Chapter 24
My soles slap against wet sand, glittering water fountaining around my feet. My arms pump, my breath turning molten in my lungs.
I run and run and run.
The blazing sky sets the riverbed alight, its vivid light pulsing in time with my heart. I wheel through a landscape of light and color, every muscle primed for the moment the Shadow will catch me.
Which he will. And I want him to. Because I’m not running for my life, this time, but for his.
A bellow erupts behind me. It rolls across the landscape, drowning out my splashing steps, the slap of my sodden dress as it smacks against my thigh. His roar soaks through my skin, through blood and sinew, melding with my bones.
Not a threat, this time, but a promise.
I sprint as fast as I can. Hurtle toward a sky that has turned the colors of stained glass. My fingers throb with anticipation, my pulse so intense I can feel it in my teeth.
He’ll catch me. Claim me. Finally.
And I’ll enjoy it.
I don’t even hear the Shadow coming. One moment, I’m streaking across color-soaked sand. The next, something solid hits me from behind, taking me to the ground. My hands splash into glittering water, my wet hair tangling around my arms. Then I’m being dragged, strong hands around my waist.
My fingers dig into the bed of a glowing aqua stream, raking furrows through the sand. Grit catches beneath my fingernails.
“I told you not to run.” The Shadow’s voice is desperate as he yanks me against him, covers my body with his. “I told you I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
I arch my back, grinding against him. “I don’t want you to stop. I want you to claim me.”
The last of his control snaps. I feel it go out of him, feel him become nothing but desperation and drive, a blind need to conquer.
His hands come around to my front and yank at my shirt laces, every touch darkening the need inside me.
I’ve become a bottomless pit of want. An ache in need of fulfillment.
Right now, nothing else exists.
He rips at my laces, then peels my sodden pants down over my hips. Soon, I’m entirely bare, splayed on hands and knees for all the world to see.
Not that I care. I’m panting, aching, throbbing with the need for him to take his victory. For him to drive the bond so deep I can never claw it out of me again.
He curls over me, his arm banded across my chest, his fangs finding the back of my shoulder and bearing down.
A half-moaned scream climbs up my throat—not because it hurts, but because it feels as perfect as anything could, a sharp prick that anchors me, even as the demands in my blood beat louder and louder.
Oh, goddess. What is happening? Raw desire screams through me, either through the bond from him, or from me to him, or are we even separate anymore? I can’t tell. We’re a frenzy of wet skin and pawing hands, a spiral of desperation so primal I have no hope of resisting.
Needy noises pour from my throat. “Please,” I hear myself whimper. “Please please please.”
A growl fills his chest as he shoves his pants down with jerky movements, wet cloth hissing over soaked skin. I arch my back, begging, needing, yearning for him. To silence the bond’s screams for completion. For him to end this hunt at last.
He surrenders, too. He has no choice. He pries my knees apart with his, his fangs sinking deeper into my shoulder, on the edge of breaking skin.
Another begging sound erupts from my throat. I’ve barreled past the limits of logic, incapable of words, of anything but sobbed pleas and lifted hips. I need—
His hand lands against my waist as he thrusts into me without warning, an invasion so complete it rips a gasp from the very center of my being. I go from empty to full in the span of an instant. From broken to whole, from desolation to drowning in pleasure.
Oh, goddess.
He drives into me without hesitation, holding nothing back.
I mewl and writhe, caged on every side, by the teeth pressing against my shoulder and the arm locked across my front.
By the hand that slides down my stomach and finds the luminous spot between.
By the way his finger traces blissful circles while every surge of his hips grinds my kneecaps into the sand.
A keening cry trips from my throat. One that sounds like it comes from someone else, because pleasure has me in a vise grip already, a storm I can’t fight.
I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed, if I even exist anymore or if I’ve become one with the sunset, the world, the surfeit of carnal ecstasy cascading into me from two places at once.
Stars crowd my vision, my whole body winding tight as he propels me toward the brink with relentless strokes. I’m nowhere and everywhere, melting around the star he’s lit at my center. In no time at all, it’s collapsing, detonating outward as my mouth opens in a soundless scream.
He doesn’t slow. Doesn’t let himself come with me. Just pours more sensation into my body as I spasm in his arms. Wave after wave stampedes through me, my knees giving out.
