25. Chapter 25
Chapter 25
H ours dragged out with nothing but the sound of me struggling against the cuffs. It had probably only been mere minutes, though, before I felt the warmth of a body behind me. Fear lanced through me. Was it The Raven or someone else?
“It is just us now.”
There was still iron in his voice, but there was something else. The lack of sight sharpened my attunement to his tone. The slightest tremble of a syllable, the smallest sharpening of a pitch. I could hear it all, and the rich complexity of those five words had me in a chokehold. I could obsess over every delicious curl of the smoke in each one.
“Let me down . . .”
My voice was soft as warm butter softened further by his closeness. I wanted to melt into him. I wanted to fall into the sea of those rich words and bask in the way they lapped at my shores.
“The rules are still the same, Sóna.” Was that the first time he said my name? It was velvet to every nerve, and I had to choke back an intoxicated whimper. “The only thing that has changed is that it is just us now.”
“Is this a naughty version of truth or dare?” Was that seductress me? I didn’t realize I could ever sound so husky, so needy, so delightfully breathless. “Let me down, Raven.”
“You’re not the one in control here, Sóna.”
His voice was steady, filled with desire, just as mine was but firm.
“Stop playing games and let me down, Raven!”
“I haven’t even started playing games yet.”
I heard his teeth press to his lip and dig in, heard them grind against his flesh. I wanted to bite his lip, too. I felt his chest rise with a deep breath and his head hover just above my shoulder as if he was bowing it in prayer.
And then he was gone. The vacuum of his warmth drifted away, and I felt nothing but the void that was left in his wake.
“Who hired you to kill the King?”
There was a slight waver to his voice, the slightest weightlessness to the question as if he didn’t expect me to answer.
And I didn’t. There was no point. I had already told the truth. No one had hired me to kill the King. Even though I wanted to.
The familiar sensation of a knife found my skin. It didn’t cut, though. Not immediately. It dragged along the exposed flesh at the nape of my neck, scratching and kicking up spurs of ice in its wake. It played there, tracing arcane, unknown symbols into me before dipping down.
I imagined it, a large blade of shining steel against my golden pearl skin and small welts chasing after it. The shackles did not bite, though, even as I bit down on my lip and leaned forward to give him more access.
The jolt of the blade meeting the neck of my dress was a bolt of lightning through me. “Please . . . Raven . . . don’t—”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to strip me naked. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel his skin pressed against mine. I wanted to feel him, taste him, touch him so bad it was nearly a ball of push pins in my guts churning with need. I only had the one set of clothes, though. And I liked this outfit. Violet had given it to me, and the buttons had been crafted by my own hand as she regaled me with tales of the children she had played with before the war.
He did not listen, though, and the knife plunged down. The petals of my gown split wide like the thighs of a proverbial virgin sacrifice. Every inch or so the blade caught on my skin and sliced a shallow cat’s scratch, and I hissed with delight. Every hiss was met with a nearly unheard scratching in The Raven’s throat until the dress was peeled all the way down and the cold from the cell rushed in to caress my body with unseen fingers.
All was silent, all was still for moments, as I could feel the hot brand of his eyes tracing over my naked back and ass. It traveled up my long legs and settled somewhere near the small of my back. I felt him gathering his strength, felt him pulling himself inward. All my senses and thoughts reached grasping fingers trying to take hold of him and beg him to come closer.
The knife pressed into my wrist and traveled down first one arm and then the other. The dress fell away from me. It pooled at my feet before his boot kicked it away. I let him look at me as the tip of the weapon traveled from first the small of my back, around my side, and then rested over the stinging wound at my belly. I could feel him watching me shiver under his gaze.
The silence drew out between us, the only sound breaking it was our harried breaths as we rode the electric charge of whatever was between us. We had ignored it for so long, and it refused to be suppressed a moment longer. I had never felt this way before. Both outside of my body and so deeply within it that I could feel every cell of my body standing at attention.
