Chapter 42
N yatrix draws closer, sliding her hands around my waist. The next moment, I’m sitting atop the table, her thighs pressed against my knees. Something inside me thrashes, demanding to be released, and I part my legs. With one of those dagger-sharp smiles, she gathers up my skirts, bunching them around my hips. And then she slips between my thighs like she’s never belonged anywhere else.
“Kiss me,” I tell her, part-command, part-plea.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she murmurs, and then her mouth is on mine.
It’s everything I’ve dreamt of—soft lips and sharp teeth, her hands sliding up my back and into my hair.
I reach for her shoulders, the sculptural slopes of her muscles a marvel beneath my palms. The Lupa Nox holds me by the nape of my neck, but I feel no fear—only pure, slick thrill, so visceral that I wonder if I’ve ever been this alive before.
“Undress me,” I murmur, my voice breathy to my own ears.
Obediently, her long-fingered hands unlace the ties at the side of my borrowed linen dress. Desperate to feel her skin against mine, I shrug out of the loose, oversized garment, letting it puddle around my waist. Without hesitation, she trails kisses from my mouth to my jaw to my neck. I wrap my good leg around her hip, tipping my head back as her tongue sweeps my collarbones.
“I’ve wanted you from the moment I first saw you,” Nyatrix whispers into my skin, one hand gripping a fistful of my silk shift. She pulls away, standing up straight, and unties the knot at the bust of the shift. My entire body pulses with need as she slips the straps off my shoulders.
Slowly, the Lupa Nox toys with me, sliding the garment over my skin, pausing just above my breasts. “You are so soft,” she says, her thumb tracing my lower lip, “in a world that is so hard.”
Then she pulls my shift down to my waist, and I am half-naked in front of her, only a simple breast band clinging to my skin. My chest heaves into hers and she groans, sliding her hands to the small of my back. She pulls me closer to the edge of the table, her body pressed tight against mine.
Shyly, I reach for the hem of her loose blouse, and she grins at me. “I want to see you,” I whisper.
She puts her hands on mine, helping me guide the garment over her head. And then Nyatrix stands before me in the candlelight, bare to the waist. I trace my fingertips over the looping ink on her sides, all the way up to her small, firm breasts. Her dark nipples are pebbled, and her breath is quick, fast, wanting.
“I thought you’d have a band on.” I laugh awkwardly.
She puts her hands over mine and slides them farther up her side, toward her breasts. “Do you want to touch me?” she asks in a low tone that utterly ruins me.
“Yes,” I whimper. “Since I first saw you.”
“Despite everything, we seem to have so much in common,” she teases as she pulls my hands up to her breasts.
Fire roars through me as I cup her perfect flesh in my palms. When I brush my fingers over the tip of one breast, she lets out a gasp that turns me to little more than molten hunger.
Nyatrix bows over me and kisses me again. I lose myself to her dark tide, burying one of my hands in her hair. I could kiss her forever, I think, all blackberry mouth and asphodel petal and sharp, wolfish teeth. When she pulls away, she takes my breast band with her—though I didn’t even feel her undo the closure at the back.
She guides my hands around her waist and then cups my breasts in her palms. “You are utterly divine,” Nyatrix groans, rolling her hips into mine. The movement pulls a long moan from my mouth that hardly sounds like my voice. She lightly pinches the tips of my breasts, and I cry out, seeking the heat of her against the throbbing place between my legs.
“Ahh,” she drawls, teasing my pebbled nipples again, her mouth against my neck. “I think I know what you want.”
She slots our bodies together differently so only one of her muscular thighs is between my legs. And then she kisses me until I’m dizzy, her hands roaming my body. She finds the small of my back and pulls me closer to the end of the table, until that tender, damp place between my legs rests against her thigh.
“Roll your hips,” she murmurs, capturing my lower lip between her teeth for the barest of seconds before releasing.
I do as she commands, finding an incredible burst of pleasure, just as I did in that ruined chapel. I cry out, and she pulls me closer.
“Again,” Nyatrix purrs. I obey, and she pinches my nipples at the same time. A moan frees itself from my throat, loud enough that anyone in the hallway would certainly hear me. “Perfect, little dove. You’re absolutely perfect. Don’t stop.”
I don’t—I couldn’t —not with the way my entire body seems to exist only for this, to entangle myself in her darkness, to drink of her splendor. I drive my aching place against her thick, muscular thigh, my hands hungry for her skin, as she captures my mouth in hers, kiss after kiss.
Soon, I am trembling with want, the pressure low in my belly building to absolute torment. I beg her for more, more, more until her teasing of my nipples becomes near-painful in the most delicious way, until she’s driving her thigh into me at the same time I arch my hips in search of her.
“Good girl,” Nyatrix gasps, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other playing with my breasts in exactly the way I want but could never explain. “Do you want to come apart like this, all tangled together, my hands in your hair, my mouth on your skin? Using me for your pleasure, your joy?”
“Yes, Nyatrix,” I whimper, increasing my pace. She kisses me, capturing the last of my words with her tongue, and the tension building like a thunderstorm between my legs crescendos and then snaps. I fall into her, little more than pleasure and wonder and the taste of her name in my mouth.
She holds me as my breathing returns to normal, tucks my head beneath her chin. We’re both covered in a light sheen of sweat, naked to the waist, lost in our selfish prayers.
“Little dove,” Nyatrix murmurs into my hair sometime later. “Would you like me to carry you to the bath?”
