Chapter 11 #2
She led him to the bed. Demetri should have refused.
He sat. Nica found clean cloths and water in the bath, and by the time she returned the wound had begun closing.
She knelt between his knees — the position sent heat through him despite the blood, despite death still cooling on the floor of the next room — and pressed the cloth to his side. Demetri hissed. “Sorry.”
“Do not apologize. You are the one touching the wound.”
“That’s generally how cleaning works.” Her voice trembled on it, the steadiness she’d held through the whole fight finally cracking now that the danger was past. Demetri lifted her chin. “You were brave.”
“I hit a man with photography equipment.”
“You saved my life.”
Nica swallowed. “You saved mine first.”
“That is different.”
“Why?” Because hers mattered more. Because the universe had narrowed, without his permission, to one human heartbeat, and everything outside it had become weather.
He said none of it. Nica finished cleaning the blood from his skin, and the wound sealed beneath her fingers, and she watched every second of it, no longer flinching from the impossibility. “Does this happen every time?”
“Yes.”
“Are you immortal?”
“Almost.”
“What can kill you?” Demetri looked at the broken blade on the floor.
“That.” Her face went pale, and he regretted the truth immediately.
Her fingers spread over his ribs, as if she could shield him after the danger had passed, as if her small human hand could stand between him and an elven edge, and Demetri covered her hand with his. “I am alive.”
“This time.” The words carried her entire wound — every ambulance, every wrong apartment number, every person she’d loved and buried — and he understood.
She looked at him as though loving him had begun a countdown she’d already lived through too many times.
Demetri drew her to her feet, and she came between his knees.
“I told you,” he said. “Loving me will not kill me.”
“You were stabbed ten minutes ago.”
“And I am healed.”
“Because I touched you?”
“Partly.” Her breath caught. He’d said too much. Again. It was becoming a habit with her, the truth slipping past two centuries of discipline as if she’d found a door in him no one else had ever located. Nica’s hand moved to the broken Chain. “What does this do?”
“It helps me remain myself.”
“And when it breaks?” Demetri held her gaze. He could not answer. She saw enough. “No.”
“Nica.”
“No. You don’t get to keep saying my name when the answer scares you.”
“It is not my fear that matters.”
“Then whose?”
“Yours.” Her face changed. Demetri stood, and she did not retreat, and their bodies touched all along their length.
Nica looked up at him with anger and fear and the same hunger that had burned between them the night before, all three braided so tight he could not have pulled one loose.
“Stop deciding what I can survive.” The dragon rose — not violent, wanting — and Demetri touched her cheek. “Tell me what you want.”
“You.” The answer came without hesitation, and his control fractured. He kissed her.
This time there was blood on his skin and death in the room beyond, and still the kiss was not frantic.
Slow. Deep. A confession made with mouths because words had failed them both.
He cradled her jaw in one big hand as he kissed her, tilting her head to take her deeper, and Nica tasted him — smoke and heat and something dark and ancient underneath — and felt the tremor that ran through him when she opened for him.
Not urgency. Reverence. As though after the fight, after the killing, after the blood, she was the thing he’d come back to himself for.
Nica pushed the ruined sweater from his shoulders, baring the broad heat of him, the scars that shouldn’t exist, the place where the wound had already sealed.
Demetri undressed her in return — no torn fabric this time, no urgency he couldn’t master, each piece drawn away slow and deliberate, his knuckles trailing over every inch of skin he uncovered.
He laid her back on the bed and followed her down, and then he set his mouth to her and touched every place fear had drawn her tight until it went loose and warm beneath his hands.
He kissed the shallow cut on her arm. The scar above her eyebrow. The hollow beneath her throat where her pulse still ran too fast. And Nica’s fingers moved through his dark hair and held him there, and something in her chest that had been braced for years began, dangerously, to unclench.
“Stay with me,” she whispered.
“I am here.”
“No.” Her hand tightened in his hair. “Stay.” The word held more than the moment — tomorrow, the morning, the hour after the fear faded and the walls came back up.
Demetri lifted his head and pressed his forehead to hers, his red-dark eyes steady on her. “As long as you allow.” His breath moved warm across her lips. “As long as you let me, Nica. Not one moment less.”
Her eyes closed against the weight of it, and he kissed her again, softer, deeper, and moved down her body.
He took his time. There was no hurry in him now, none of the starving edge of the night before — only slow, thorough worship.
His mouth traced the curve of one breast and closed over her nipple, warm and unhurried, drawing on her until she sighed and arched into him, and then he crossed to the other and did the same.
His hands mapped her ribs, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, learning her all over again, as if the first time had only been a rough sketch and this was the true rendering.
By the time he moved between her thighs she was shaking, wet, aching for him, her hands pulling at his shoulders.
He kissed the inside of one knee. The soft skin of her thigh.
And when he finally touched her — two fingers gliding through her slickness, circling her clit, slow — she said his name with need instead of fear, and the sound of it broke something open in him.
“There,” he murmured against her thigh. “That is what I wanted. My name. Like that.”
He worked her until she trembled on the edge, patient, relentless, and only then did he rise over her and settle the broad head of his cock against her entrance.
He pushed inside slowly, and Nica’s breath fractured as her body opened around the thick stretch of him, taking him deep, deeper, until he was seated fully and they both went still.
“Pain?” His voice was rough with the effort of holding steady.
“No.” She dragged in a breath, her hands flat against his chest, feeling his heart slam beneath her palm. “It’s good. God, it’s — it’s good.”
He moved.
Deep. Unhurried. Each long, deliberate stroke carrying more intimacy than the frantic hunger of the night before — as if he meant to say with his body every truth the law had forbidden his mouth.
Nica wrapped her legs around him and held his gaze, and Demetri refused to look away, watching the pleasure build in her face, watching her take him, watching her let him in.
Her hand slid down between them and settled over the broken Chain at his wrist.