Chapter 12 #3
“Because. If you fail, then this is all I can ever hope for. And if you succeed…you leave.”
I blink up at him, my lip caught between my teeth. “And me leaving is enough for you to give up? Even if I break your curse? Why would you do that?”
He hovers there, his stare drilling into me. He won’t answer. I know he won’t, because that would require him to articulate something he’ll never admit, not even to himself.
“Why?” I say again.
His expression tightens. Or…I think it does.
It’s hard to tell in the dark, and his gaze tilts downward, hiding from me.
I expect that to be the end of it, for him to move away, and maybe he actually tries, because he spends a moment locked in place, his body trembling.
But then he releases a shuddering sigh and moves closer, his face angled toward my neck.
All the blood in my body veers off course. The room shrinks down to the heave of his exhales, to the way his body curves around mine, a shield against the world.
“What’re you doing?” I whisper.
“I’m tired,” he says beside my ear. “I’m just so.
Fucking. Tired.” He breathes deep, inhaling me.
His hands fall from the door, feeling their way through the darkness, finding my hips.
He touches me tentatively at first, then more boldly, squeezing my hipbones through my gown, pinning me to the door.
A whimper blooms in my throat. “What’re you doing?” I say again.
Or at least, I think I do. The words might get lost between my chest and my mouth. As it stands, my thoughts have definitely gone missing on their way to my brain.
“Smelling you,” he mutters, his breath hot against my neck.
“But you’re drunk.”
“Who cares?” he says. “You’re not.”
His exhale paints liquid fire across my skin. I try to pull away, but I have nowhere to go. Nowhere to retreat to. And in the next moment, I don’t want to anymore, because his mouth closes around my throat, bathing my pulse point with heat.
A jolt rips through me, like a lightning bolt spearing the heart of a tree.
The moment we touch, I feel everything inside him.
A door slams shut on the anguish he’s suffered for two centuries, but even the pale shadow left behind is enough to make me feel like someone is ripping me apart, turning my skeleton inside-out.
Just for a second. In the next, the pain dies away, and then I’m flying, soaring into orbit, buoyed by the intensity of his relief.
Amriel groans, sweetness and agony all rolled into one. His tongue works against my skin, tasting, sucking, taking.
Fuck. So this is what happiness feels like.
The thought blooms inside my skull. I don’t know where it comes from, whether it belongs to me or him.
Well, that isn’t true—I never curse. But the words might as well have sprung from me anyway, because my body goes electric, alive in a way it never has been, my blood a mere conduit for the pleasure running rampant in my veins.
His mouth closes into a kiss, which he drags up to my ear. Gentle teeth nip at my lobe. Somehow, my hands have found his shoulders, kneading the rounded muscles, clutching at him until my heels lift from the floor. His hair drapes against my shoulder, a heavy fall of silk.
My eyes drift shut, all thought fracturing into sensation. And I realize, then, that my skin was never meant to contain me. It was only ever meant to receive the gift of his touch.
He releases my hip, his hand skimming up my ribcage to my neck, his grip splaying against my jaw.
His fingers work their way through my braids, so similar to the way he touched me at the Claiming.
Only this time, fire goes sizzling and sliding down my throat, as if the sky has just dropped its hottest, bluest star straight into my stomach.
Its burn licks through me. Reduces me to wave after wave of want.
Amriel kisses a path from my ear to my jaw, then veers toward my mouth.
I expect him to slow as he gets closer, to give me room to breathe, because he must know I’ve never been kissed before.
But he doesn’t give me time to think. Now that his iron hold on himself has broken, he can’t seem to stop, or even hesitate.
He just reaches his destination and slants his lips across mine, fusing our mouths together.
The impact barrels into me, brutal in its perfection. Apart, we are nothing, but together, we’re a combustion of joined lips and questing tongues. I moan into Amriel’s mouth, and he moans into mine, and my fingers clutch tighter, fisting the fabric of his shirt as I pull him closer.
He responds, caging my jaw with his hand, his other arm banding around my waist and hauling me to him. Something firm prods against my belly, and my hips tilt, wanting to be closer, needing to be closer.
Goddess. Kissing is nothing like I imagined. Not gentle, or tender, but desperate. Consuming. Like he’s trying to devour me. Extinguish two hundred years of agony in the blaze of a single moment.
