Chapter 80
Aurelia
Without his mask, with the full force of his presence upon me, I suddenly find it hard to breathe. Find it hard to think being this close, cervix deep. Ghoul’s presence has always been overwhelming. Like the stifling dark in a small room, you can feel that basilisk lurking so close to the surface.
He really is pure, coiled, malevolent power.
I can tell he wants me to look at his face.
I don’t know if he feels relief, or if he feels anything at all under the power of his basilisk.
Being able to shift into different forms, I’m not subject to the order powers in the same permanent way as the other orders.
Ghoul cannot or does not want to escape the dark powers of his monster. They are too crucial to who he is.
The monster is me and I am the monster, he’d told me when we’d first met.
It’s just unfortunate that the giant serpent is even more psychopathic than a shark.
I have to breathe through the stretch of his cock, now that the heat of my initial arousal is cooling me down. And as we lie here, I suddenly can’t believe we’re back in my little bungalow.
When I’d left it the night after my wedding to Halfeather, I’d never thought I’d see the inside of it again.
My eyes burn, and not in the lethal way.
Ghoul leans in and scrapes his fangs across my bottom lip.
His cock is still hard as diamond, but it twitches just a little as I suck in a breath at his touch.
How the fuck am I going to spend three days with this beast? Who only answers the questions he wants to, whose power sends infinite tingles across my skin? He flexes his hips, and I moan as my clit is jostled into pleasure.
“Are we going to spend three days fucking?” I ask wryly.
His tongue, this time forked, slips out to taste me. My eyes widen as the crimson glows. “If you are mine for three days, then I get to do as I please, do I not?”
“Well, technically,” I say, “if your cock is stuck in position, you can’t really do all that much, can you?”
I’m on my back before I know it, my legs over Ghoul’s muscular shoulders as he thrusts into me. I cry out at the sudden pleasurable fullness, tingles spiralling through my clit. So he can move inside me. Just not all the way out.
My eyes warm as power collects behind them in response to the crimson glow above me.
My fangs snap out of their own accord. Shadows snake out from his shoulders, gripping me around the wrists and pulling them all the way up over my head.
My own shadows draw out, just slower and more clumsy with the new, smaller movements, and I touch the sides of his face with them. A face I want to get to know.
“Fuck me like you’ve wanted to this entire time,” I hiss. “Fill me with your cum like you’ve dreamed.”
Black brows twitch in amusement as he shoves himself balls deep in me. “I should make you beg for it.” Something tickles my ass, and I know it’s his shadow, ready to wind me open and fill me with everything he has.
I arch my back in pleasure, laughing at my own amusement. “We’re beyond that, shadow-man.”
Ghoul licks the column of my neck, up my mating mark and up to my ear. “Tell me how good it feels, snakelet. Tell me how much my cock makes you want to come all over me.”
My body tenses around him, slow pulsing motions I don’t even know if I can control. A finger of shadow slips inside my ass, toying with my entrance, making me gasp his name.
“I wish you knew my real name,” he breathes. “You’ll be using it before the end.”
Ghoul fucks me hard and fast, like a serpent striking over and over again.
His hips snap in and out, moving us both across the floor.
He growls into my neck, hands tightening over mine as I scream his name to the broken ceiling, taking him and his furious need and his power that comes barrelling forth like a dark tornado that pulls and sucks and writhes within me.
I let it twine around my own golden power, let them dance in a manic cyclonic wind of their own making.
I’m dizzy and breathless; we’re both sweating and crying out as Ghoul comes inside of me. My cervix is flooded with him, and he fucks his pleasure into me in hard, brutal movements that I revel in. “Give it to me,” I pant, squeezing his hands. “I want all of it.”
He lifts his head, and our gazes lock, our faces truly meeting for the first time. “Aurelia,” he says. Another first, and I come from the need in that single word. Come from the feeling of our powers finally touching. I come from the sudden unrestricted emotion I see in that face.
Because there, in the dark, with blue and red glowing between us, the thing I see—profound in its beauty and wholly unexpected—is pure devastation and devotion.
I wake the next morning to a heartbeat in my ear.
My pussy is sore from the girth currently occupying it, and with a sudden jolt, the harsh light of reality comes crashing down on me.
Ghoul’s chest is warm under my ear, and I blink up at the light.
Familiar dawn light streams through tattered curtains.
My eyes fix on the yellowed material in wonder.
How many times had Ghoul stared at me through them?
