Chapter 18 #2
His eyes widened. As though, of all the things she could have done in this moment—writhe, moan, beg, submit—simple tenderness was the one thing he hadn’t prepared himself for.
“Sasha—”
“I know what you are,” she said. Quietly. Firmly. Her thumbs traced the sharp lines of his cheekbones. “I know what this costs. I know the story will kill me because of it.”
His jaw tightened under her palms. His eyes were glassy again. That not-quite-crying that his existence allowed him. The approximation of tears that was the closest he could ever get.
“I want to be here anyway,” she whispered. “With you.”
He made a sound. Low. Broken. Like something inside him had finally, after millennia, given way.
And then his mouth was on hers, and it was nothing like the soft, quiet kiss in the library.
This was consuming. This was the tide of ink she’d felt the first time, the overwhelming, drowning wave of him, but it was different now because she wasn’t fighting it.
She was pulling him in. Her fingers threading into his hair, her legs wrapping around him, her body arching up to meet every point of contact.
The tendrils tightened everywhere at once.
The creatures surged. She felt them—all of them—and him—and the boundaries between where he ended and they began dissolved into meaninglessness.
There was only sensation. Heat and pressure and that low, thrumming purr vibrating through every inch of her body.
More, she thought, knowing he’d hear it, not caring anymore, not caring, not caring, not caring—
“As you wish,” he growled against her lips.
The whole world went darker.
Not the terrifying dark of his worst moods—not the suffocating void of the Dark King’s cottage or the hungry emptiness of his shadow form.
This was something else. Warm. Encompassing.
Like being submerged in water heated to the exact temperature of her own skin, where the boundary between self and everything else ceased to exist.
She could barely see. He was everywhere. Against her. Around her. Inside the space between her breaths.
The tendrils had multiplied. Or maybe they’d always been there and she’d only now stopped fighting them enough to feel them all.
They wound around her thighs—both of them now, not one—sliding beneath the stockings that were being pushed and pulled past the point of serving any purpose.
One looped around her left wrist and pulled it up over her head on the pillow.
Another traced lazy, maddening spirals across her stomach.
And then there was him. The actual, physical, solid weight of him between her legs, one hand braced beside her head, the other tracing the mark his teeth had left at the curve of her neck. His thumb pressed into the bruise. Gently. Then not gently.
She hissed through her teeth. He chuckled.
“Pain or pleasure?” he asked. It wasn’t rhetorical. He was genuinely asking. Checking.
“Yes,” she managed.
His laugh was delighted and wicked. “Oh, you are going to be the death of me, Sasha Lancaster.”
“Impossible. You can’t die.”
“There are worse things than dying.” He lowered his mouth to her collarbone, and his tongue—that tongue, the one that was just slightly too long and just slightly forked at the tip—drew a burning line from the hollow of her throat down to the swell of her breast. “Like wanting something you’re not allowed to have. ”
The tendril at her stomach slid lower. Slowly. With a deliberateness that made her entire body tense in anticipation. It traced the crease of her hip, dipping inward, following the line where her thigh met her body. Close. So close to where she needed it. But not touching.
Not yet.
She made a sound. Something between a whimper and a snarl.
“Patience,” he murmured against her skin, his mouth now hovering over her nipple. His breath was warm and it made the sensitive flesh tighten and ache. “I’ve waited a very long time for this. You can wait a few moments longer.”
“I hate you.”
“You do not.” His tongue flicked out and circled the peak of her breast without touching it.
The almost-sensation—that same ghost of contact she remembered from the Dark King’s void—was somehow worse in a body that was solid, that she could see if there had been enough light, that she could grab and pull and demand things of.
“You haven’t hated me in quite some time.
But you’re welcome to pretend, if it helps. ”
The tendril between her legs finally—finally—made contact. The lightest brush against her core. Just the tip of it, smooth and impossibly warm, tracing a line so feather-light she might have imagined it if it hadn’t sent a shock of white-hot sensation straight through her nervous system.
Her hips jolted upward. Involuntary. Desperate.
