Chapter 21 #2
I lick my lips, but there’s no use lying to him anymore, so I nod.
“You needy little thing.” His hand comes up to cage my throat—not exerting pressure, but staking a claim. “Tell me what you want. With words. I want to hear you say it out loud.”
I hold my breath. Our breath, because it’s one and the same now, a silky, synchronistic slide that only feeds this towering hunger inside me.
“I want… I want…” I weigh my next words, testing their heft before shaping them.
I want to know. I don’t want to die without finding out what he feels like, what he can show me.
What it means to be fully alive.
I stare up from beneath pinched brows. And feel the moment inevitability locks us together, the ease of it, the echoing click.
This time, I don’t drop my pendant, or fling it away. I slide it along its chain and let it fall down my back, out of sight. A signal for Ishanna to look away.
Because I’m going to do something I shouldn’t. Something I’ll have to repent for later.
Which I will. Another day. When I get home. When I return to order and discipline and everything that makes sense.
But for right now, I step to the edge of the abyss, let myself stare down. Let myself fall. “I want…you. I want you to be angry and gentle.”
His eyes go dark and liquid. “There it is, my sweet,” he croons. “Was that so hard?”
My fingers tangle in his shirt hem as I cling to him with both hands, now. I nod. It was. It really was.
“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice like steel and silk, anger wrapped in a promise. “I want you, too. More than anything.”
My core clenches around nothing, but I have no defense against those words. None at all. So I pull myself closer, rise onto tiptoes, and kiss him.
The moment our mouths meet, a dam breaks somewhere inside him. His grip slides from my throat to my nape, cupping me close. Emotion floods us both, and I feel it—how much he was holding back, how much he needed me to cross the distance first. How much he needed me to need him, too.
And goddess, I do. I no longer care if it makes sense. I only care that, for once, I want something that actually wants me back.
Amriel deepens the kiss. My eyes flutter shut as I savor his taste, a heady mix of wine and anger and longing. His hand ravels in my hair, his fingers twining around my wet strands, tugging my head back. A moan heats my chest as his tongue explores my mouth, tracing silky strokes against mine.
This kiss is different than our others. Not only fiercer, but deeper. More sure of itself.
Maybe because there’s no going back. I’ve stepped off the cliff, and now we’re plummeting together, neither of us sure where we’re heading, air rushing past as we streak toward the unknown.
I get lost in the feel of him, in his taste, in the way my palms press flat against his chest. I could stand here forever, kissing him, but he gathers me up like he did in the solarium, carrying me to the bed and laying me down.
His hips settle between my thighs, the silk of his pants sticking to my damp skin.
Our tongues twine tighter, our hands roving over each other’s bodies, my palms molding to the ridges of his abdomen as he tugs my robe apart.
“I’ll take care of you,” he says into my mouth, the words guttural and half-swallowed. “I’ll take such good care of you.”
Anticipation explodes within me, a puddle of heat at the base of my spine.
Amriel’s hand slides along the opening of my robe, first pulling aside one half, then the other.
The brush of his fingertips across my ribcage is the sweetest torture I’ve ever endured, an excruciating counterpoint to the weight of his longing.
Because behind this feather-light caress, a tide of desire roars through him, forceful enough to flatten me against the bedsheets.
I pause, breaking the kiss long enough to pull my arms free of my gown so I can spread myself beneath him.
He’s the first man to see me naked, but somehow, vulnerability doesn’t touch me.
Instead, power flushes through my limbs as Amriel stares down with glazed eyes, his breath ragged, his lips parted.
The bond lets me see exactly why. Need spins through him, multiplying, threatening to consume him, me, everything in its path.
It doesn’t matter that he’s lived for centuries, seen things I’ve never imagined.
He’s never encountered anything like this before, never considered that he could want something with such intensity that the compulsion beats in his blood, in his bones, in the roots of his hair and the beds of his fingernails.
“Shadows below,” he murmurs brokenly. “You’re so much more than I deserve.”
A frown creases my brow, but a moment later, it ceases to matter, because he bends his head and closes his mouth around my nipple. The warm suction has me crying out, plunging my hands into his hair. The starlit strands feel exactly like I imagined—heavy and silken, slippery between my fingers.
