Chapter 29 #2
He swallows the sound. Takes it for himself.
His tongue slides against mine, and he tastes like he always tastes, like smoke and honey and something ancient.
The gold bond between us blazes to life, a current of heat and want that runs both ways, and I feel his desire crash into mine, amplifying it, feeding it, turning a spark into something that could level buildings.
I grab fistfuls of his shirt. Pull him harder against me.
"There she is," he murmurs against my mouth. "There's my girl."
The words shouldn't do what they do. Shouldn't make my knees soften. Shouldn't make the fear retreat, just for a moment, replaced by something older and simpler and infinitely more powerful.
I want him. Not because I'm scared. Not because I need comfort. Because he is Croesus, and his hands know my body like a map he's memorized by touch, and the way he says my girl makes me feel like the most valuable thing in a collection that spans millennia.
"The water's still running," I manage.
"I don't care." He walks me backward until my shoulder blades hit the cold marble wall, and the shock of it against my heated skin makes me arch into him. He pins me there with his body, one thigh pressed between mine, and the pressure is deliberate. Knowing. "Unless you want me to stop."
"If you stop, I'll kill you."
"That's my girl." He kisses my throat. My collarbone. The hollow at the base of my neck where my pulse is hammering so hard I can feel it in my fingertips. His mouth is hot and demanding, and he bites down on the curve of my shoulder just hard enough to make me cry out.
"I've been feeling you for days," he says against my skin, between kisses that leave heat in their wake.
"Through the bond. The fear, the exhaustion, the way you curl into yourself at night and pretend you're sleeping.
Do you know what that does to me? Feeling you hurt and not being able to touch you? "
"I didn't want to burden you."
He laughs, low and humorless, and drags his teeth along my collarbone. "You are the most infuriating woman alive. A burden. As if wanting you is a burden. As if having you in my arms is anything less than the only thing I've wanted in milenia."
His hands move. Down my sides, over the curve of my hips, fingers pressing into the muscle of my thighs with a firmness that's going to leave marks. I don't care. I want marks. I want proof that this happened, that in the middle of a countdown to war, someone held me like I mattered.
"The others," I start, because it occurs to me through the haze of his mouth on my skin that my shields are in ruins. That every bond in my chest is an open line.
He pauses. His forehead rests against my shoulder, and I feel his breath, hot and unsteady, against my wet skin.
"I know," he says. "They'll feel it. Let them."
"All of them?"
His voice is rough. "Seraph might already know. Kael definitely does. Your shields are shredded, Raven."
I should stop. Should pull back, rebuild the walls, spare us all the intimacy of sharing this.
But it’s not like they haven’t seen it with their own eyes.
The thought of Lysander feeling my desire, of Idris hearing the sounds I make, of Kael's wrath-fueled heat spiking in response to mine, of Dorian's abundance amplifying everything, of Caspian's void potentially swallowing the sensation whole. ..
"Let them," I say.
Croesus goes still against me.
"Let them feel it," I repeat, and the decision settles into my bones like certainty.
"I'm done hiding. I'm done walling myself off and pretending the bonds don't exist and trying to be a weapon instead of a person.
If they're going to be inside me..." I pull back enough to look at him.
At those blind gold eyes that are the first thing I loved about him, those eyes that can't see me and see me better than anyone ever has.
"They can feel what you do to me. I don't care. "
Something shifts in his expression. Darkens. The hunger I saw before is still there but it's joined by something fiercer now. Something triumphant.
"Say that again."
"I don't care if they feel it."
"Not that part." His hand finds my face again. Traces my cheekbone with his thumb. His rings leave cold trails on my flushed skin. "The part about what I do to you. Tell me."
"You want me to stroke your ego?"
"I want you to say it while six other angels are listening.
No doubt very intently." His mouth finds my ear, and his breath is warm against the sensitive skin there.
"I want them to hear you tell me what I do to you.
Every single one of them. I want Seraph sitting in his perfect study feeling what I make you feel and knowing that all his control, all his discipline, all his beauty can't touch what we have. "
Oh.
Oh, that's not pity at all. That's possession. That's years of greed condensed into a single, burning intention, and it's pointed directly at me.