He pulled the tendril away.
“Fuck—Vile—”
“Ask me.” His mouth finally closed around her nipple, and the flat of his tongue pressed hard against the sensitive flesh as he sucked, drawing a ragged cry from her. He released it with a wet sound. “Ask me properly.”
The things at her thighs tightened, spreading her wider. She felt exposed and vulnerable and unbearably, achingly empty. The tendril that had been tracing her back earlier was now beneath her, supporting her, arching her up toward him like an offering.
“Please.” The word came out cracked and raw.
“Please what?” He kissed his way to her other breast. His teeth dragged across the peak of it and she whined, actually whined, her hands fisting in the sheets above her head because the things that were now wound around both her wrists wouldn’t let her reach for him.
“Be specific, Sasha. I am a villain. I thrive on specificity. Leaves less room for plausible deniability.”
Something pressed against her entrance. Not entering. Just…there. The pressure of it, the heat of it, the promise of it. Her body clenched around nothing and the frustration was blinding.
“Please touch me.” She couldn’t recognize her own voice anymore. It was wrecked. “Please, Vile, I need—I need you to—”
“To what?” He pressed harder at her entrance. Not in. Not yet. Just enough for her to feel how thick it was. How warm. How ready. “Finish your sentence.”
He had a thing about making her finish her sentences while he took her apart. She was starting to see a pattern. The bastard got off on it. On her losing coherence. On watching her try to hold onto language while he systematically dismantled her ability to think.
“Fuck me.” She growled it at him, and the fury in her voice surprised even her. “For the love of every story ever written, Vile, will you please just—”
He thrust forward.
All of him. Everything. In one movement that was so sudden and so deep and so impossibly much that the sound she made wasn’t a moan or a scream but something in between that had no name.
Her back arched off the silk. The tendril beneath her supported the curve of her spine, holding her there, suspended, impaled, every nerve ending in her body firing at once.
“—oh God!”
“Wrong deity.” He was breathing hard. His forehead pressed against hers, and his eyes—both blazing violet—were inches from her own, burning with something feral. His jaw was tight, the muscles in his neck corded. He was shaking. “But I’ll allow it.”
He withdrew. Slowly. The drag of it made her toes curl and her breath stutter. And when he pushed back in, it was just as slow, and just as devastating, and the things at her thighs tightened their grip and the thing at her wrists pinned her harder and the shadows—
The shadows were touching her everywhere.
Smooth, warm surfaces sliding along her arms. Something coiling around her calf, squeezing in rhythm with his thrusts.
A tendril at her throat—not squeezing, just resting there, a warm weight against her pulse, feeling the wild hammering of her heartbeat.
Another winding slowly, deliberately, around both of her breasts, constricting in a way that made the flesh swell and sensitize until even the air against her nipples was too much.
And him. Inside her. Moving in a rhythm that started slow and deep and unhurried, each stroke hitting a place that made her vision white out at the edges. He was in no rush. He had all the time in the world.
He had all the time in every world.
And he was going to use every second of it.
“Vile—I can’t—I’m going to—”
“Not yet.” The tendril at her core shifted. Pressed against her. Something found the swollen, aching bundle of nerves above where he filled her and rolled against it with a precision that suggested he could, in fact, read her body the way he read pages. “Not until I say.”
“You son of a b—”
He slammed into her. Hard enough that the iron frame of the bed groaned in protest. The sound she made in response was not a word. It wasn’t even close to a word. It was pure, animal sensation escaping from her throat because there was nowhere else for it to go.
The pace changed. The slowness evaporated.
He was moving faster now, the careful restraint giving way to something more desperate, more ragged.
His breathing was harsh against her neck.
The hand beside her head fisted in the pillow hard enough that she heard fabric tear as if he had suddenly grown claws.
The shadows moved with him. The tendril between her legs pressed harder, rubbing in tight, merciless circles that made her scream and arch and thrash against the restraints at her wrists. The things at her breasts squeezed tighter. The one at her throat pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
Too much. Too much of everything. Like the Dark King’s cottage, but amplified, intensified, because this wasn’t a character. This wasn’t a story. This was him—raw and unmasked and panting against her throat, his hips snapping into hers with a desperation that said he was just as lost as she was.
