28. Sullha #2
"Not just the clan, any immortal. Humans can't bond like that.
Only people who carry the godly genes can.
Bowen says that it's incredibly powerful, especially when it's new.
Even a few hours of separation are difficult to bear.
Mates who have been together a long time can tolerate longer stretches.
That's how Bowen and the other mated Guardians can leave their partners behind in the village and join missions.
An established bond can stretch. A new one is too taut. "
Sullha thought about Areana living in the dungeon with a male the whole world was better off without, and the lore stopped sounding like a myth and started sounding like a diagnosis.
"Who do the Fates consider worthy?" she asked.
"According to Bowen, those who have suffered greatly, or those who sacrificed greatly for others."
"Then both of us qualify." She lifted her face, her nose nearly touching his clean-shaven jaw. "We've both suffered, but so has every woman in that enclosure. If the Fates reward suffering, then every one of them has earned a truelove mate, and the Fates owe that island a great deal of weaving."
"Yes," Yaaf said. "They do."
He was looking down at her, and his eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there.
They were glowing, and it wasn't a trick of the light. It came from within, a low blue luminescence rising up through the irises. It was as beautiful as it was impossible.
Sullha forgot all about the Fates and what they owed to whom.
"Your eyes are glowing," she whispered.
"I know." He did not look away from her mouth.
"Why are they glowing?"
"They do that when I get excited."
The words came out a little slurred, as if he was talking with a full mouth, and it took her a moment to realize that he slurred because his fangs had elongated.
"Your fangs." She leaned closer.
His lips parted slightly, and there they were, twin points pressing against his lower lip. He ran his tongue over one of them with the resigned air of someone confirming bad news.
"That also happens in response to excitement."
For some reason, she had thought that immortals' fangs elongated only when they were getting ready to fight but, given that she now knew that they bit their partners during sex, it made sense for their fangs to elongate in response to excitement.
To desire. But did Yaaf desire her in the full meaning of the word, or did he only desire the biting part?
Fangs meant venom. Venom meant a bite. The bite meant immortality for a carrier of the godly genes, but it also meant pain. Those sharp points were made for piercing, and that would hurt, but it didn't matter.
It had hurt to push Tomek into the world, and he was the best thing she had ever done. Good things came with a cost, and if pain was the payment for eternity with her son, she would gladly endure it.
"What are you thinking?" Yaaf asked.
I am thinking whether you are even able to want the rest of what comes with the bite, and I would rather walk back into the enclosure than say that out loud.
"Nothing," she said.
He arched a brow. "It didn't look like nothing from where I'm sitting."
She was going to have to give him something, because he knew her too well to accept nothing, so she decided to give him the part she could say.
"Margaret told me that immortal males bite their partners during…
well, you know, and that's how they can induce the transition in a female Dormant.
It must hurt really badly. Those are..." She pointed at his mouth.
"Those are really big, and they look very sharp.
But I decided that the pain is a small price to pay for immortality.
I'm no stranger to pain, and I know I can take it.
Tomek was a big baby, and if I survived his delivery, I can survive anything. "
Yaaf smiled.
It was a mistake because the smile put his fangs on full display, those long, white, and wickedly pointed incisors. It should have frightened her, but instead her stomach performed a slow, warm revolution that wasn't about fear at all.
"You shouldn't be afraid of the bite," he said.
"It hurts for a split second, and then you are flooded with pleasure so intense that women pass out and soar on clouds of euphoria for long hours following the bite.
Some come to crave it so much that they get addicted.
They seek it out again and again because nothing else compares. "
He seemed to be speaking from personal experience, and the realization sent a hot sting of jealousy through her.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "How do you know that? Is this from Bowen's explanation, or from personal experience?"
"I wasn't always an enhanced soldier," he said. "Before the program, before the transcendence, I was a regular Brotherhood warrior, and regular warriors are given certain privileges, which I made use of." He tilted his head. "Did you think I was a virgin?"
"I didn't think about it at all," she said with great indignation, which was a lie, and when his raised eyebrow said he knew it was a lie, she abandoned the pretense.
"Fine. I thought about it. And what I thought was that you weren't interested because of what was done to you, and I didn't think of what was before you volunteered for the program.
It's just that you never showed any sign that you thought of me that way.
" She waved a hand between them. "You never once tried anything, and when I kissed you at the cove you froze. What else was I supposed to think?"
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, they didn't glow as brightly as before.
"You were right to assume that it was first the work of the enhancement and then the transcendence.
The drugs muted those urges, and then, when the eight of us merged, and our consciousness expanded, we were glad that we were no longer ruled by primitive urges.
Other males devote so much of their bandwidth to thoughts about sex that it's a miracle they manage to learn anything after puberty hits.
Getting rid of the constant background noise felt like a liberation.
We were proud of it. But then we saw Dimitri with Mattie, and we realized that love was beautiful, and that we knew nothing about it.
We were so eager to learn that we even tried to bribe him to merge with us so we could feel love through him.
But then I saw you again, and everything changed.
It didn't happen overnight, but I discovered that muted is not the same as dead, and that love is the ultimate goal, and when intimacy intertwines with it, there is nothing base about it. It becomes sacred."
Sullha could not breathe.
"Sacred?" she managed, barely a whisper.
"I want to kiss you so badly." He looked at her mouth.
Her heart was flying, fluttering high and fast, and there were probably graceful things a woman could say at such a moment, something beautiful to match what he'd said, but her mind was empty of anything other than the promise of a kiss.
"Yes," she said. "Please."
He cupped her face so carefully, so gently, as if her cheeks were made from delicate glass, and he lowered his head slowly enough to allow her to change her mind a hundred times, but she wasn't going to. Instead, she leaned in.
The first touch of his mouth was soft. Just warmth, just the shape of his lips learning the shape of hers, unhurried, asking rather than taking, and Sullha had never been kissed like that before.
She made a small sound against his mouth, and it undid him.
His arm slid from her shoulders to her waist and gathered her in. He deepened the kiss, still careful of his fangs, angling around them with an unbelievable control that must have cost him.
She put her hands on his solid chest, feeling his heart pounding under her palm, hard and fast, and kissed him back with everything she had been carrying in her heart for years.
Because this hadn't started when Yaaf the man had returned to the enclosure.
It had started a long time before with the boy who was her best friend.
The room faded away.
There was only his mouth, and his hand splayed warm across her back, and the small sounds they both made, and somewhere far beneath the sweetness a slow heat was building that she had felt before only in a dream she'd pretended to forget. Except this was better than the dream, because it was real.
When they broke apart, she leaned her forehead against his jaw, and her mind went to a strange place.
She suddenly understood the goddess and her choices.
Completely, suddenly, all the way down. Areana had stood in a penthouse full of natural light and told a room of doubting women that she had given it up gladly for a hole in the ground with her truelove mate.
An hour or so ago, Sullha had thought the bond a shackle, but now she knew better.
Now she sat in a small underground room with a meal slot in a reinforced door, in the arms of a male the world had tried its best to eliminate, and she knew with perfect clarity that if it were not for Tomek, she would hand back the pretty house in the village, the garden, and the mountains outside the window without a second of grief, to stay right here with him.