Chapter 26 Salem
CHAPTER 26
SALEM
The cliff was ethereal as winter set in.
Light drops of rain hung suspended in the air and Salem sat at the edge, watching the mist cloak her, make her one with itself, hiding her seated form from anyone around. The dark gray evening sky expanded endlessly, meeting the darker gray sea at the horizon. The cold had slowly set in, enough for her to feel it in her bones despite wearing multiple layers. The wind was all around her, frigid, sharp on her exposed skin, biting with sharp, invisible teeth.
Salem gazed down at the sliver of a beach, looking like nothing more than a strip of land before the sea swallowed it whole. If Tanya had jumped, the chances of her hitting the beach were actually slim, even though it hadn’t seemed that way from the beach below. Looking now, she could see that the trajectory would have made her hit the rocks instead of the beach. Which meant that either she had died on the beach or someone had placed her there after she died. Why?
Salem glanced at the rocks, seeing them lead in a curved edge around the coast to the lighthouse.
The abandoned, rumored haunted, lighthouse. If she’d thought the legends around the library ridiculous, the ones around the lighthouse were absolutely insane. And seeing it right then, a dark tower of old stones and paint that had peeled ages ago, shrouded in white mist that made it appear even eerier, standing on the rocks that dipped right into the sea, Salem could believe it. Even looking at the lighthouse from a distance, she could feel a chill settle inside her, as though just looking was going to infect her.
She was haunted enough as it was.
The dreams had returned with a vengeance, except this time, instead of her sister, she saw herself rotting and being torn apart by vultures, unable to do anything. She couldn’t do a thing in the dreams to stop it, paralyzed and sluggish as she witnessed her demise and disintegration at the mercy of scavengers feeding on her body.
She hadn’t slept peacefully, just an hour or two each night, since the night she’d slept with Caz, surrounded by him and the safety of his arms. That had been days ago. And she’d spent the time since he’d kissed her in public and almost fingered her in almost public ignoring him.
To his credit, he had tried to corner her and talk to her, but she’d simply given him her patented chill and walked away. She wasn’t interested in going around in circles with him anymore. She had officially hopped off the ride and that was that. Though she wondered semi-deliriously in her terrible state if she could work out a deal with him just so she could sleep. Or maybe, she could just take her pills.
She really didn’t want to, though.
Exhaling a loud breath, the air dissipating around her face, disturbed by her breathing, she looked out at the sea and wondered how easy it would be to just lean forward a bit, just a little, and go splat on the rocks. She wondered, almost dispassionately, if someone would find her body like she had Tanya’s or whether she would lie there for days, rotting and decaying like in her dreams, before someone stumbled upon her.
At least she would be asleep then. No more disturbing dreams, no more escaping emotions, no more nothing. Just long, quiet peace.
Maybe, she thought in her muddled state, Olivia had been troubled too and had simply wanted to sleep. She shook the thought off immediately.
She had to stay awake. For answers. Because she knew no one would look, not for a long time, not like she was.
An arm wrapped around her waist, a shriek leaving her as she was pulled back gently from the edge, the fog around her completely disturbed. The scent of the sea mixed with paint and petrichor, and her tense body relaxed a bit, realizing it wasn’t someone who was going to push her in.
Well, the jury was still out on that one.
She stayed still as his warm, large body settled behind her, his legs coming to the sides of hers, his arms wrapping around her waist right under her breasts, caging her in, replacing the cold, invisible wind that had been biting her with his warm, tangible form, the sharp teeth of the frost with his own teeth in a mouth of warmth. He nuzzled the side of her neck, pressing soft kisses down her shoulders and back up her neck, just sitting and holding her and giving her affection in the way she knew she was famished for.
Her sinuses tingled. She twitched her nose and blinked her eyes to control whatever was happening within her, a small, fragile part of her soaking in the visible display of affection, another part, a bigger, harder part, reminding her that it was temporary. Like life, it would never last.