He doesn’t let me fall. He unlatches his teeth from my shoulder, pulls out of me and spins me around.
He hauls my hips up to his face, drapes my legs over his shoulders as he buries his tongue between my thighs.
My toes dig into his back, and he moans as he drags a long lick up my center, then another.
Aftershocks jolt through me every time, but he doesn’t relent.
Just licks and sucks until I’m trembling again, melting into the ground.
My hands find his hair, the tips of his ears, needing something to hold on to as my eyes roll back in my head.
He feasts on me like he has no other purpose. Like it’s all he’s ever wanted. And he does exactly what he threatened to the first time we met.
He makes me scream.
“Inside me,” I manage, when I finally catch a breath. “Inside me again.”
His tongue swipes upward, delivering one last dose of pleasure before he lowers me and surges upward, his forehead pressed to mine.
He stares into my face as he takes hold of his cock and guides himself in.
The force of it makes my whole body quake, bliss zipping along my bones, setting every nerve alight.
A growl builds inside him, a savage sound of satisfaction, but he pauses to give me a moment.
Just one moment to savor the intensity and fullness, then he takes me hard again, every roll of his body pressing me deeper into the sand.
Warm water splashes my sides and shoulders, the only proof that I still belong to this earth.
That I still have a body to call my own, that I haven’t been carried away by this waterfall of sensation.
Our eyes lock, his wild and golden and urgent.
His fangs grind together, the bond granting me access to everything—his pleasure, sharp and overwhelming.
His need to claim me, to make sure I never question who I belong to.
His terror that this is a dream, that I’ll disappear, that he’ll wake up alone and fractured like he has every day for the past two hundred and twenty-six years.
“You’re mine,” he growls, the words barely human. “Say it. Say you’re mine.”
“Yours.” The word rips out of me as pleasure coils tighter, a whole second peak rapidly approaching. “I’m yours, I’m—”
He crashes his mouth onto mine, swallowing the words. The kiss is all teeth and tongue and recklessness. I bite his lower lip and he groans into my mouth.
My hands find his back, my nails raking down his spine. He hisses and drives himself deeper, the angle hitting something inside me that makes sparks explode across my vision.
Mine. His. I’m his and he’s mine and I’ll piece his broken soul back together and he’ll take me, have me, never let anything hurt me, never go another day without making sure I have everything I need, everything I’ve ever wanted.
We melt together. Burn as one. We become a wild tangle of pleasure, of wet skin and sliding bodies and the soul-deep pulse of the bond. Every thrust drives me higher until I’m teetering on the edge of something I don’t care if I ever come back from.
I only care about this. About yes and more and harder, about him giving me what I crave without the need for conscious thought. His whole body tightens, ragged curses spouting from his lips as I… As he… As we…
The pinnacle slams into me, screams flowing from my throat as my body arches off the sand. He hangs on tight, his nose buried in my neck while we shatter together. Again and again, a shower of glittering pieces that break the whole world as they fall.
My body turns to stardust. Pleasure sweeps me up and wrings me out and finally leaves me panting and sticky and limp in his arms.
He collapses, his hand cupping the back of my head, his weight pressing me into the sand. We lie there, surrounded by the sound of ragged breathing and the gentle burble of the stream.
Time slows to a trickle, long seconds getting lost in the combined thud of our heartbeats. Minutes pass, maybe. I don’t know.
“Shadows take me,” he murmurs against my neck.
I somehow scrounge up the energy to skim my nails down his back, which earns me a shiver.
I chuckle. How pliant this bulwark of strength becomes with a simple touch.
“Do that again,” he says, a rumbling command.
I do, eliciting an even deeper shiver, this time.
He growls his contentment, then raises his head and stares down into my face. I stare back, struck by the weight behind his eyes, by seeing his two halves shine forth at once.
Because in this moment, I have both of them here, inside me. One soul pinning me to the sand, gazing down as if I hold the secrets of the universe in my palm.
For a while, we stay like that. Just…being. Existing.
Basking.
But I can’t lie here forever, and eventually, I reach up to frame his face in my hands. “I need to go,” I whisper. “I need to finish.”
He kisses my palm, his eyes alight with some new glow. “I know,” he murmurs.
My brows shoot up. “You mean you’re not going to fight me? Like Amriel did?”