“Regina,” comes a faint voice in my head. “Regina, are you there?”
“Savage?” I reply, rubbing my face. “Are you alright? I’m alright. Is Minnie okay? Is everyone alright?”
“You sound far,” he says in dismay. “I want you here.”
My body pangs in multiple places, and I try to stretch out my stiffened joints.
My leg protests, and I grimace. But a hand, brown, tattooed and large, runs down the seam of new and old, and I sigh, looking up at him.
Shadows linger about his head like a dark halo.
Like one of the angels that fell from heaven to walk the dark path. Hot crimson lasers regard me.
“I won’t be long,” I tell Savage. “But tell me you guys all made it home in one piece.”
“Um…” Savage sings. “Maybe not fully in one piece.”
I sit bolt upright. “Who is it? Who did it?”
Scythe’s faint voice, hard as rock and dark with unhappiness, whispers into my mind. “Regina. Yeti is injured. Everyone else is whole. Where and when can I pick you up?”
My heart twists as I look down at Ghoul.
Yeti should have been the last person injured.
Poor Minnie. They’d only come to help us.
Guilt twists in my gut. As if he knows what I’m feeling, Ghoul cocks his head, his fangs snapping down beyond his lower lip.
He rises onto his elbows, and I give him a meaningful look.
“Two days,” I say. “But it will be faster if I come to you.” Dark brows furrow over flared nostrils.
“Every day without you, I suffer.” Scythe’s voice is almost a hiss in my mind. “Every day without you I want to kill someone, regina.”
It almost makes me smile. “I love you too. But you need to go to sea.”
“Xander is taking me tonight. The next day we will come for you, and I will not hear another word on it.”
A low hiss comes from Ghoul’s mouth, and I lean over to kiss one of his fangs.
“Yes, sir,” I say to Scythe.
“Good girl.”
I have to let out a sigh to release the tension as Scythe disconnects. Instinct makes me lie back down on Ghoul’s chest. The basilisk lord is forced to lie flat as I press my weight against him.
A deep-rooted awareness in my marrow knows that these next moments I have with Ghoul might be my last chance to feel my fifth mate’s skin on mine, so I close my eyes and simply listen to his sounds.
Simply feel his warmth seeping through me.
We sleep like that for the next day and a half.
Serpent bodies are made to sort of hibernate during this time, so neither of us needs to use the bathroom.
And while I need only sip water, Ghoul will only drink my venom.
I have so many burning questions, but from the tattoos on his face and body, I know that he cannot betray Mace, can’t plot against him, or lie.
“My father worked so hard to make sure you wouldn’t rise up against him,” I muse, tracing an old sigil for ‘obey’. “He knows you’re more powerful than him.”
Ghoul doesn’t smirk at this. It’s knowledge he’s had for a long time.
“What were you doing with Raquel?” I ask.
“It’s a funny story actually,” he drawls. “I knew they are sworn to Scythe so I stole them away, thinking I could use them for one thing or another. But when I arrived here, the Silver Tail pack recognised them as their Regus so I had to turn Raquel over.”
“The Silver Tails,” I say, frowning down at him. “They’re a nasty, feral lot aren’t they?” I sigh. “So naturally my father is working with them. I hope Raquel has been okay.”
Ghoul’s laser bore into me. “Central mates are born to take charge of their pack.” His thumbs rub circles in my thighs. “It’s a heavy responsibility.”
I can’t deny that. “But that only means the rewards are greater.”
Ghoul does not reply, and it hammers home the realisation: he doesn’t think we can ever resolve this. He doesn’t think he can ever be free.
I’m not so sure of this either.
For the rest of our time together, we sleep in each other’s arms, talking very little, sometimes only looking. Ghoul holds me like he’s waited a lifetime for it. Like he never wants to let me go. Because we both know what comes on the third day: he will likely never hold me again.
I can feel when the lock ends. It’s a loosening. It’s a deep sigh at the edge of all things. Sleeping on Ghoul’s chest, I listen to him as I have this whole time. His heart dances solidly beneath my ear, and I focus on it, forcing it to go slower.
He fights it at first, a sudden hiss erupting from his mouth.
But I lift my head to look up at that face, so new to me, yet already so familiar.
My vision blurs, and I squeeze my fifth mate’s heart under significant power.
His body goes rigid with awareness, his eyes holding mine with the knowledge between us.
That because of his multiple blood oaths, I can’t trust him.
That he has been ordered to kill me.