“Salem?” he murmured into her neck.
“Hmm?”
“Stop thinking.”
The words gave her brain pause. What did he mean by “stop thinking,” exactly? How did someone do that? Wasn’t that the main purpose of the brain, to figure things out? And how the hell did he know she was thinking? Who the hell did he think he was to tell her to stop thinking?
“I can literally hear you screaming in your head,” he told her, his voice so soft, low in her ear, shooting straight up her auditory nerves and into her brain, creating that relaxed, fuzzy feeling in her it always did. “Give it a rest.”
She didn’t know how.
Evidently he did. Because he literally guided her through it. “Lean back into me.”
Salem didn’t want to comply, wanted to hold onto her anger at him and her distrust of the situation. But she was
So.
Damn.
Tired.
Her body leaned into his before her brain could compute it.
“Good girl,” he praised her softly, and it was like a nerve was suddenly touched in her brain. It sent an electric wave through her whole system. “Now, relax your muscles. You’re wound so tight. Let go. One by one. Okay?”
“Okay,” she mumbled, feeling her muscles slowly relax as he instructed her, shoulders, neck, arms, back, hips, legs. Even sitting on the cold ground, in the cold, she felt warm, like she was wrapped in a cocoon of the softest, most fuzzy blanket that rubbed against her skin just right.
She felt limp as a noodle.
Was he a magician?
He chuckled in her ear. “No, little asp.”
Oops, she’d asked that out loud.
She kept her eyes on the horizon, feeling the steady heartbeat and warmth and soft kisses, and felt her eyes get droopy. God, she wanted to sleep so badly. She could almost see herself falling into the void. But she was outside, and though her body trusted him, her mind didn’t. Or did it? Was that why her blinks were getting slower and slower? Did her body know something her mind didn’t? Was there a communication gap between them? Which one should she trust? If she couldn’t trust herself, then who?
“Sleep,” he murmured quietly into her hair. “I’ll be here.”
Fuck it.
Her brain finally shut up and she jumped in headfirst.
It was the pain in her ass that woke her up. The literal kind, not the metaphorical one in her head.
The mental joke surprised her, bringing her fully awake as she blinked her eyes open. She was looking at the sky. It was dark, almost pitch black.
Wait, why was she looking at the sky?
Taking stock of herself, she realized she was lying down on some kind of stone slab. There was a ray of light coming through from somewhere in the woods, like moonlight from behind the clouds.
The woods? Why was she in the woods? She’d gone asleep on the cliff and woken up in the woods, like the time she’d gone to sleep in the lecture hall and woken up in her room.
But the woods made no sense, though, looking around, she realized she recognized the place. She had followed him to this place in the beginning of her semester, which had been just months ago but felt like lifetimes to her. The crumbling old structure behind her loomed dark and sinister, rising from a layer of fog right out of some horror movie. Creatures of the night added a great soundtrack to the setting too, making her shiver.
A bite of cold on her nipples suddenly brought her attention down to them, bringing her attention to another fact, one her hazy mind hadn’t noticed.
Her shiver hadn’t been because of the unease. It was due to something else.
She was naked.
She was naked, lying on some kind of altar in front of some kind of ancient sacred place, in the middle of the woods, in the darkness of the night with pale moonlight.
What the hell?
Seriously, what the hell ?
What in the psycho shit had he done?
She looked around frantically, trying to locate her clothes or something to get the hell out of there, and saw a thick, woolen blanket at the base of the altar. She was sitting up to reach for it when his voice came from behind her.
“Stay still.”
She’d begun to hate those words from his mouth. He always followed them with some crazy shit.
“Are you insane ?” she hissed, covering her breasts and looking back to see him.
Naked.
He was naked too.
Yup. He was mad. She had enough evidence.
“Insanity is a spectrum,” he answered, like he was in class and provoking her. “We’re all a little mad here.”