“Why did you kill the King?” he finally grated out, his normally smooth rumbled voice scratchy and whiskey soaked.
“I didn’t,” I whispered back.
The tip of the blade dragged across my belly, licking fire and ice in its path toward my bared breasts. My core tightened and wept with need as the blade flat skipped across the meat of my tit and let the edge dance along my sensitive nipple. I tipped my head back, pressing it into it, throwing caution to the wind. My mind was gone, blown away on an angry gust, and I was nothing more than desire-soaked flesh determined to experience what we had been dancing around since our eyes first locked together.
“Why did you poison the King?”
His breath was hot on my nipple, pebbling it as it strained toward his lips. My back bent, arching into the biting edge of the knife .
“I didn’t.”
The blade slid into my flesh. The dichotomy of the unending waves of tightening lust pulsing through me twinned with the searing pain. It exploded into fireworks behind my eyes as he dragged the knife from the middle of the fleshiest part of my breast down over my ribs. It was a sensitive spot, one whose nerves were already at peak attention, with him being so close.
Nerves scattered in chaos as they tried to figure out which sensation they should be feeding my addled brain. Was it agony? Was it pleasure? Was it torture? Was it rapture? My body was too confused at the discordant sensations and stimulation to know which was which, so it chose neither and decided to make one the other and vice versa.
I groaned deep in my throat, a bestial, primal sound that echoed off unseen walls and fed back to the throb between my thighs and in its twin at my side.
“Who poisoned the King?”
His voice was behind me. This time, his thighs found mine, and one knee stroked up and down the back of my leg in a slow, luxurious pattern as if to simulate what it would feel like if he were riding me.
“I don’t know.”
The cuffs bit in, tiny little serrated teeth clamping down on tender skin.
I sensed his head tip up, the brush of his hair that must have come undone grazing my bare shoulder. “Interesting,” he murmured to himself.
“Who poisoned the King?” he asked again, his voice honeyed fire against my ear, dusting over the pointed tip and filling my senses with nothing but him.
“I . . .”
“They will bite again, and so will I. Do not lie, Sóna,” he commanded, his knee inching toward the screaming aching center of me.
“I don’t know who they were. They were in black, head to toe. Thin. Snuck in without a single sound and left without a single sound. They wore a hood. It was all black inside of the hood. I couldn’t see anything,” I grated out, needing him to move just a single inch to the left.
“Good girl,” he purred, dragging the tip of the knife down the river of my spine, turning me to jelly. I sagged against the cuffs, arching like a cat into the scratch of the blade. He returned to my ear, though, his lips burning so close to my flesh without touching me that I wanted to scream out in frustration. “Do you deserve a treat for your obedience?”
“Please . . .”
The whimper sounded so foreign on my tongue. So weak and so supple. It was not my head speaking but rather my throbbing, aching clit that wanted nothing more than for him to plunge himself deep within me and give me some sort of relief.
“That word on your lips is prettier than I could have ever imagined. Say it again.”
His knee moved an inch to the left and wedged itself between my thighs. I could feel his heat through his leather riding pants, pulsing into my body. Leather against my damp pussy felt like heaven, and I wanted to be sung home to the gates of pleasure.
“Please!”
Glossy gloves wrapped around my hips and drew me down onto the firmness of his knee as he ground me into the leather stretched across his circling knee.
I cried out, the thin thread of my control on myself snapping in an instant the moment my flooded pussy pressed into the friction of his leg. I needed this. Oh, gods, I needed this. He barely even needed to guide my hips as I rode his leg for every single snap and pulse of divine pleasure that popped behind my eyes.
Mere seconds, that’s all I was given, only moments of pure bliss at feeling the heat of his body against mine, before he was pulling away again. Whimpering, plaintive sounds fell at my feet as I silently begged him to come back. I didn’t care—he could drag that knife across whatever part of my me he wanted if he gave me some relief, any relief at all. My need for him was a forest fire, struck carelessly, burning within me and singeing away any semblance of sanity. And from the panting half growls behind me, he felt it, too.
