I COULD NOT SLEEP.
Not that I had been sleeping anyway. I never slept. At all. This Manor haunted me, pulling away the drowsiness from my soul. I was always restless—or my sleep filled with suffocating dreams. The phantom ache of where he had touched me, his mouth kissed me, or the memory of his breath against my skin. It was all suffocating me—even in a dreamless state. It was something deeper, truly. Even under my consciousness. A sickness in my soul. A thought I could not chase away. Such a thought that would never leave my soul.
Gods, there it was again.
The ache.
The need.
The pain.
Then the words came back to me.
Icarus Duskbane had married my mother.
The document in his study was no lie. I had traced every letter of the certificate with shaking fingers, rereading it again a
