Chapter Eight #3
And I knew something without reservation or shame, without argument or concern. We belonged, Jovi and me.
We were made for this, this dark communion. No matter what happened. No matter what he did because of vows he’d made to monstrous men. I would forgive him.
I already had.
And I think he saw that on my face, because he made a low, helpless sort of growl and then he was swinging me up in his arms. He carried me back into the bedroom, laid me out on the bed, and taught me that the things I’d only read about in books were far, far better on this side of the page.
He let me explore him. I traced the muscles on his back, the strength of his biceps, and the planes of his chest. I became obsessed with his male nipples that I found I could lick and tease as he’d done to me.
I moved from one to the next, the way he’d showed me, and paused to make sure I licked my way along every letter that circled his heart, and the snake slapped over it.
“Chiù nniuri ri mezzannotte nun pò fari,” he muttered at me, as if it was some kind of prayer. Then he translated himself. “It can’t get any darker than midnight, surely.”
As if I was torturing him. I flushed with pleasure.
I followed the hair on his chest, glorying in the way it thickened as I moved down south, and when I got to that intriguing V that seemed to point the way to exactly where I most wanted to go, I thought he would stop.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he moved me so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was kneeling before him, deliciously caged between his legs.
“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered, my hands trembling as I held myself up with my palms on his thighs.
Something dark and fierce moved over his face then, and took root.
“You remember what I did to you last night,” he said.
It wasn’t a question. It was a demand, I realized. He wanted me to remember exactly what he had done. In detail. And so I did.
And as I did, I could feel myself ripen. I could feel that soft heat take me over as if he was licking into me all over again.
“It’s the same idea,” he told me. “Less a dish of ice cream, more a cone.”
I set myself to the task happily. I slid my hands up, reached into his boxer briefs, and pulled all of him out.
And he was beautiful. He made my mouth water. Everything about him was thick and long, hard and big.
So astonishingly big that I was intimidated.
But I thought about ice cream cones, and how a person didn’t go shoving the whole thing in her mouth at once.
So I started the way I would approach a cone. As if I was at a seaside, where I always imagined the best ice cream cones would be sampled, not that I’d ever seen the sea.
I licked my way over the tip first, humming a little as I went because he tasted so good.
He tasted like heat and our own wildfire. He tasted exactly as a man should, and though I had nothing to compare it to, I was confident no man alive could possibly taste better than he did. Just as no man was as beautiful.
I was enjoying myself, but the more attuned I became to his responses, the better I got.
When I sucked him into my mouth, he groaned.
When I wrapped my hands around the base of his shaft and took him as deep as I could into my mouth, he began muttering a string of filthy Sicilian curse words that I did not require translation to understand.
He let me play and experiment and what I got in return were the sounds he made, the way he dug his fists into my hair, and that molten heat between my own legs that had me squirming where I knelt.
And then, at a certain point, everything shifted. He sat up straighter and took his hands out of my hair so that he could grip the sides of my head instead, and that easily, that quickly, he changed everything.
He took control.
I could feel my whole body surrender to his mastery as he slid himself in and out of my mouth, using me as he would, making me soar.
I could feel a trembling start deep down inside me, and it almost felt like grief, because I wanted so badly to concentrate on him. To make this all about him, the way it had been all about me before.
But there was no helping it. It was out of my control, like everything else.
And this was what sent me skyrocketing over the edge.
I squeezed my thighs together and began to rock myself and his thrusts were a little bit harder. He went a little bit deeper.
And then, as I broke into pieces, I tasted the flood of him on my tongue—a deep salt heat.
I drank down every drop. I shattered while I did it.
And for a long time, we stayed like that. Me, spent, still on my knees with my face on his thigh. Jovi sat on the bed, propping himself up with one hand, as he played with my hair, my cheek. As he murmured things I wasn’t sure he even knew he was saying.
“We cannot stay in Prague,” he told me after some while, his voice gritty.
My eyes were closed and I was still trying to catch my breath, but the import of his words hit me. Hard.
If we were leaving Prague, that meant he didn’t intend to kill me in this house.
It meant that things had changed.
But I knew better than to crow about that. Or even to question him. Maybe I was afraid that if I did, he’d change his mind.