“Why did the Fae in black kill the King?”
His question was jagged, broken rocks at the bottom of the cliff of restraint he had flung us off.
“I don’t know.”
The flat of the knife pressed into the top of my spine, the tip digging in sending skittering shocks across my skin.
“Did the Fae who killed the King speak to you?”
“No.”
The blade twisted and let its edge split an arch of whip sharp fire along the outline of my shoulder.
I tipped my head back and screamed. The sensation danced with the unbridged need that carved within me, rewiring my brain and shorting any circuits that I might have had remaining in place. I was a beating heartbeat between two thighs shaking like leaves on a forgotten tree.
“They didn’t!”
The knife found my shoulder blade and carved a matching wound there. The chill of my blood leaking down my back brought to mind a bloodied angel, bleeding from the stumps of shorn wings.
“Who plots against the King?” He heaved great gasps of ragged breaths being drawn into the bellows of his lungs behind me.
“Probably a whole fuckton of people!” I screamed when the tip of his knife found an especially tender spot on my ribs and pressed enough for the flesh to give way to its bite.
“Good girl,” he murmured, and the knife left the shallow cut to travel his path around to face me.
A leather glove slid around my throat and tipped my head back, the knife finding the bone of my hip.
“Do you have a lover?”
“What?” I gasped, and the blade cut an inch-long tease of pain along the sensitive flesh that yielded so easily. He didn’t repeat himself. My brain charged through, rampaging around the cage of my skull, trying to find how this fit with the interrogation. “N-N—what?” The blade cut deeper, farther toward the fountain at my apex. “No!” I finally screamed.
A groaning purr was my answer as the glove tightened around my throat and dizziness sought to claim me. The scent of the black leather gloves and his natural woodsy cologne filled every bit of me and left no room for anything other than him.
“Why not?”
“I—what?”
“Why don’t you have a lover? You have been in the warrens for months. Long enough to find someone to fuck this greedy, wet pussy. So, why don’t you have a lover?”
“I’m not interested in anyone.”
Blood trickled down my wrists as the cuffs bit into my flesh and ripped a shriek from my lips.
“Interesting . . .” I could hear the self-satisfied grin in the words and wished I could muster the energy to bite him.
The pressure of the black leather glove tightened for a single moment and then released as it began a lazy journey down my chest, taking a side quest to flick the rock-hard peaks of each nipple before plunging between my thighs to cup the drenched flesh of my pussy. My hips had a mind of their own and began rocking against his hand.
He had called me greedy, and he was correct, I was greedy. I needed to come for him with every fiber of my being. It was a divine mandate, and I was a pious penitent waiting on absolution.
“Say it again,” he commanded.
“What?”
The knife, once more, pressed against my skin. This time, without pretense, it dug into my hip and bit a cut, sending a quick reproach for my misbehavior. Slick blood slid down the length of my thigh and dripped to the floor.
His grip tightened around my too-sensitive flesh, and he whispered, “Say it again.”
“Please . . . ”
A groan of utter pleasure rippled between us, and two impossibly thick, leather-clad fingers plunged into the grip of my pussy without a single second of hesitation.
“Fuck!” I screamed as ecstasy flooded me and washed any last hope of making it through this situation with my senses.
It was gone. The memory of any higher thought but an ash on the wind as the burning stretch of his invasion leaked in and took over. He did not move, did not press further, simply let me enjoy the sensation of his fingers parting me and my juices soaking his gloves. Fuck, the sight it must have made, his fingers buried within me, the scent of my pussy flooding into the leather.
“More.” He finally rumbled when I did not move. His finger slid away enough to piston back up into me.
It took precious moments of me being overwhelmed for my hips to get tired of not moving and find a rhythm with him. Swinging back to plunge his fingers deeper.
