NINETEEN
Hermione couldn't believe what she was doing as she found herself nodding. What was wrong with her? Running seemed out of the question since he moved so unimaginably fast, but she could push him away, couldn't she? Argue in hopes of distracting him? Wrest her wandhand free and tag him with an offensive spell.
Instead, she was closing her eyes and tipping her head to one side.
And waiting …. Bracing ….
But the bite she'd been expecting at her throat never came.
Uncertain, she was about to snap one eye open—if not for how close together they stood, she might've thought he'd slunk away as quickly as he'd appeared. But she never quite got to that.
Antonin fell before her, his form moving against hers as he dropped to his knees. Her attempt to look at him, to see what he was doing, was lost to her as he lifted the length of her robes out of his way.
Her head tipped back and her breath caught in her throat at the feel of him sealing his mouth around the wound she'd reopened.
There was relief in the first taste of her blood against his tongue. Relief and sweetness and a heady rush at the feel of his thirst abating, of his thoughts righting themselves in his mind.
How strange, he realized as he traced the outline of the punctures with the tip of his tongue, that she'd offered her throat and yet he'd not simply sunk his fangs in then and there. He was painfully aware of how her free hand rested atop his head just then, fingers curling into his hair. Perhaps it had seemed easier to take from what was already there?
No. He understood as he gently raked his teeth around her broken skin. He hadn't been in control and the sensation of sinking his fangs into her flesh—as he remembered from last night—was simply too good. He'd have done it again, with or without an already open wound.
He shuddered against her, his breath coming out in ragged spurts as he continued lapping and her wound, sipping at her blood in only the tiniest of increments, savoring it. He recognized now that it was because he hadn't wanted to hurt her again.
Antonin nearly laughed at the strangeness of it—of how becoming more of a monster than he'd been while human could make him handle her so very gently.