How, I wonder, could I ever say no to the woman who made me want to forsake God?
O ut on Liminalia’s night-drenched cliffs, the wind whips up, spraying my hair with sea salt. Steam curls from the bath, making Nyatrix appear divine, gowned in shadow and fog, an avenging goddess returned with the taste of blood in her mouth. I can barely believe this is what I carved out of myself, offered up on the altar of supposed saintliness, all for a god who only ever pretended to care.
“I love the noises you make,” Nyatrix breathes against the curve of my neck, her lips brushing my earlobe. “Don’t stop.”
I don’t, particularly not as she slides her hand between my thighs. She presses me back against the tiled edge of the hot spring, her kiss growing more insistent.
“Might I be permitted,” she murmurs, her hands winding into my damp hair, “to taste you?”
I pull away slightly, meeting her gaze, confusion surely crossing my expression. “Haven’t you already?” I ask, thinking of the bells we must have spent bathing each other, drowning in the feel of the other’s kisses, so much stolen wonder in a world that seems intent on destroying itself. Destroying us.
“Not completely,” she replies, her mouth curving into that dangerous smile, the one that makes me completely willing to pitch myself off the edge of the cliff, straight into the darkness waiting below. “Not where I want to taste you the most.”
She illustrates her meaning, her fingertips working slow circles at the apex of my thighs. I cry out, my back arching.
“Yes,” I gasp. “Please.”
“That’s my good girl,” Nyatrix murmurs, slipping her large hands around my waist. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I cannot,” I manage to get out as she lifts me, placing me on the steam-warmed rocks at the edge of the springs, “imagine such a thing.”
“And yet,” she says, gently pushing my knees farther apart until I’m completely exposed to her, “you need only say the word. You have bent me utterly to your will, Ophelia.”
Her words send an impossible thrill through me, all lightning strikes in my chest, a bonfire sweeping up from that aching place between my legs. For a moment, she just watches me —my heaving chest, heavy breasts anointed in bathwater, the soft slopes and folds of my belly, generous thighs outlined by the weak moonlight. Then her eyes come to the tangle of curls between my legs, and it is pure, simple hunger that I see in her expression.
The Lupa Nox lowers herself into the spring. Her dark hair is slicked back against her skull, black strands plastered to her collarbones. The looping, vine-like ink across her shoulders stands out in the moonlight, perfectly symmetrical, accentuating the musculature that already makes me feel weak. Then her mouth meets the inside of my thigh, and I cry out her name. I can feel her lips curve into a smile against my skin, and it makes me want her closer, closer . I tangle one hand into her soaked hair, desperate.
“Your pleasure,” she tells me, working her way closer to the apex of my thighs, “is the most divine thing I have ever known. I would gladly bring an apocalypse upon the men who taught you otherwise.”
I draw in a ragged breath, chest heaving. She reaches out, cupping one heavy breast in her hand, fingers grazing my nipple. I moan, the pleasure singing out in every part of my body intensifying its chorus. And then—and then —when I think she cannot possibly pull more wonder from me, the Lupa Nox brings her mouth to that hidden place between my legs. That place meant only for my bridegroom. A place for my husband to enter for pleasure, a place for children to be summoned to this world and into the Church.
Instead, it is Nyatrix who claims me.
She starts off slow, drowning me in kisses, but a wolf is always hungry. A bell, an annum, a millennium—then my thighs are draped over her shoulders, her hands gripping my bottom as the Lupa Nox feasts on me.
“Claim your pleasure, Ophelia,” the Lupa Nox purrs, looking up at me, those thunderstorm eyes meeting mine. “Come apart. Say my name.”
I could deny her, I know. But it is unimaginable—that would be the true heresy, my heart cries out, the only real sin in this world.
So I take what she offers me willingly, what I thought I would never have, what I thought I had long ago forsaken. I drive my hips into her mouth, panting, and fall into her storm. And when I emerge on the other side, I slip back into the water, where she cradles me in her arms.
“My perfect girl,” Nyatrix whispers, stroking my damp hair, holding me aloft in the steaming bath. My back presses against her chest, her muscular biceps around my shoulders. “You captivate me.”
I turn my head, resting my cheek against her collarbone, and close my eyes. The last time someone held me in the water like this, I was a young thing, submitting to the Baptisma and its Mysterium-blessed font. Then, the person I trusted—one of the scholae nuns—let me go. Opened her arms and watched me slip away, plunging deeper and deeper into the water to meet my fate.
The Lupa Nox, I know, would never. She would never let me fall, watch me drown, leave me to meet my fate alone. If we fall, I am sure, we will fall together—just as we did from that parapet at the edge of Lumendei.
I lift my face from her chest, tilting my chin back to look up at her. “Nyatrix,” I whisper. “Could you show me how to do those things to you?”
She shifts away to meet my gaze. My pulse pounds as her eyes search mine—a thunderstorm about to break open.
“Is that what you want?” she asks, smoothing a lock of hair away from my face. My pulse pounds as her moonlight-slick shoulders catch my attention, just barely enough illumination to see the asphodel flower blooming across her chest, her dark, pebbled nipples, the sword of a stem running down her hard, muscular stomach.
“More than anything,” I whisper. “I want to worship you.”
“I think,” she replies, one hand tightening around the curve of my waist, “there would be no going back, then. I think that might mean forsaking your god entirely.”
Desire races through my veins, hot as a hearth-fire. “So be it.”