He sucks and sucks, teasing my nipple with his tongue, his hand sliding up my side in a way that summons lightning beneath my skin. Heat swarms my insides, charting a direct path from his mouth to the ache between my legs.
Everything accelerates. I tug at his clothes, and he helps me, shucking off his boots, peeling away his shirt, whisking his pants down over his hips and onto the floor.
When both of us are bare, he climbs my body and kisses me again, one hand gripping behind my knee, splaying my legs wide as he covers me with his weight.
The kiss takes over. He does—his heat, his scent, the way his hair falls around me like a curtain.
The room melts to a hazy glow of blue light and silk sheets, to a silence measured in desperate breaths, to this bulwark of muscle holding me down.
Amriel grinds against me, sliding his arousal across the same spot I gave so much attention to in the bath.
Good goddess, it feels completely different when he does it. Stars burst in my vision, my blood surging beneath my skin as if trying to lure him closer.
I gasp with every slide of our bodies, then glance down just long enough to see what he’s doing to me. A squeak escapes me, my eyes snapping up to his again.
No. No way can he fit that inside me. Where is it going to go? Where can it go without causing pain?
“I won’t hurt you,” he says, low and forceful and certain. The heat of his gaze pins me to the bed, his palm molding to my cheek. “I won’t hurt you at all.”
I stare up, helpless. “But how can you know?”
“Because. I’ll be touching you the whole time.”
My heartbeat gets all tangled up, snared by the intention in his look. I hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t considered the magic of the mate bond.
“I mean, there are ways, among mates,” he continues. “If you wanted pain, I could give it to you. Like my Shadow wanted, when you scarred us. But you, me, this… I won’t hurt you, Princess. I can’t. Not tonight. Not ever, unless you need me to.”
Somehow, that makes tears form, bathing the backs of my eyes. A raw ache lodges in my throat and grows there.
Amriel must feel it, because he stops moving and stares down. The thing inside me swells and pushes, trying to reach him—a word or a promise or both.
I don’t know what to call it. I’ve never felt it before. I have no name for whatever this is, no frame of understanding.
I only know that it commands me to reach up and frame his jaw with my hands. He turns his face into my cheek, aiming a soft kiss against my palm, his brow creased as if in pain.
“Shadows take me,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “I didn’t know. I had no idea.”
I smooth my thumbs along his jawline, the pads of my fingers scraping against the stubble there. “About what?”
He inhales against my palm. “That I’d be able to see myself. Through your eyes, I mean. That I’d be able to see how much you…”
I wait, but he only shakes his head, his eyes squeezed shut. I don’t need him to finish, though. I feel what he feels, bend beneath its intensity, too. Beneath a beauty so bright neither of us can bear to look at it directly.
“I know I should wait,” he says, raw emotion thrumming in his voice. “Make sure you’re ready. Touch you first. Taste you. But I need you, Princess. I need to wreck you. Punish you. I need to fuck away every second I spent wondering if you were hurt.”
I cage my lip beneath my teeth. And widen my legs, granting him permission.
Because I am ready. I was ready the moment I kissed him, or maybe even at the dinner table. Now I’m nothing but a needy ache, a bed of tinder wanting for a single spark. I’m hungry and desperate and don’t want to wait another second. “Then do it.”
His eyes flare gold, brighter than I’ve ever seen. Neither of us acknowledges the enormity singing between us, the unstoppable force that joins our heartbeats and binds our breath.
He leans down, feathers his nose against my cheek. Breathes in hard as he tugs my legs wider, lets his cock press against my entrance. He kisses me softly, then searches my face with eyes that have gone summer hot, sea deep. They hold mine as he pushes inside me.
He doesn’t do it gently. He’s inexorable, inevitable.
His hips press forward, stretching me open as he makes room for himself in a way that has my breath tripping over nothing, my eyebrows snapping together.
My spine lifts from the bed, and he takes the opportunity to slide a hand beneath me, his palm spanning my shoulder blades, his fingers notching into the grooves between my vertebrae.
He doesn’t stop, though. Doesn’t even slow.
And I don’t want him to. Because it doesn’t hurt. At all. It feels like…like…completion. Like bliss.
The bond explodes between us. Not just emotion, but everything—thought and memory, feeling and fulfillment, a maelstrom of sensation my body can barely hold. Somehow, I can’t remember what existed before this moment. Before him. And when I gasp, it comes from both our throats.