The tension coiled between us as I rocked against his hand, chasing the cliff of the orgasm. When his fingers pulled away too far, my legs wrapped around him and drew him back in. I wouldn’t let him stop. I wanted him. I didn’t remember when I started wanting him, but I wanted him now, and that was all that mattered to me. All I could think was of him, his scent, his touch, the divinity in the way he was making my body curl tight in around itself and around the ball of pleasure he was building within me.
“Sóna . . .” he moaned as I fucked myself down on the leather of his gloves.
With every pull back, I could feel the friction of the soaked leather plunging back up into my depths.
My name sounded like music on his lips, an aria of lust that would never fade into eternity. I was so close, a single razor-thin hair between falling into the dream world of an orgasm awash in the scent of my blood, his musk, wet leather, and the metallic tang of hot metal.
“Fuck,” he groaned and leaned into me, the linen of his shirt rubbing against my nipples shooting arrows of delight through my mind .
“Fuck me, Raven. Fuck me harder,” I begged into a growl of my own.
The command went straight to my hips, and I threw my head back as a wild fury rode my spine. Frenzied for him, frenzied for this, I rode his hand with every ounce of muscle I could manage, tightening and pulsing against his slightly curled firmness. I needed to feel every last inch of his fingers. I wished it was his flesh against mine, but that wish was something for another day.
I was shaking with the unheeded need to come. It was an effervescent snake coiled tight around my brain, squeezing any and every bit of thought from me as I slammed my hips down harder and harder into the palm of his leather-clad hand.
Pain slid between me and pleasure as he gripped the base of my long hair and pulled back. “You want to be fucked, little bug? I’ll fuck you hard enough to stamp my name on your soul.” He growled viciously as his fingers speared up into me.
That sent me over the edge. Just a few words, and I was sailing into a night sky, stars bursting behind the black velvet of midnight as my thighs gripped down hard on his back. I went still as the orgasm washed through me.
A dirty laugh fell from his lips. “Oh, no, little bug, you don’t get to come that easy.” His fingers curled and hooked on my G-spot, the thumb of his glove pressing into my clit as he kept thrusting. The sensation was too much. It was too big. But he kept fucking me, kept pressing down, letting the texture of the soaked leather glide over the too sensitive bundle of nerves.
“S-Stop! Too—too much!”
“Too bad. Fucking take it. Scream for me, Sóna,” he bit back as he kept plunging deep into me. He was possessed, brutal, vicious . . . and I loved it.
The stars of my orgasm gave way to supernovas, and I did just that, screaming at the top of my lungs, as it grew too powerful. It took over everything that I could claim as my own. It remade me into a throbbing, pulsing wanton ball of nerves firing into the night. It filled me up and left no room for anything but the overwhelming and unending euphoria crashing over me as I drowned in the sea of it.
It seemed to go on forever, one orgasm rolling into another, my pussy burning from the ache of his fingers and the ache from my clenching muscles. It was sweet sublime saturation. I thought pain had danced with pleasure before, but here was the true ballet, the two lovers hand in hand as the orgasms turned painful.
He purred a self-satisfied sound as my body trembled against him, my legs losing all sensation and strength. He slowly slid the drenched leather glove from my depths and lowered my feet to the floor. The vacuum left cut straight down to the core of me. I needed him back again. I needed to touch him. To feel his heat inside of me again.
The glove that had been in my hair grazed my check tenderly, stopping at my chin to tilt my head up. In the pitch black around us, I wished I could see his face, as I had the distinct feeling he could see mine.
“In all my years, I have not seen something so beautiful as you, fucked brainless and dripping for more.” His lips were so close to mine we were sharing the same breath. I tried to push up to kiss him, but his grip held firm, preventing me from moving. “Rest. We will commence soon.”
“Wha-What?”
He was gone, all heat and sensation of him disappeared in a puff of smoke. “You didn’t think I’d fuck your brains out and be done with you, did you, Cricket? You killed a King. Your interrogation has barely started. I will have my answers one way or another.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
“The cuffs don’t bite because His Majesty still draws breath. Pray to whatever god you still worship, Cricket, that that never changes”—his pitch turned down into a whisper—“for both our sakes.”