“Do not.” She grabbed the blanket, covering herself with it. “Do not quote the Mad Hatter to me right now.”
He chuckled, distracted, and it was the first time she focused on what he was doing.
He was painting.
Not sketching like she’d seen him do, but full-on painting. There was a huge canvas in front of him, the size of his torso almost, though where he’d gotten it from in the middle of the woods, she had no idea. He had a paintbrush tucked behind his ear, his piercing glinting in the moonlight with his movements, his hair swept back from his face, bringing his bone structure into sharp relief. Tattoos covered him from his neck down to his abs, and even lower from what she could see. His cock, which she now saw for the first time, was much, much larger than she’d expected it to be, than she’d felt against her during the times they’d been close enough.
And he was hard.
Dear lord.
He glanced up at her, his eyes light and heated in the semi-darkness, before going back to the canvas. That’s when she noticed one of his hands holding a palette of paints she couldn’t even make out the colors of, his other hand, his right, dominant hand, moving over the canvas in rapid strokes.
“Move the blanket,” he instructed her, and Salem tightened her grip on it.
“And die of hypothermia? Like you? No thanks.”
She saw him roll his eyes. “It’s not that cold.”
Looking at him, no one would have said it was. He was just… warm. She doubted he’d ever felt cold in his life, not the way she did, right in the soul.
“Cazimir van der Waal.” She called him by his full name for the first time. “Where are my clothes?”
His hand paused on the canvas. “Inside. That’s—”
The hesitation made Salem frown. He seemed to have struggled with something before he looked at her. “Pact of trust,” he said, calling back to their conversation in her bathroom.
Salem didn’t want to, but she nodded, curious.
He took a deep breath and went back to the painting. “That’s not my last name.”
A ripple of shock went through her as she processed his words. Not his real name? Who was this man?
Salem swallowed. “Then what is?”
He nodded at her blanket. “Take it down. I just need to add some details.”
“Who are you?” She stayed adamant.
“Lose the blanket and I’ll tell you.”
Shaking her head at his absurd demand, she pushed the blanket away, exposing her naked form to his gaze. She wondered what she looked like in his eyes—hair disheveled all around her, breasts heavy, nipples pebbled to tight points, rolls in her stomach evident as she kept sitting, her legs closed but her mound visible.
He didn’t say anything, just went back to the painting, and she wanted to draw his eyes back to herself, to call upon his patience, to make him tell her what he thought.
He wasn’t the only one with tricks.
She lay back down on the altar as she’d been originally, her body suddenly hot, not feeling an iota of the cold she’d woken up with. Salem kept her eyes on him, watching him move and work with that concentrated look on his face, and that look did something to her.
She spread her legs, exposing her core to the cold night and hot eyes, feeling the wetness in between. No one was going to come into the woods. It was the middle of the night and the place was secluded enough that she wouldn’t even have known about it had she not followed him that day. She could also tell no one would be stumbling upon them by the fact that he was painting there. He was notorious for being private when it came to his art, so he wouldn’t have been doing it if there was a possibility of being discovered. She knew all that, and yet, being so out in the open and so exposed, being the object of his concentration, did something to her brain, which in turn did something to her body.
Of their own volition, her hands came up to her breasts, feeling their weight in her grip.
His breathing got deeper but he didn’t tell her to stop.
She didn’t stop.
She swirled her fingers around her nipples as he swirled his paintbrush in the palette, imagining they were the bristles instead of her digits, imagining she was the canvas instead of the one on the easel, imagining they were his hands instead of her own.
Her breath hitched, the sensitivity in her nipples increasing tenfold, sensations shooting down straight to her core, making her wetter, making her writhe, making her world contract between them.
The speed of his hand picked up and she matched it. “Tell me your name,” she demanded in a breathy voice, one she’d never heard come from her throat before.
