Chapter Twenty-Four
AT FIRST, WHEN THEY’D FINISHED, ALL SHE COULD do was lie beneath Malachi limply.
She breathed raggedly, could barely catch her breath.
Her head swam in a manner that left her blinking rapidly and made the room wobbly.
Then, there were the disorienting circles Malachi was tracing over her neck at the spot where …
Replaying the events that had just occurred was like plunging her whole body into a pool of electric eels.
She shoved at Malachi’s chest. The male was so solidly built that she might as well have been pushing against the Yunna Mountains.
However, he rolled off her immediately and positioned himself on his side.
He propped his upper body on his arm. She turned sideways to face him, not letting her gaze dip below his waist. She’d felt his thick erection that lingered when he’d been between her legs, and if she saw it, she’d lose this newfound clarity.
“You bit me!” she cried, slapping his chest. “You. Bit. Me!” She found herself fingering the spot on her neck.
The puncture wound had already healed, but the area remained a sensitive bundle of skin that had her nipples hardening and a delirium-inducing electric current shooting straight to her core when she merely touched it.
Malachi’s stare was searing. It completed a slow sweep from her neck to her breasts, and then lower before snapping back to her face.
The way he looked at her had shifted, the smugness gone for now.
In its place was something else, something a tad frightening—he no longer gazed at her like a male intent on bedding an object of his desire; he looked at her like a predator who’d already run down and dragged what he sought back to his den and didn’t intend on letting it escape.
Ever. She snarled, feeling claustrophobic and needing to assert the fact that she was not, in fact, Malachi’s caught prey.
“I am pretending at being your war prize. I am not such a thing and never will be, regardless of how many times we might fuck,” she growled.
Malachi blinked, as if dazedly coming out of some trance.
He scowled as he touched two fingers to his own neck where twin bite marks remained.
He stiffened when he did, and Kadeesha surmised he felt the same sensations she had when he touched the marks.
“You bit me back!” It was a clear accusation that made Kadeesha’s hackles raise.
“You initiated it,” she reminded him. “I was caught up in passion; I acted solely on natural instinct after you sank your teeth into me! You hauled us there, not me.”
He reached for her and snagged her around the waist, pulling her against him.
His hand covered hers, which was now clutching her neck while she delusionally pictured tearing the damnable bite marks off.
He pulled her hand away from her skin and replaced it with his own.
With painstaking gentleness, as if handling something extraordinarily rare, immensely fragile, and precious, Malachi touched two fingers to the marks he’d left on her.
She wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the sensation that his touch would induce.
She bit her lip hard enough that she drew blood to keep from moaning.
But it did nothing to curb her body going soft and pliable against his or the wetness gushing down her thighs.
Malachi’s arm banded tighter around her, soldering their bodies together.
“You are exquisite when you’re on the precipice of coming,” he murmured.
“I want to be the only one who puts that look on your face. The only one you desire to place it there. The only male who’d dare even attempt to place it there.
I’m going to ruin you, Kadeesha. If you dare think to take another lover, they won’t compare, won’t satisfy you, nor will they live very long. ”
He was blowing an infinite amount of arrogant air, and she was about to tell him that.
Instead, she moaned loudly when he threw her leg over his hip and pushed inside her once more, his strokes matching the energy of and then punctuating each decree he’d made.
Her eyes crossed. She couldn’t think straight when they were connected like this.
Every rational thought scattered, and she skimmed her nails over the bite marks she’d left in the groove of his neck, wanting her touch to have the same mind-bending effect on him.
He shuddered. A primal sound ripped from Malachi that was a guttural version of her name.
His fingers dug into her hips, and he hit spots inside her she was formerly unaware could be reached.
She should shove him away, because they needed to have a very real conversation about what exchanging bites meant—but her thoughts fractured again when Malachi withdrew from her excruciatingly slowly and then plunged back inside brutally swift.
