34. Nyssa #2
Caelus backed me into the wall, and I gasped as the cold tiles dug into my bare shoulders.
He swallowed the sound, deepening the kiss.
Slowly, his hands slid down my body, thumbs drifting over my peaked nipples — and I cursed the thick leather cuirass still between us.
His fingers drifted lower, lingering at the curve of my ass, fingers digging in hungrily as he hooked them under my thighs.
My breath hitched as he lifted me effortlessly, and he swallowed that sound too. Caelus guided my legs to rest around his hips, locking us together in a tangle of limbs and furious need.
His lips consumed me.
The water ran cold, but it did nothing to quench the heat rising between us. My body burned entirely, greedily, for him. My fingers tangled through his short, wet hair, eliciting another deep groan as his hips rolled into mine.
I felt every inch of his hard length grinding against my core through two sets of damnable leather breeches.
“Nightshade,” he whispered between kisses, lips trailing across my jaw, “you’re going to be the death of me.” His mouth found my neck, kissing tenderly, sending tingles through my body like tiny shockwaves.
And yet it was his body that trembled. I felt it in the fingers still clutching my thighs, in the shoulders my nails dug into, in his unsteady breaths.
He pulled back to look at me, as though trying to memorise the way our bodies fit together.
“Lucky for you,” I murmured, “death and I go way back.”
“Nyssa,” he rasped, his breath grazing my skin, leaving goosebumps in its wake. I cupped his face gently, running my thumb along the sharp edge of his jaw.
“I’m here.”
A shudder rippled through him. His grip tightened almost imperceptibly as he began to lower me with unbearable care. But I couldn’t help the flinch when his fingers brushed my aching side.
Caelus glared at the three jagged holes piercing my ribcage, just beneath my breast, and swore voraciously.
“If you hadn’t killed him,” he growled, fingers twitching at his sides, “I would have.”
I stood a little straighter, despite the sharp pain in my side protesting every inch of movement.
“I’m okay.”
“You are not okay!” he exploded, voice raw and shaking — not with anger, but something much deeper. “You are so very far from okay! I have half a mind to go downstairs and demand that Charon ferry that bastard’s ass directly to me so I can find a way to kill him again.”
I should have been unsettled by the unleashed violence in his voice, by the way his hands curled into fists against his thighs, by the air cracking with the promise of a storm.
Instead, all I felt was heat curling low in my stomach, setting every one of my nerve endings alight.
I had almost died today. And Caelus was unravelling because of it.
I reached up, tugging gently on his jaw until he met my gaze.
“Caelus,” I murmured. “I’m here, and I’m very much alive.”
A heavy sigh flew past his lips, and his eyes shuttered for a heartbeat. His hands dug into my hips like he needed the contact — needed the reassurance that came with it. His forehead dropped down to mine, and he spoke so quietly I almost missed it over the roar of the shower.
“You almost didn’t come back to me.”
His voice was heavy with an emotion that sounded a lot like grief — a feeling I knew all too well. But I wasn’t having that.
I rose onto my toes and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips. He pulled back, gaze stormy and irises swirling — then surged forwards, kissing me just as deeply as he had moments before. His fingers drifted lower, hooking the waistband of my soaked leathers.
How does one overcome a lifetime of no intimacy? You dive right in, despite the lingering fear in your veins — despite all the reasons not to — when someone makes you feel this alive. When they look at you as though you hung all the stars in the sky.
His touch was steadying, a quiet force against the war within me. He wasn’t taking or demanding, — just showing me, in the quietest of ways, that he would find a way to shoulder my pain and weather the storms with me.
I gripped the leather chest plate he still wore, tugging him closer, and kissed him softly, trying to convey every ounce of gratitude I felt for him.
Perhaps it should have scared me — the way I clung to him, the way he made my soul feel like it was aflame — but I was lost to the moment. Lost in the way my frozen heart cracked, then subsequently shattered its cold encasing.
Caelus pulled back, breathing roughly.
“That’s as far as we can go tonight, Nightshade.” He grinned at my pout. “I’ll just have to wait to find out what you taste like when you’re not swaying on your feet, still bleeding.”
His voice was the striker, and my body, his tinder. One suggestive phrase, and I was putty in his arms all over again.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he would actually be the death of me. My ovaries certainly thought they were dying right now.
He pressed one last gentle kiss to my forehead, and my heart tugged traitorously, not an ounce of ice to be found on the organ I wasn’t sure belonged to me anymore.
If I was truly honest, I knew it had stopped being mine a long time ago; had started beating for the god in front of me a long time ago.
It just took almost dying to realise I had a lot to live for.