Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
Nova
My entire body caught fire at his words.
I was burning and breathless beneath his touch as he lifted my shirt over my head and threw it to the floor, as he undid the supportive bindings underneath and his lips moved across my shoulders, along the back of my neck, across the shell of my ear.
Once my breasts were bared, he cupped them, his possessive grip drawing me even more tightly against his chest. I felt his arousal, hard and throbbing, against my lower back. Without thinking, I lifted up and down on my toes, shamelessly trying to ride his length.
His hands roamed over my naked stomach, eventually settling on my hips, helping me rise and fall against him. It felt sinfully good, even with too many clothes still separating us.
Far too many damn clothes.
My hand fumbled for the corner of the chair we’d been sitting in. I clutched it, desperately holding on, barely resisting the urge to beg him to take me completely right then and there.
As if my desires were written across my flushed skin, he clenched a hand into my hair again, drawing my face back toward his with a grip just shy of painful, and said, “You want me to bend you over this chair, don’t you?”
My knees buckled at the low, hungry growl in his voice.
I didn’t manage a coherent response.
“Soon enough,” he promised, sweeping me into his arms, carrying me to the nearby bed and tossing me onto it. His hands fell again to my hips, peeling off the rest of my clothing and jerking me toward the edge of the mattress in the same motion.
His mouth crashed to mine, the force of him making the bed and the floor underneath creak and groan. I hooked my arms around his neck, pulling myself upright and more fully into the kiss. As his tongue went deeper, my hands strayed lower, fumbling with the drawstring of his pants.
He laughed with his mouth still against mine, the sound vibrating down my throat. “So eager,” he murmured. “I appreciate the enthusiasm—but you aren’t supposed to be thinking of anything at all.” He caught me by my arms, his strength overtaking mine easily and pressing me back down toward the bed. “Isn’t that what you said you wanted?”
My words caught in my throat as his golden gaze burned into mine, but I managed a nod.
“So that means I’m in charge.” His fingers raked along my arms, caressing and guiding them up above my head, pinning my wrists against the mattress with one hand. The other hand smoothed its way down the length of my body, settling with a light, teasing amount of pressure between my thighs. “And you don’t move without my command.”
I was too transfixed by the feel of his fingers moving, playing at my entrance, to reply.
“Agreed?”
The thought of agreeing was both thrilling and maddening. His touch was growing more precise, deliberate taps and circles and pinches against that most sensitive bundle of nerves I possessed, and I would have done anything in that moment if it ended with him inside of me—yet I wasn’t sure I could manage what he asked. To not think, to relax as if the world outside didn’t exist, to trust him to carry me completely away from it…
Aleks let out a quiet, dark laugh, clearly sensing my questions, my building vexation. “Why doesn’t the challenge burning in your beautiful eyes surprise me?”
“I’ll never be done challenging you,” I informed him, breathlessly.
“Gods, I hope not.” His smile turned wicked. Any answer I might have uttered was cut short by that expression, and by the realization that he was dropping to his knees, aligning his mouth so it could follow the pleasurable paths his fingers had been mapping out. “But maybe, just this once…trust me, and I’ll make it worth your while.”
Trust me .
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d trusted anyone this way—if I ever had. When you spent most of your life feared and hated, you became wary by default. For so long, there hadn’t been anyone worth trusting with such conviction, with such potentially devastating certainty.
Not until him.
I exhaled a shaky breath. “You make a convincing argument with your head between my thighs like that.”
His smirk somehow turned even more devious. He dipped his head lower, pressing a kiss to my center—a slow, lingering kiss, the tip of his tongue dipping inside of me and drawing a faint, needy sound from my mouth. His gaze stayed on my face the entire time. “I could stay here all night, trying to convince you,” he said, planting a far more innocent—but no less searing—kiss on the inside of my thigh.
I studied his face a moment more. The familiar strong lines juxtaposed against the faint dimples. The particular softness that came over his eyes when he looked at me, and only when he looked at me. Every little thing I’d fallen in love with. Every unspoken promise I’d somehow started to trust.
Slowly, I let my head sink into the mattress. My eyes closed. My arms relaxed at my sides, and he immediately claimed them, pressing them against the bed, holding me down as his mouth came back for more. His tongue worked tirelessly between my thighs, darting and licking until I was soaked and squirming beneath him.
He pinned my hands more firmly into the bed. My legs moved where my arms couldn’t, spreading further and encouraging him to taste me more fully, more deeply.
“There it is,” he mumbled, approvingly. “Open wider for me.”