Exactly like the first time this morning and the many, many times last night, Malachi fucked her furiously and relentlessly, as if chasing a release that they both painfully needed.
When it hit, for them both at the same time, it was like being launched into the stratosphere and floating amongst glittering stars whose heat licked every inch of her body.
Then, she was biting him again, making a fresh puncture wound at the barely healed site, and his teeth were shredding her skin where he’d first delivered his bite mark.
The act left her suspended among those stars, spinning wildly out of control with no tether back to solid ground.
She remained completely out of her mind with bliss for what might’ve been an eternity for all she knew.
When she finally came down from the high, Malachi’s features were contorted with a rhapsody that told Kadeesha he’d experienced the same.
After her breathing and heart rate returned to a steady enough state, she scooted out of Malachi’s arms, needing to place a fraction of distance between them so her head remained clear.
Yet even then, she felt a dizzying pull to move back closer, like some invisible thread ran between her and him and it savagely tugged on her if she ventured too far away.
That was enough to rattle some sense into her, which stayed put.
“You’ve bitten me—twice now,” she hissed.
Malachi’s jaw ticked as if the proximity she’d placed between them personally offended him. “Yes, and you’ve done the same to me,” he said nonchalantly, like it wasn’t a huge affair. A catastrophe, actually.
“There is a reason it is a long-abandoned act between lovers in any court!” she cried.
Even among spouses who’d been wedded for centuries, mutual biting in the throes of sex did not happen.
Especially among faefolk who wielded magic.
Blood exchanges when passions ran high had a way of intermingling both parties’ magics on a transcendental, metaphysical level.
Not only was the possibility high that the act could open a two-way channel between the participating parties’ very life forces and their inner wellsprings of magical power, it perilously allowed each party to have uninhibited access to the other’s life force and power moving forward.
And it could irreversibly bind the two together.
Ice flooded the pit of her stomach. She’d been stupid.
She was never stupid when it came to meaningless sex.
She had it a lot, and she thoroughly enjoyed each time, but she was also extremely careful about what power she relinquished—meaning she never relinquished even a fraction.
Not once. However, with Malachi, she’d lost her Celestials-damned mind.
This male is planning to usurp you, steal your court, kill you eventually!
She reminded herself of everything she should’ve been thinking about when he took her on the dining table and then when she let her guard down in his bathing chamber and then when she didn’t immediately set him ablaze for biting her.
She took a deep breath before a frenzy overtook her that revealed too much and showed Malachi, her damn enemy, that she was actually now terrified.
Displaying such an emotion would only enhance her current state of vulnerability.
The consequences go both ways, she also reminded herself in order to place things in better perspective.
He has exposed himself to a weakness that can be exploited as much as you have.
The knowledge helped her calm mostly down.
The war board wasn’t imbalanced. As long as that remained so, she could still shape things to her advantage. Hopefully.
“It is not that shunned of a practice in my court.” Malachi’s revelation wrenched her from her thoughts.
His admission went against southern customs so egregiously that her face went slack with shock.
Then again, his court didn’t exist among the southern lands, and faefolk who lived on opposite sides of the Yunnas rarely mixed.
“You all still widely engage in Markings?” she asked, incredulously.
“Why in all the realms would anybody do so?” Yes, she was aware how hypocritical it sounded given her current predicament.
Malachi chuckled at how positively flummoxed she was.
“It isn’t necessarily commonplace. But it isn’t some archaic practice that is heavily ostracized like it is among you southernfolk.
My parents both wore Markings and …” He paused as if judging something heavily.
Something in his gaze shifted after a few spells.
A resolute gleam shone in his dark eyes, as if whatever he’d been weighing, he’d come to a definitive decision.
“My parents’ Markings made them both all the more stronger for it,” he said at last. “It is true that bearing Markings exposes a mutual vulnerability between two powerful fae, but it can also make both stronger if the effects of Markings are cultivated wisely.”