Instead, I turned my head slightly and pressed a kiss to his thigh. “All right.”
His voice, if anything, was grittier when he replied. “It has not yet been twenty-four hours. Once we passed that marker, likelihood of getting caught in a snare increases.”
All my limbs felt weighted down, but I managed to shift my hand and I traced patterns on his heavy quad muscle, currently acting as my pillow while I knelt there.
His fingers moved through my hair, smoothing out the inky-black strands as if he found them precious.
It would have been unbearable enough to make me cry if I could have processed it then, but I couldn’t. I didn’t.
I could only drift in the sweetness of this. I could only live in it.
“Where will we go?” I asked.
“Sicily.”
I looked at him, confused. “Isn’t that the last place you should go? With me?”
His mouth tightened. “It is the last place they will think to look for me. Until they hear that the assignment is complete, they will assume I am doing what is necessary somewhere else. It will buy some time.”
Time, I decided, sounded lovely. It sounded the way I felt, gazing at him with his fingers in my hair.
Maybe, with time, I’d figure out if it was even possible to process…all of this.
“It is better if I appear to be traveling alone.” He sounded fully grim then. “Do you understand what I mean?”
I thought I might, but I wanted him to tell me. So all I did was shake my head, there where he could feel it.
He tipped my head back so I was looking at him, and it was as if all the constellations in the sky somewhere above us changed position and found a new firmament there in his gaze.
I held my breath.
“I will need you to stay out of sight and quiet for some time. There is only one way to achieve this, practically speaking. I will knock you out and keep you out, then transport you out of Czechia.”
“You do love to give a girl choices,” I whispered. “I’ve never heard of such a thing as a woke weapon before.”
His head tilted slightly to one side. But his eyes were gleaming. He was laughing. I knew he was.
“This is not a matter of offering choices. I am telling you what must occur.”
He sounded as forbidding as ever, but the thing was… I knew better. Everything was changed. He isn’t going to kill me. And there was a gap between not being killed and living happily ever after, I knew that. I did.
Although, given who we were, maybe not quite so big of a gap after all.
But in any case, I wanted to make him mine, and I wanted to be a part of the we who left Prague together. I wanted to make all of this my own, and not just because that was the easiest way to make a bad thing good.
Because I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t think it was terrible.
I wanted more.
“You can do what you want with me,” I told him. I tilted my head a bit to show him my neck, where long ago—it felt like a lifetime ago when it was only last night—he had traced his fingers down the side of my neck and talked to me of blood chokes. “All I ask is that you make it good.”
For a moment, he looked stunned. In the next, I actually saw a flash of his teeth, as before my very eyes, Giovanbattista D’Amato, Il Serpente’s deadliest weapon, smiled.
It almost made me come again, just at the sight. It hit me like a bolt of sensation, directly between my legs.
“As you wish,” Jovi told me.
And then he hauled me up from my knees and dragged me over him to straddle his lap. He gripped my head, palming the back of it, and kissed me, dirty and deep.
As he did, he reached between us and speared his fingers into all of my molten heat, and he was deliciously, deliberately ungentle. As if he knew my hunger had teeth.
When he found the heart of me, he pressed his thumb there as he slid a finger inside my body.
Then, for a long, heated while, there was only his thumb, his finger, and his mouth on mine, demanding and marvelous.
He added a second finger, and I sighed a little bit against him as he stretched me, but I took it.
With his other hand, he gripped my neck. And kept right on kissing me, deep and carnal.
There was a pressure between my legs, a pressure plus a glorious heat and longing.
There was also a pressure on my neck, and that grip became a little bit harder and then a little bit harder still. And the more I bucked against it, the more my hips moved and the more I delivered myself into his hands.
I began to shiver, and he growled in approval.
“Come, Rux,” he ordered me. “Come hard on my hand and deliver yourself to me.”
And I did it. I obeyed him.
I clenched down hard on his fingers and sensation ripped through me, so intense it was almost like it hurt—
But the hurt was good. It was so good.
And his hand was on my throat, tighter and tighter, and just as the storm in me exploded I felt him press even harder.
Everything was delicious, bright hot and delirious.
Then it went dark.
And when I woke up, I was in Sicily.