His tongue pushes deeper into my mouth. I welcome it, because I can no longer think, or resist, or even remember my own name. I can only drown in the feel of him, in the press of his body against mine, in the way his hand tangles in my hair as if he’s begging me not to walk away.
My legs give out, but he catches me, lifts me like I weigh nothing. The world spins, and then I’m sitting on something hard and cold. His desk.
He steps between my knees, forcing them wide. My gown rides up to expose my legs, but I don’t care. Not when I have his tongue in my mouth and his hands all over me—my waist, my hips, sliding up my ribs. Not when I’ve just been granted access to a paradise I didn’t even know existed.
“Shadows take me,” he rasps against my mouth. “You taste like—like—”
I kiss him harder, shutting him up, because I know. Because this kiss comes straight from a bottomless pit of pleasure. Because he tastes like sweet wine and bitter chocolate and every wish I’ve ever made, even the ones I thought would never come true.
I arch into his touch. He maps my body like he’s memorizing it. His hands skim over my gown at first, then beneath it, sliding fire along my thighs, slipping beneath the satin to palm my belly, my hips.
The star in my stomach fizzes and boils, a searing ache that gathers between my thighs. I want him to touch me there, need him to, and I know he will, can feel the intent, heavy and certain in his mind.
But first, he’ll give me pleasure. Drawn-out, long-awaited, fed to me drop by drop. Until neither of us can stand it anymore.
A groan trips up my throat. “Amriel…”
He swallows his own name, drinks it straight from the source. I feel him do it, taste its headiness on his tongue. And shadows below, it’s better than any liquor. It’s what he wishes wine would taste like. It’s the thing he’s searching for every time he pulls yet another cork from another bottle.
I tug him closer. I’ve acquired a second heartbeat, somehow—his, maybe, thudding inside his chest. Or maybe the one that pulses between my legs, fluttering just for him.
My hands rove, sliding up his shoulders and down his back, my fingers hugging lines of hard muscle.
The silk of his shirt is smooth beneath my palms, but I want it gone.
I need the heat of his skin against mine.
Already, I have the joy of his thoughts spilling into my mind, the pleasure that coils in his belly spiraling through mine, too.
Now I want it all.
I slip my hands beneath his shirt, pushing apart the vee, no longer conscious of where his sensations end and mine begin.
When we come together fully, it will be endless.
Infinite. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced and nothing he’s ever even dreamed of, because this is better, this is written across the sky somewhere, and—
My hand grazes something raised, just below his collarbone. I pause, because it almost feels like…
I frown. Pull back. Our lips part with reluctance as I feel my way across the textured scar. Surely this can’t be what I think it is. But…
“Why…” My voice breaks, and I try again. “Why’re my initials carved into your shoulder?”
He goes still, his hands collared around my waist.
I stroke across the raised, rough scar again. Yes, those are definitely my initials, in the very same place the Shadow wears them. The V even has the little flourish I tacked on to the end. As if I carved this myself.
“Amriel?” This time, my question carries a note of warning. “How’d this get here?”
He eases back, his expression shuttering, all the fire and longing draining out of his eyes. “Do you really need to ask?”
“Obviously I do, or I wouldn’t have bothered.”
His jaw works. He chews on his answer for much too long before spitting it out. “Because you put it there.”
I blink, my mind cycling through those words, trying to find the order in which they make sense. “No. What? I carved my initials into the Shadow.”
He exhales slowly. “And whose Shadow do you think he is, if not mine?”
I lean back, pushing against his bare chest, opening space between us. With every inch of ground he cedes, I come back to myself. I descend from some dizzying height, my toes touching earth again, remembering how to answer to gravity once more.
“No,” I say. “You and the Shadow, you’re…brothers. Twins. Not… Not…” My mouth won’t finish the sentence. Won’t form the words my brain is scrambling to reject.
“Not cut-up halves of the same person?” Amriel supplies, his voice flat. “Not one man’s two forms, forever separated by this fucking curse? You didn’t think he might also be me? You really thought we were two fae with the same face?”
I jerk back, shaking my head, trying to dispel the realization.
But even as I do, pieces slot into place with sickening clarity. The way everyone says Amriel’s Shadow. Their identical heights, their matching eyes. The fact that I’ve never seen either of them change forms.
Goddess, what? Just what?