Chapter 18 Beg #2
Her desire at this moment is as powerful as it is when she gets a drop of Dorian’s power, but this time, it’s completely and entirely natural. There’s no magic between them—only hatred being refined into something stronger. Like ore into metal. Like coal into diamonds.
“Say that again,” she begs.
“Earn it.” He threads his fingers through her hair and pulls hard.
Wild moans erupt from her mouth, and Cassius pulls harder.
It’s exquisite. With every second he maintains his tight hold on her hair, another wave of tension releases.
Her eyelids flutter as the pain gives way to the pleasure tightening in her core.
“Tell me how. Anything.” She can hardly tear her eyes away from his lips. She needs to kiss him—now, for more than just a taste of his fear.
She wants to taste his desire.
One hand still in her hair, he reaches over to a drawer in his desk and says something in Latin—probably some charm he learned from Malevimus—and the drawer springs open. He pulls out a thin, flimsy collection of old parchment.
Holding it out of her reach, he says, “Is this what you want?”
She nods.
“Use your words.”
Claudia grabs the hem of his unbuttoned shirt and pulls him closer, pressing her chin to his waistband. Cassius pulls her hair. She can feel his cock pulsing against her throat. Her breath skates across his abs when she says, “Please give it to me, Cassius. Please.”
He stifles a moan, fighting to stay in control. “Again.”
“Please.”
“Louder.” He lets go of her hair and drags his thumb across her bottom lip. “Beg me with that pretty mouth.”
Driven by instinct, she sucks his thumb into her mouth, moaning and twirling her tongue around it. She teases a bite, catching his thumb between her teeth and clenching before releasing him. “Please. Please. Please,” she says, dragging out each word.
He leans down close, just barely bringing his lips to hers with a featherlight touch. It’s not a kiss. It’s a tease. A taunt. She tries to catch his lips, but his hand finds her throat and holds her back. He could choke her if he wanted to.
If Dorian is right about the MacLeods, Cassius could kill her right now.
Her heart beats louder than a war drum.
“Good girl,” he moans into her mouth, and her entire body trembles.
Her nipples harden, poking through the lace of her dress, and she desperately wants Cassius to rip the fabric from her body and drag his tongue against her skin.
Again, she aims for a kiss, but he keeps his lips out of reach. His hand tightens around her throat.
She loves it. She wants more. Tighter, harder.
“Again. Call me that again,” she pleads, but Cassius stands up straight, breaking the spell.
Claudia nearly falls over when he steps away from her and walks to his door.
She’s shaking all over like she’s been left out in the cold.
For a second, Cassius braces himself against the wall and takes a deep breath.
Then, he clears his throat and, to Claudia’s horror, opens the door, gesturing for her to leave.
No. No, no, no. They can’t be finished. Not when she’s aching so desperately for his touch, not when she feels like she might die if he doesn’t split her legs and drink deep from the throbbing space between her thighs.
Not when she didn’t get to see his fear.
Standing slowly, she bites out, “I said I want you to say it again.”
He flashes a devious grin. “I’ll make you a deal. Beat me in the debate, and I’ll call you that all night long.”
Frustrated, unfinished, embarrassed, Claudia picks up her robes from the floor and dresses quickly. “So, that’s it?” Her eye twitches.
“Not at all.” He saunters toward her. He reaches up to touch her face, but she slaps his hand away.
He tsks. “That’s not good, now, is it?”
“Don’t tease me.”
Too fast for her to stop him, he takes hold of both her wrists and lifts them above her head, bringing her to a delicate balance on the tips of her toes. Lips pressed to her ear, he says, “You love being teased, Claudia.”
She trembles as his words buzz in her ear. “Do we have to stop?” she whimpers. “We barely started.”
His nose scrapes her cheek. His lips hover over the corner of her mouth and he says, “Like I said, you’ll have to earn more.
” She fights once more to get her mouth on his, but he’s too fast. He lets her go and steps back.
Without his strength holding her up, she stumbles, barely catching herself in the doorway.
Cassius hands her the books and the paper from his desk. “Good luck. Truly. I mean it.”
Claudia is a hot, wet mess when she returns to her room. It’s taking everything in her not to charge back to Cassius’s room, spread herself on his bed, and beg for more. She’d beg all night if he told her to.
To cool off, she opens up the doors to her balcony and steps outside, taking a swallow of midnight air.
What the fuck was that?
