, only missing warmth, but I didn’t let that waver my focus. I wanted him here. My hand trailed higher until he tensed when my fingers brushed the skin of his neck, and maybe my desperation to have him conjured some heat at the contact.

“I can’t,” I whispered. I met those fiery eyes, seeing the last of his restraint snap right before he broke.

“Fuck,” he said as his lips crashed to mine.

Our mouths moved feverishly, his hand cupping my nape to keep us close. I whimpered at the absence of something, but I tried to forget where he was and that this was only as good as a dream. Nothing had ever touched me with such exhilaration like this, and I wondered how I would even survive the true feeling.

He hooked me behind my knee, pulling me over his lap completely, then reached under my cloak, but it wasn’t enough. I needed his skin against mine even in this blissful torture of a ghost reality.

“I have waited so long for you,” he murmured, pressing his lips to my jaw, then my neck, and I moaned softly, clutching his hair in my fingers. “I would have waited an eternity for this.”

He was too convincing. Too addictive. As maddening as his mouth was along my collar, I brought his lips back to mine, and we erupted.

I straddled him where he lay. His tongue slipped into my parted mouth, and he groaned, switching our positions effortlessly. His hips ground against my core, making me moan softly. That seemed to encourage him. He pressed harder, raising my pleasure, and I arched into the blissful torture. Not enough. I whimpered in frustration at what was building too slowly for me to chase it.

“When I fuck you, it will be real,” he murmured huskily in my ear. “You know how to find your pleasure. You’ve done it before, thinking of me.”

I gasped. My eyes flew open as I realized what he meant, but Nyte’s lips continued to trail down my neck. “You were in my mind,” I breathed.

“It was one of the easiest times to be with you from afar. How much you wanted me there, and, fuck, Astraea, I was both thrilled with your thoughts and absolutely murderous not to be the one inside you.”

“I wanted it to be you.” My lust-hazed mind let slip the confession without care.

Nyte chuckled sinfully down my throat. “I know.”

My thighs tightened around him, but he stopped moving, leaving me needy and breathless.

“Slip that hand down your body, Starlight,” he coaxed thickly.

Realizing what he wanted me to do, I took a few heartbeats to decide. His irises were all fiery challenge.

So I did.

My fingers undid the laces and buttons of my pants, pulse thrumming as he watched their every movement. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Nyte fixed his attention between us, where he was still positioned against me, but I managed to dip my hand under my waistband, finding myself slick with arousal. My head tipped back, and his groan only added confidence. More than that. Knowing he was devouring everything I was doing and it was bringing him pleasure too built on an impending climax.

“Look at you,” he growled. “So beautiful as you touch yourself for me.”

My hips rolled, knocking against the strain of him in his pants, and his arm slipped under my arched back to press us tighter together.

“Oh god!” I cried, chasing the pleasure scattering over my skin.

Nyte’s mouth came down on mine, hard and only once, before he mumbled against my lips, “Say my name, Astraea.”

It was already dancing on my tongue as I circled the sensitive bud of my apex harder and faster to his sinful whispers in my ear.

“That’s it. Use me.”

My pants were too tight for me to curve my fingers inside myself, but imagining him above me, what it would feel like to take him, compensated for it. Blood rushed through me, flushing my skin and making me pant with the chase of pleasure. I whimpered with the frustration of being restricted by my clothing, wanting to shed them, but I couldn’t stop.

More so, I wanted it to be his hand between us. Relieving the ache he’d caused. Stars, I even imagined his head between my thighs to taste the arousal he ignited through me, what it would feel like to have his fingers curve into me.

I boldly left every one of my sinful thoughts open to him.

“I plan to savor every taste of you,” he purred close to my ear. “Feel every perfect inch of you, hear every sound I’m going to draw from you, and watch––” His head dipped down to where my hand disappeared. His growl was low and primal, dragging his sight back up. “Watch when you take me beautifully.” His hand slipped up my side, phantom teeth nipped my lobe, and I unraveled.

