Dark Love

Part 46

Nick Stavros stared down at the gaping girl before him. Innocence shone out of her incredulous gaze. Tawny green they were. Her mousey brown hair was disappointingly tied back and hidden beneath her hoody. But he knew it's warm colour, just as he knew her stubborn nature.

"She's not the one for you son."

His fathers' words. First uttered when he was just fourteen, rang in his ears. Saera had bewitched him right from the start. Her soft golden green eyes had stared up at him with bewildered determination. Her thin frame eager to carry out the moves as instructed. She had been a natural in martial arts. A natural in thieving. She was a natural in seduction. Even at that tender age. Men, human men, were drawn to her because of that seductive allure. But because she was also a natural in some apparently predatory instincts, they kept their distance. Nick roamed the streets with the deadliest of his kind, and Saera had spent every step of the way along side with them. Yet not one of them had ever blatantly hit on her.

And that had been before Saera came into full power. Now her every step just radiated with threat. The silent hidden kind that raise hairs at the back of necks and arms without anyone knowing why.

"She's a witch son, she's meant for her own kind."

Words of wisdom, his fathers'. But they meant shit when he couldn't follow through. Couldn't ever come close to following through. He had not understood just how much she belonged to her kind until he turned sixteen.

"She has to marry a wizard at her twentieth birthday to gain her full powers," his dad had said, eyeing fourteen year old Saera in practice with the knives. Shaking his head, he'd added," Just imagine how much more impressive she will be then, as a full witch."

Nick had known right then he never stood a chance with her. But that hadn't stopped him wanting. It hadn't stopped him desiring her in more than just a partner in crime and that had just turned him brutal in his regard and treatment of her. He gave her hell because she gave him hell. Sleepless nights desiring her in his arms instead of whomever he had to make do with, daily facing off in wits and then fists. There was nothing he didn't do to keep as close to her as he possibly could. Even stooping to shadow her every move. Either going himself to stealth about tracking her movements or send one of his goons to keep an eye on her.

Then she turned twenty.

His heart had stopped that night before, when he'd stood outside her mansion in the early hours of that stormy morning already knowing what her aunt, that she called mother, had planned. His spying on her had naturally extended to the aunt. As the sole person who had any claim to her, he had naturally been suspicious of her close association. And not without reason it seemed.

He'd followed the two to the abandoned church in the fields, keep his distance to spy on them through a pair of binoculars. He'd caught sight of the arrival of the priest and has to abstain himself from stepping forward and putting and end to what had clearly been happening. But for some unknown reason, perhaps the years of warnings from his father ringing in his head telling him, she was not his, that she could never be his. Perhaps that was what stood him down when a a snap to the air about the church marked the entry of her intended. A flash of movement silhouetted by the glimpse of dawning light through dusky storm filled skies marked the arrival of another. One who chose to remain hidden in the shadows.

Nick had moved closer then, to the get  a view of proceedings within that church. He'd seen her arrival, as a bedraggled waif in that ghastly mud soaked dress. He'd hoped then that her muddied appearance if nothing else would put a stop to proceedings. But it hadn't and then the priest had begun. Nick had stepped forward then, ready to put a stop to that charade of a wedding. Ready to declare her his.

But whatever was being said by the priest created an impenetrable barrier between him and the church. Nick could only stand there, soaking up and seeping out rain as he watched the priest declare her we'd and then the first cloak covered man to make her his before the other emerged from the shadows to lay his own claim on her.

Nick had burned with more than rage at the sight of those two strangers taking what was his with such animalistic abandoned. He shook with his own desire to possess her for himself.

Then when, the two men had their fill and left her in that empty church. Unconcious and unaware of the storm that no longer brewed just within the realm but within his own soul. He'd stepped in.

Nick stepped into that church to lay a claim of his own.