“Later. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Salem felt her breathing deepen, her heart beginning to pound a staccato in her chest. She let her eyes settle on him and tugged on her breasts, a little noise escaping her throat, her hips writhing on air heavy with the arousal brewing between them.
Her fingers traveled down her body in a familiar path, right to where she ached the most, softly dragging down her stomach, down her pelvis, between her nether lips and encountering wetness. So much wetness, as though her body was preparing itself for the giant cock she had visuals for. She watched it, throbbing and bobbing, the mushroom-shaped head a darker angrier color than the rest of him, a clear fluid glistening at the tip.
Her mouth watered.
She wanted to taste it, to taste him, just as he’d tasted her. She wanted to lick him, take him, swallow him whole. She wanted to go down on her knees and have him grab her hair the way he was obsessed with doing, and she wanted him to take what he wanted, holding her immobile and making her take him, the idea making her gush even more around her fingers.
“Oh, god,” she whimpered, her fingers becoming frantic as she pushed two of them inside her, rubbing her clit with the other hand. Heat traveled all over her body, making her arch her spine, making her whimper again as she tried to go deeper but couldn’t. It wasn’t enough. It never was. She needed more. She needed him.
“Caz,” she begged, turning on her side and pressing her hand between her legs to find some semblance of relief, to no avail, her body so hot she felt a thin sheen of sweat covering it.
She groaned, feeling herself climb higher with the new angle, her peak feeling closer as pleasure shot up and down her body, the awareness of his eyes on her amplifying it, making her hotter, louder, wetter. She was so wet she could hear the squelching sounds as she moved her fingers inside herself.
“Caz,” she called out on a moan, calling for him to come to her, calling for him to take her like the primal animal she was feeling like, calling for him to end her torment.
And suddenly, she was up in the air, being twisted, until she was bent over the altar, the side corner digging into her stomach, her hot breasts pressed against the cold stone, her feet off the ground, her body held up by the man behind her. One moment she’d been on the slab, the next she was over it, his hand fisted in her hair, tugging her head back until her spine bowed and her neck arched, her nipples rubbing against the chilly stone, the sensation so acute it sent her crashing into a mini orgasm, her entire body shuddering.
And right in the middle of a shudder, he thrust inside her.
A scream left her throat, muffled by his mouth covering hers, his tongue penetrating her the same way his cock was, spear into her, her walls clenching and unclenching around him helplessly, her hands grappling with the opposite edge of the altar to get a grip.
His lips left hers and went to the side of her neck, biting and licking the length of it as he pulled out behind her, only to piston in again, bottoming out inside her aided by her wetness, sending her nipples scraping against the stone so she cried out, tears streaming down her face unbidden as the scale of sensations everywhere—inside her, outside her, around her—overwhelmed her.
Her lips were quivering and she bit down on them, her hands holding onto the edge for dear life as she hung over the slab, her toes curling in the air, held in place by his hand on her hip and in her hair, and his cock, moving in and out of her, her walls adapting to his girth and length, caving for him, welcoming him with ecstasy like a lover come from battle.
“Fucking hell, Salem,” he growled in her ear like he did, and the sound just made her flutter around him. “Such a good girl, taking me so good.”
She almost came from the words and voice alone, the sounds triggering her overstimulated brain.
He felt it.
“You like being called a good girl, hmm?” he asked, his voice molten lava coursing in her body, igniting her from the inside out. “Tell me, little asp.”
She was so lost to her lust and the feelings around it she didn’t even care about the nickname. “Yes.”
“Good girl,” he praised her, pulling out, leaving her empty for a split second before filling her again, his pace slowing, his length so deep inside her it almost hurt, but hurt so good. “My girl.”
His voice was pure sex, more sex than they were having.
“Who’s fucking you?”
“Caz,” she whispered, the slower pace making her clench harder, taking her right to the edge. He was edging her, like he had before.
“Caz who?”
He was having the conversation balls deep inside her. Seriously?