They didn’t make love, didn’t even kiss, and yet it was the most lustful she’s ever felt in her life.
But Cassius doesn’t truly want her, does he? Cassius likes to be begged—even Odette had written that about him—and he likes to tease. He may even want to fuck her, but he won’t ever make a life with her. He hardly wants to be her friend.
At best, Cassius is a distraction. At worst, he’s a killer, and he’s merely playing with his prey.
Is that what they were doing? A dance just before death?
She can’t wrap her head around it. It wasn’t sex—it was better. It wasn’t intimacy—it was more honest, more raw. Passionate. Dangerous. Is there a better word for it? Whatever it was, she wants it again.
She’s so lost in replaying the interaction in her mind that she almost forgets about what she went there for in the first place—secrets and fears.
At least she got one of them.
Turning away from the sky, Claudia spreads Cassius’s papers across her bed and reads.
THE TALE OF DRACOEMAGYL: OUR CURSE OF SILENCE
Five is an odd number, no? Why only five gods? Six, it should have been. And six there were, in the beginning.
Gray, our ancestor, would have been Dracoemagyl, God of Dreams and Tragedies, Patron of Dramaturgy at Cygnus University.
But he is only the god who never was. He was far more talented than the others—it was his idea to attempt the ritual that would become what we now know as ascension.
But perhaps he was not as smart. I mean that as no insult.
One only has the capacity for so much greatness.
Ask yourself: If you were already quite talented and quite smart, but could acquire more greatness in only one area, what would you pick?
I know my answer. The world favors talent over everything, and nothing is rarer than true, sparkling talent.
People, though, on an individual level, despise seeing talent in someone they know.
Talent is awe-inspiring from afar but impossible to stomach up close.
It brings out the worst in the less talented—jealousy, dishonesty, even sabotage. That is what happened to Gray.
The night that the aspiring gods performed their ascension ritual, Dracoemagyl was the first to rise.
Sidarphion struck him down, leaving him like a fallen tree.
When he called for help, the god of stars and nightmares clasped his hand over Dracoemagyl’s mouth so the others would not come.
He then used his claw to etch a spell into Dracoemagyl’s skin—Andromeda, Cygnus, Auriga—so that the other gods could never hear his screams. Sidarphion left him there to rest, and to rot.
The others clawed their bodies with runes, and each slaughtered a witch. They then drank the witches’ blood and swallowed their souls, and thus, gods they became.
If Gray had not been betrayed, he would have been the most powerful of them all.
I’m sure they feared that he would’ve been strong enough to keep the heavens to himself.
No doubt he would have been able to, but Gray was a gracious man and would have been a gracious god.
Instead, the forest nearly claimed his life.
He survived by dragging himself through the dirt for miles, broken bones and all.
I have torn my way to his story, to the truth that everyone else wants to stay buried.
Even I, to some extent, want to keep it hidden.
It’s not a good feeling to be tied to a legacy of falling and failing.
But as a MacLeod, that is who I am. That is what we are.
One day, someone in our line will redeem us.
It may be me, but I doubt it. I do not know enough.
Perhaps if I had this collection in my possession already, rather than being tasked with creating it, it could be me.
I have had the Dreams. The visions. I see how it will be done, but I never see it through my eyes.
I see it from above, as if I’m looking down from the afterlife, watching it happen long after I’m gone.
Someone in our line will be the Dreamer, and they will save us.
Until then, our line is cursed with silence. No god will answer us.
But when we have the gods’ ears, we need to seek justice. The god of stars and nightmares must be punished. We need to end Sidarphion like he tried to end us.
Everything she learns about Sidarphion makes her hate the god even more.
This is damning evidence that the gods must be punished.
They are not always good. They can be slimy, night-slick, soul-trapping, and blood-cursing gods who deserve to experience all the pain they’ve dealt.
Why would Cassius ever choose to argue for their impunity?
He should want to see them punished more than anything.
The thought strikes her then—anyone can become a god, right? Perhaps that is Cassius’s ultimate aim. He wants godhood for himself, and once he ascends, he doesn’t want to be punished for how he exacts his revenge.
If the tale of Dracoemagyl is to be believed, then perhaps Cassius deserves revenge more than anyone she’s ever met. Maybe even more than Dorian.
But this evidence only strengthens the theory that the MacLeods are the ones who have been murdering celestial witches. It must be them—a bloodline out for blood. They want to punish Sidarphion. What better way to get the attention of a god than by slaughtering his lambs?