My hips lifted as I obeyed, pressing myself harder against his mouth. He seemed to lose control for a moment, his hands moving away from my arms and digging into the fleshy backs of my thighs instead, lifting me even more completely to him. The savageness of it brought a cry of near-release to my lips.
He jerked away, his composure quickly returning.
I let out a protesting whimper, but he merely leaned up, kissed my pouting lips and said, “It’s much too soon for that.”
He rose to his feet, pulling me with him. The room spun slightly around me, making me feel like I was floating.
“The chair,” he reminded me, his harsh, lustful tone causing chills to erupt across my body.
I should have been self-conscious, maybe, crossing the room wearing nothing except the bracelets that jangled at my wrists. But I had never felt more confident than I did in that moment, striding to that chair while Aleksander’s eyes drank me in. I felt his gaze like a caress. Sensed every slow, deliberate step he took after me. The air between us literally shimmered and sparked as he closed in—our magic still reacting to one another’s, despite all the work we’d done over these past weeks to better control it.
“Put your hands on the armrests,” he ordered.
I did, shivering with anticipation as he circled closer and admired me from every angle, occasionally brushing a hand over my displayed body; slipping it between my legs; tracing my curves; fondling my breasts and pinching their hardened tips.
He paused as he came close to my face, fisting a handful of my hair and using it to lift my lips to meet his.
“You are so godsdamn beautiful,” he rasped, in between kisses. “Just in case you weren’t aware.”
I regarded him from underneath my lashes, breathing hard, as he pulled away only to immediately bring his lips back to my skin, dragging them along my neck and up to my ear before growling out another command: “Now bend lower.”
I did, and I was rewarded with another touch—a slow, confident trailing along my spine, over the curves of my backside, into the dampness waiting between my legs. His fingers circled and teased through that dampness until my knees were in danger of giving out, my arms shaking despite the support of the chair.
Then he stepped away.
I felt his searing gaze still watching me. I heard the sound of him continuing to undress, of the rest of his clothes hitting the floor beside his discarded shirt. Then he was back to me, his hand trailing one last featherlight touch between my thighs before coming to rest on my right hip—steadying me for what came next.
I inhaled sharply as he guided his cock between my legs. Like his touch, the movement was smooth, just barely a brush of velvet and heat and hardness. He slid it back and forth, adding the slick of his own arousal to mine, while his hands guided my legs farther apart.
His touch skated down my body, shifting the hair from my back over my shoulder, leaving a bare expanse of skin for his fingertips to slowly stroke as he asked, “Are you relaxing for me?”
My pulse was pounding, but I managed a breathy yes .
He let his length rest between my legs, pressing just close enough that I could feel every throb and twitch, every tiny movement that sent more coils of needy heat twisting through me. “Still mine to do whatever I wish with?”
“ Yes. ”
“Good.” He drew a few more mesmerizing patterns along my back and shoulders. Gentle. Smooth. Precise. As if painting his name, his vows onto my skin, before finally letting his touch slide lower, grabbing my sides, digging his fingers in.
With a powerful thrust, he drove himself into me, jerking me back against him in the same moment. I cried out at the sudden, almost unbearable fullness of him. His hand was over my mouth an instant later. He kept it there as he continued to thrust into me, muffling my cries of pleasure and occasional gasps of pain.
I moaned against his palm when his pace slowed. He bent me back over while he leaned forward, drawing close enough that his lips brushed the curve of my shoulder as he teasingly whispered, “Quiet. We don’t want the guards outside thinking you need any help in here.”
The guards .
I’d forgotten they even existed.
And I didn’t give them another thought as Aleks twisted my arms behind me, pulling my body more upright before pushing into me once more.
He fell into a powerful, easy rhythm as he moved inside of me, each push and pull of his hips more devastatingly good than the last. I started off trying to match his movements, but the waves of euphoria rippling through me made it difficult to keep up. My knees still felt weak. My raspy attempts at breathing were leaving me lightheaded. I started to sink against him, and he hooked an arm around my throat, further arching my back and better supporting my body with his strength.
His free hand snaked around my waist, dipping between my legs, his fingers finding their way to the swollen bud that was desperate for his touch. He stroked until I was rocking against him, chasing the continued rise and fall of his hips with whatever desperate, chaotic efforts I could manage, all my inhibitions lost as I felt my release building.
I pushed against him with particular force, and a feral sound ripped from his throat—something caught between a growl and a groan. He jerked me tighter to him, nuzzling his face into the waves of my hair, his mouth moving over my neck with slow, slightly dazed kisses.
His strong hold merely supported me for a few minutes, letting me ride him however I wished—a breach in our agreement that didn’t last long before he was back in control, flipping me around, pinning me underneath him in the chair.
