Chapter 22
Feather
Ididn’t speak the words aloud. It seemed disrespectful of Gavriel, who was in no way actually sleeping on the floor. But I said them clearly in my mind, and I knew he might have heard them anyway. Make love with me, Rumple.
Rumple dropped his hands, and then the cloth, hanging his head.
I can’t remove this armor, my beloved. I can’t do as you ask.
His horns spiraled up and over his skull, and I reached out to explore them as I’d wanted to since I’d first seen them in the lightning of the void.
“They’re sensitive,” he said, shivering like a racehorse, his shoulders rising and falling with each breath.
“Clit horns,” I agreed. “Or I guess dick horns for you? I had horns after I redeemed Sanctuary. They came off in the Celestial Realm. No, they didn’t cut them off,” I quickly explained when his eyes flew to my head in horror.
“Oh.” He huffed a small laugh. “You called them clit horns? Only you.”
That’s what I want. I want to be your only one. For now, and forever. Will you love me? I think if you let me, I can help. I showed him what I’d done with Mikhail and Righteous. Hope flared in his eyes. Please, Rumple?
You would want to? He held up one smut-coated arm. You see this, and you truly feel desire?
Let me show you. Slowly, I pulled my stained toga the rest of the way off, revealing my skin. Prisms danced on all the walls, and I heard a soft sigh from Gavriel.
Rumple was entranced. He traced the patterns of the gray on my shoulders with one hand, and the strange faces that resided in his own skin subsided, sinking beneath the surface. His face and hands were a shining, shimmering hematite gray now.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “I love you, and I love everything about you. What you look like on the outside has nothing to do with my feelings for you. In any life, if we were born again and again, no matter what you looked like, I would see you and want you. I would chase you across a thousand galaxies, Rumple. You’re mine.
I will never give you up. And I will never give up on you. ”
As I spoke, I kneeled on the bed in front of him, and began stroking him lightly all over with my fingertips.
I leaned forward, using my tongue to trace what I knew in my mind were angelic sigils, holy words of love and grace, though I had never read them or learned them. They were a part of who I was.
The armor began to soften, and I whispered a prayer as I learned his new textures, his shapes.
His eyes were closed, and thick, sludgy tears fell in constant streams down his face, then to the breastplate as I praised him.
I murmured all the things I wanted to do with him.
All my dreams and fantasies, always with him in them.
Always, Rumple. No matter if I had to fly for a thousand years across the void, I would still come for you.
For a moment, pain flashed across his face, and I saw into his thoughts. Saw what he had planned. He was going to sacrifice his life to save me and Gavriel, pay the price to open the Great Gate. He thought he had it all figured out.
I’d always sucked at chess. Rumple loved the game, and in between lives, after my pain had faded enough that I could think again, he would try to distract me with a game, using an enormous mental chessboard.
I never won, never even got close. He said it was because I was too compassionate and had trouble giving up a single pawn, even if it meant saving the queen.
I was almost sure it was because he was an ancient being, capable of almost anything and with thousands of years of practice under his belt, but he’d disagreed.
“You must learn to be not only selfless, but ruthless,” he’d said.
“At some point, you will need to save yourself—or someone you love—by making a cold, calculated decision. One that benefits the game as a whole, and not the individual pieces. One that does not result in you, little queen, being taken off the board.”
I knew I would never do that. But I also knew Rumple had shown me again and again how to set up a move that ensured a win: checkmate. And I had exactly what I needed to make certain he didn’t give up on us. Or on himself.
I leaned over his hard shell, ignoring the bite of sharp edges on my skin, and nibbled at his ear.
“I will never give up,” I repeated, lifting my hands to his horns and tracing teasing lines over them, until he writhed in delicious torment underneath me.
“And I’m going to fuck you until you believe it. ”
“I thought we were going to make love,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“That, too,” I agreed, rubbing myself over him and using the energy I had left, along with the little the yogurt and mochas had given me, to coax his armor to soften.
I hummed a love song as I kissed my way over his forehead and down one cheek, and paused with our mouths next to each other.
“It’s always a kiss, in the fairy tales,” I whispered. “It’s a kiss that ends the nightmare.”
And then I slipped a thread of my soul between my lips, in the way Mikhail had taught me, and pressed our mouths together.
He opened his lips, and I plunged that thread deep inside him. It was a golden filament in a well of darkness. But it shone with all the light of my love for him, and I believed it would be enough.
That I would be enough for him.