She would’ve moved but she had no give, no ground beneath her feet and no space to do anything. She whimpered.
“Please,” she begged him shamelessly. “Please, Caz.”
The hand on her hip moved around her body and came to a breast, squeezing it, tugging the nipple, and she felt herself tighten around him.
“Tell me,” he cajoled her, slapping her breast, and she went liquid.
“Caz van der Waal.”
“No.” He spoke against her neck, pulling out and pushing into her, oh so slowly her eyes rolled back, vision blurring. “Caz Vanguard.”
Vanguard.
She knew that name.
From where? Somewhere.
Before she could think more, he moved her body up slightly so the edge of the stone slab pressed against her clit instead of her stomach, and the effect was instantaneous. With him deep, so deep inside her that she could feel him in her soul, his scent in her nose and his warmth wrapped around her skin, his sound in her ear and his tattooed hand splattered with paint on her breasts, her body started to shake and fire infused her veins, burning brighter and brighter and brighter until it scorched her completely, from the roots of her hair being pulled by him down to her toes curling in air. Salem screamed and exploded into a billion pieces.
She died, such a beautiful death. For a split second that got imprinted in her brain as a core memory, so powerful that there would be a before this and after this for her, a before him and after him.
Heart pounding loudly in her ears and her chest and her throat, she felt like a giant pulsing heartbeat, alive for the first time outside the cage of her ribs.
She became aware of his increased pace behind her, almost frenzied, uncontrolled, his hand squeezing her breast and snaked into her hair, his lips trailing open-mouthed kisses on her neck and coming right back to her mouth, in a wet, sloppy, dirty kiss that made her flutter around him again, the urge to keep him, save him deep inside her, so acute it filled the marrows of her bones.
“Come inside me,” she said against his mouth. “Come inside me, Caz.”
At her words he groaned loudly, both his hands moving to her hips, one going to her clit and rubbing it, his lips covering hers in another hot kiss as he pumped his hips once, twice, thrice, before he flooded her, triggering another orgasm right on the tail end of his.
By the time her senses returned, they were both panting heavily, him curved around her as she stayed limp over the altar.
The altar.
She couldn’t believe she’d just had her brains fucked out of her on an altar outside an old ruin in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night.
But it had been life-changing.
She felt new, more aware of herself, of her surroundings, of her emotions. She knew the heights of pleasure she was capable of. She knew the depth of connection she was capable of. She knew the nuance of emotions she was capable of.
Post-orgasm clarity was a thing for a reason.
She could admit, after her multiple orgasms, that what she felt for him would probably never go away.
As he slipped out from her and lowered her feet to the ground, she felt his come run down between her thighs, and instead of making her feel dirty, it made her feel cherished, trusted, wanted.
She felt wanted.
She turned around to see his eyes tracking his semen, his mercurial eyes hot with desire so intense she felt insatiable.
“Is this a one-time thing?” she asked, just to clarify.
He stepped into her personal space, holding her hair gently, and pressed a hot kiss to her mouth, the kind that had her panting again by the time he pulled back.
“Does it feel like a one-time thing?”
It didn’t. But she was terrified of it being more, of being abandoned. “I don’t know how to give you more than that.” She paraphrased his words back to him.
His lips twitched. “Then I’ll take it, little asp,” he said, eyes roving over her face in that way he did. “You like that. The idea of me taking?”
She did.
She nodded.
“You want me to take from you?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
His eyes blazed. “You just gave me the keys to your castle. What if I plunder?”
“I’ll plunder right back.”
He smiled. “Fuck, you’re perfect.”
The smile warmed something inside her, something she hadn’t even known had been frozen. It had cracked, and now it was melting, and she stared up at him, no clue what was happening, no clue where it was going, no clue where it would end, but for the first time in her life, not bothered by it. She let herself revel in the feeling—of being desired, of being wanted, of being accepted.
She reveled in the feeling of being alive.
Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone—never.
—Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923