"You make me feel safe," I whisper. "Which is insane, because you're a fallen angel and everything about you should terrify me."
"More." His teeth graze my earlobe.
"You make me feel wanted. Not useful. Not valuable. Wanted. Like the difference between a thing someone collects and a thing someone can't breathe without."
"More." His hand slides down my throat. Between my breasts. Over my stomach, where the muscles flutter under his touch. Lower. His fingers trace the crease where my thigh meets my hip, and my breath fractures.
"You make me feel..." My head drops back against the marble. The water is still pounding down around us, steam thick in the air, and his hand is so close to where I need him that I can barely form words. "Croesus, please."
"Please what?" His fingers skim my inner thigh. Teasing. Deliberately not touching where I'm aching for him. "Tell me what you want. Say it clearly so there's no ambiguity. So every angel in this house with a connection to you knows exactly what you're asking me for."
His voice. God, his voice. Low and rough and commanding, the voice of a man who has spent eons negotiating and dealing and getting exactly what he wants, and right now what he wants is to hear me beg.
"Touch me," I breathe. "I want your hands on me. I want you inside me. I want you to make me forget that I'm scared and that everything is falling apart and that I might die in eleven days."
"Not good enough." His fingers trail higher. Barely brush against my center, and the contact is so light it's almost nothing. Almost cruel. "I won't fuck you so you can forget. I'll fuck you so you remember. There's a difference."
I make a sound that's somewhere between a sob and a moan.
"Remember what?" I manage.
"That you're mine." His fingers part me, and the first real touch of his hand against my slick heat makes us both groan.
Me from the relief of contact. Him from the way the bond transmits sensation between us, letting him feel what I feel, the wet heat and the aching need.
"That no matter what happens in eleven days, no matter what you become, this doesn't change. I don't change."
He slides one finger inside me. Slow. Deep.
His thumb finds my clit, and the pressure is perfect because he knows my body better than I do.
He's mapped every nerve ending, every sensitive spot, every place that makes me gasp.
He learned me the way a blind man learns anything, through touch and repetition and relentless, consuming attention.
"You're so wet," he says, his voice dragging over the words. "Already. Just from this. Is it for me?"
"It's you." My hips roll against his hand. "It's always been you."
"Prove it." He adds a second finger, and the stretch is delicious, his fingers thick and sure, curling inside me to find the spot that makes my vision white out at the edges. "Come on my hand. Right here. Right now. Let every angel in this house feel you come apart for me."
I can't think. Can't strategize or shield or protect. The bonds are wide open, all of them, and I can feel the other angels on the distant ends of the connections like points of light in a dark sky. Kael, whose heat is spiking somewhere in the east wing. Lysander, who I can practically hear groaning. Idris, silent and watchful, those color-shifting eyes probably wide in whatever room they’re haunting.
Dorian, whose bond is amplifying the sensation, making everything more, and Caspian, who for once isn't a void but a low, resonant hum, as if my pleasure is the first thing that's penetrated his apathy in decades. And Seraph...
They can feel this. All of it. My need. Croesus's hunger. The way his fingers move inside me, the obscene wet sounds the shower can't quite drown out, the building pressure in my core that's going to break me apart.
Croesus growls against my neck. His fingers pump faster. Harder. "No doubt, Lysander's losing his mind. Kael's burning the sheets in whatever room he's in. And Seraph..." A dark laugh. "Seraph is trying very hard to be above this. He's failing."
"Don't stop," I gasp. "God, don't stop talking."
"You like knowing they can feel you." It's not a question. His thumb circles my clit with devastating precision while his fingers work inside me. "You like that six ancient, powerful beings are sitting in their rooms right now, hard and aching, because you're falling apart on my hand."
"Yes." The word tears out of me.
"You like that Lysander is probably touching himself. That Kael is putting dents in his wall. That even Caspian, who hasn't felt anything in centuries, is feeling this."
"Yes, yes, I..." I'm so close. The pressure is building to something enormous, fed by Croesus's touch and amplified by Dorian's bond and sharpened by Lysander's lust and heated by Kael's fire.
Every bond is contributing. Every connection is amplifying.
I'm not just one woman anymore. I'm a conduit, and the pleasure running through me is feeding back into itself through seven channels.