With how much I wanted it, the feel of him was too real, and I ground against him as I reached the pinnacle of my climax.

“Nyte!” I cried out, trembling violently with the first hit, unlike anything I’d experienced in a similar manner. I breathed hard, trying to collect myself while the tremors shook through me.

Nyte didn’t ease away, planting soft kisses over my neck and jaw as I came down. “That,” he said, squeezing my thigh still hooked around him, “was the single most exquisite thing I’ve seen and heard in centuries.”

Now the cloud of my lust was dispersing, I lay in utter surprise at what I’d done. In front of him—part of me had done it for him. Stars above, who was I? This new air of confidence I wasn’t ashamed of.

I was thrilled.

I fastened my pants, but I didn’t want to leave this place regardless of whether the owner came back to find me here or not. Nyte lay beside me, grazing his knuckles over my flushed cheek.

“Perfect,” he murmured.

My eyes fluttered as I rolled onto my side. I could have lain in this peaceful silence with only his touch for hours.

Nyte stilled. I became alert to the shift in him. The lines around his eyes tightened. He stared off to the side as though he were in two places at once, and I realized where I’d seen that look before: in the library when Drystan had visited.

He backed off the bed abruptly, and I followed his alarm, scooting to the edge.

“Nyte,” I tried carefully.

His eyes closed and his jaw tensed like he was in pain. I stood, slipping my palms over his face, desperate for him to look at me and explain what was happening. He only gave a strangled sound as if trying to suppress it, and panic bubbled inside me.

“Is someone hurting you?” Adrenaline coursed hot through me. Then fear. Then rage.

Nyte fell to one knee, and I went with him. He clutched my arm, held my hand, but he could hardly move.

“What’s happening?” I tried, desperation seeping into my voice. I couldn’t help him here.

“You can’t go back,” he said at last, his voice so labored and pained my heart cracked. “To the castle. Promise me you won’t.”

“I have to.”

He gave another groan, and I held him tight, but it was hopeless. Not the comfort he deserved, and not the help he needed.

“I’m coming.”

I tried to straighten, but his hands tightened. Finally, he lifted his broken eyes to mine, and my body became weak with it.

“Astraea, they know. They know who you are, and he can’t have you.”

“H-how?” This couldn’t be right. I was so close. It couldn’t end here.

And I was not leaving without him.

“We have always been cursed from the start,” he said, brushing the loose tendril from my braids. “I need you to leave the Central, Astraea. You’ll find the key another way.”

“No—”

“Remember the monster you saw chained. There is a reason.”

Nyte didn’t feel so firm anymore. He was fading, content to leave me behind when I was not.

“You don’t get to decide what I see as a monster.”

“There is so much you don’t know. So much I’m sorry I never got the chance to explain to you. It wasn’t the right time.”

“Nothing is ever the right time. Except this. Us.”

“Stop.”

“You don’t get to push me away. Not now.”

Nyte appeared so tired my chest clenched, near suffocating, with thoughts of what they were doing to him. “I order you to leave the city.”

“No!”

I knew what he’d done seconds before my body reacted to the command through the bargain we’d made. “I will fight it,” I said, already straining against it. “I will fight you, Nyte. You can’t win this one.”

“Once you leave, the bargain will be broken. You won’t see me again, I promise you.”

Tears filled my eyes as I tried to hold onto something that was slipping from my grasp too fast. What was once whole and firm was now drifting like sand…until Nyte was gone and my palms flattened against the wood.

I sobbed. A tether running through me tugged with agony and heartache, and I couldn’t ignore it to leave. But the bargain was stretching another way. Far away from Nyte.

Fuck your promise.

Anger built within me, raging-hot, enough that I cried out with the force it took to defy his command. He would not get to order me away. He wouldn’t not suffer alone. Not anymore.

Against all that was slicking my skin in my battle to act against it, I settled on my destination.

The castle.