One of my legs draped over the armrest. He took hold of the other, moving it aside as he guided himself back into me. My eyes closed and my head tipped back as he sank in, and I grabbed for the armrests, clenching tightly as he found his rhythm inside of me once more.
“Open your eyes.”
They fluttered open.
He braced one hand against the chair, then caught my chin with the other, forcing my gaze up to his. “I’m the only thing you’re looking at right now. The only thing you’re thinking about.”
It wasn’t a question, but I found myself nodding anyways, completely mesmerized by the sight of him on top of me. By the way he moved with increasing fervor but never looked away. By the soft part of his lips; the breaths rumbling through his broad, sweat-slicked chest; the way his eyes seemed to shift through every shade of gold imaginable as they watched mine, studied them, memorized them.
“Keep them open,” he said, his hand moving from my chin to the small of my back, lifting it as he pushed even more deeply inside. “I want you to meet my eyes when you come for me.”
His lips found mine—and this was what tipped me over the edge. Not the frantic, powerful pounding of his hips. Not the feel of his hands moving over me, finding every sensitive spot that made me gasp and convulse a little more wildly. Not the rasp of his breaths or the pure desire dripping from his words.
It was the soft and certain way he kissed me and then pulled slowly back to watch what came next—as if there had never been a doubt between us and there never would be. I was his, he was mine, and there was no questioning it.
Mine.
As that thought crashed over me, so did the waves of my release. Those waves caught him, too, drawing him alongside me, deep into a pool of final, untethered bliss.
He came with a roar that vibrated deep in my bones, sending a second surge of my own release spiraling through me.
I floated in that blissful space with him, toes curled and muscles pleasantly taut, for several long moments before the room came back into focus around me. Even then it seemed brighter, more vibrant than before.
Aleks gathered me in his arms, and for a few minutes, we returned to the quiet repose of earlier—curled in the chair together, heartbeats racing, skin sensitive and shivering at every point where we touched.
Eventually, we unfolded from one another and stumbled into the tiny washroom to clean up. He brought me one of his shirts to use as a nightgown, and then he crawled into the bed while I lingered by the sink.
My gaze had gotten caught on my reflection in the mirror above it—on both the scars on my face and neck, and on the shadows Aleks had drawn out, the latter of which were still lazily drifting around my skin.
I watched as one of those shadows caressed the widest scar on my throat and then swept toward my arm, circling it and eventually winding around the turquoise bracelet at my wrist. The movement felt deliberate. Sentient.
I realized I was holding my breath, and I forced myself to exhale slowly.
“What’s wrong?” Aleks asked, his voice slightly slurred, heavy with sleep.
Nothing , I started to say.
“…Were you telling the truth earlier,” I asked, instead, “when you said you thought of me while you were imprisoned?”
He took a moment to answer, clearly losing his battle against sleep. His eyes were closed, his face halfway buried in the pillows, but his eventual reply was quiet yet certain: “I thought of you and your shadows,” he said, “and somehow the darkness around me didn’t seem so terrible.”
My response caught in my throat. I wasn’t even sure what I’d been planning to say; I couldn’t name the emotion choking me, much less put into words all that I felt in that moment.
By the time I found my voice again, his breathing had slowed and his muscles had relaxed more completely. His eyelids occasionally fluttered, but he was obviously fully lost to whatever dreams had been waiting for him.
I moved quietly into the room, settling onto the very edge of the bed, not wanting to wake him. I didn’t mean to stare, either.
But I couldn’t help myself.
Out of everything we’d done and said and survived together, something about those words he’d just spoken shattered me—and then reformed me—more than anything else.
He didn’t simply accept my shadows.
He found… comfort in them.
One of those shadows was still tightly woven around my turquoise bracelet. I stared at it, thinking of the moment that bracelet had slipped from my wrist in the swords’ chamber. Of the things such a small act had unleashed, and of the power bound within me—power I was going to need for the battle that lay just ahead.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled the bracelet from my wrist and placed it on the bedside table. The urge to put it back on struck immediately, but I resisted, turning away and huddling closer to Aleks instead.
His arms wrapped tightly around me, pulling me against his warm chest. Despite his heat, I shivered. My magic was shifting wildly inside of me, a storm of frigid wind and overwhelming energy.
But Aleksander’s hold stayed secure, drawing me away from the cold and the dark, just as he had that night at Lake Nyras, and countless times since. Every time I thought I might give in to the desire to reach for the binding on the bedside table, he would pull me in again and kiss my forehead. Still asleep, I thought, and yet, more than once, I would have sworn I heard him say the same words he’d said to me that night in the water—
I’ve got you.
I finally let myself believe it.
And I finally slept.