“Sasha—” His voice broke on her name. Actually broke. Like a note sung too hard by someone who didn’t know they were singing.
She wrenched against the tendrils at her wrists. They held fast. She snarled in frustration. “Let me touch you—”
They released.
Her hands flew to him. One fisting in his hair, the other clutching the back of his neck, pulling him down to her, crushing her mouth against his. She tasted copper. She tasted something darker than copper. She didn’t care.
He groaned into her mouth—low, guttural, the sound of something unraveling—and his hand found her hip and gripped hard enough to bruise. His thrusts were erratic now, losing their rhythm. Losing control.
“Now,” he snarled against her lips. “Now, Sasha—”
The tendril at her core pressed down and his hips drove forward and the thing at her throat tightened just barely—
And she shattered.
She genuinely felt as though she had been taken apart, atom by atom, and scattered across the darkness of the room like light through a prism.
The orgasm tore through her in waves that seemed to have no end, each one cresting higher than the last, compounding, building, because he didn’t stop.
Didn’t slow. Kept moving inside her, kept the pressure at her core, kept the tendrils tightening and loosening in a rhythm that wrung every last shuddering pulse of pleasure from her body until she was sobbing.
Actually sobbing. Tears running down her temples into her hair while her body shook and clenched around him and she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t think and she couldn’t do anything except hold onto him and let it happen.
He followed her over the edge moments later.
She felt it—the sudden rigidity of his body, the sharp snap of his hips, the way his hand at her hip tightened to the point of pain.
The sound he made was not a moan. It was closer to a roar—something ancient and inhuman and torn from the deepest part of whatever he was.
The shadows in the room convulsed. The creatures keened.
The purring peaked into something that resonated in her chest like a cathedral bell.
And then.
Silence.
Absolute, complete, all-consuming silence.
The shadows retreated. The tendrils loosened and withdrew with a gentleness that was almost apologetic. The warmth around her settled into something softer—a presence rather than a pressure. The silk beneath her was damp with sweat and she didn’t care. She couldn’t move.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever move again.
That was fine.
Vile was still above her. His weight on his elbows now, his breathing ragged. His forehead was pressed to hers. His eyes were shut. She could feel the tremor in his arms.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
It was Sasha who broke first. Because of course it was. “Vile.”
“Hm.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“You okay?”
A pause. Then, impossibly, unbelievably—he laughed. A real laugh. Not the theatrical cackle or the dark chuckle or the bitter bark she’d heard a thousand times. A real, genuine, startled laugh, as if the question itself was the most absurd and wonderful thing anyone had ever asked him.
“No one,” he said, and his voice was wrecked and raw and barely a whisper, “has ever asked me that. In the entirety of my existence after—” He paused to breathe. “Not once.”
Her chest ached. “That’s a terrible answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.” He finally opened his eyes. Purple. Dim. Spent. And looking at her with an expression that she knew, with absolute certainty, had never been on his face before.
He rolled to the side, pulling free of her—she couldn’t help the small, involuntary sound of loss—and settled onto his back beside her on the ruined silk. The ceiling above them was no longer infinite darkness, but it sparkled with…stars.
He’d put stars up there.
Faint and flickering, like the ones in the stained-glass windows of his library, but real enough to be beautiful.
She turned her head to look at him. He was staring up at his stars with an expression she couldn’t name. His chest rose and fell. His hair was a disaster. His suit—what remained of it—was destroyed.
And for the first time since she’d met him, he looked…peaceful.
Reaching over, she found his hand in the dark. Laced her fingers through his.
He didn’t pull away.
They lay there in the quiet, in the dark, in the space between stories where nothing was written yet and anything was still possible.
And if the narrative was going to kill her because of this, she decided, while staring up at the stars he’d made for her in a ceiling that didn’t exist…
Then the narrative could get in fucking line.
Because this was worth it.