Chapter 29 #3
"Come for me," Croesus commands. "Come on my fingers and let them all feel what it's like when I take you apart."
I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me with a force that makes my legs buckle.
Croesus catches me, his arm like iron around my waist, holding me upright while his hand works me through wave after wave of pleasure that radiates outward through the bonds like light through a prism.
I can feel the other angels react. Kael's bond flares white-hot.
Lysander's surges with answering desire so intense it nearly pulls me under again.
Idris sends a single, inarticulate pulse through our connection that might be shock or might be awe.
Dorian's bond amplifies the peak, stretching the pleasure out until I'm writhing against Croesus's hand, oversensitive and still wanting.
Caspian's bond shifts. For one heartbeat, the void lifts, and I feel something underneath it. Something warm and startled and alive. Then it's gone, smothered again by the weight of apathy.
But it was there. For one second, the angel of Sloth felt something.
Croesus is breathing hard against my temple, his hand still between my thighs, fingers buried inside me, not moving now but not withdrawing. Holding me. Feeling the aftershocks pulse around him.
"Beautiful," he murmurs. "You have no idea how beautiful you are when you let go."
"You can't see me." The words come out slurred, drunk on endorphins.
"I can feel you." He withdraws his fingers slowly, and I whimper at the loss.
His hand slides up my stomach, my ribs, leaving a trail of my own wetness on my skin.
"I can feel the way your body tightens around me.
The way your pulse changes. The way you breathe my name like a prayer when you come.
" He kisses my forehead. "I don't need eyes to see you, Raven. I never have."
Something in me breaks open at that. Not the frightened, fracturing kind of breaking. The kind that happens when sunlight finds a crack in a sealed room. When something dark and clenched and held too tight finally, finally opens.
"I love you," I tell him. Because I'm done being careful about it. Because we might have eleven days left and I'm not spending them measured and guarded.
His gold eyes soften. The hunger doesn't leave, but something else joins it. Something vast and terrifying and tender.
"I know," he says.
"Rude."
"Honest." He kisses me. Slowly this time.
Deep and searching, his tongue sliding against mine with a thoroughness that makes my toes curl against the wet marble.
His hands frame my face, and his rings are warm now, heated by the water and by my skin, and the weight of them against my jaw feels like an anchor.
When he pulls back, I'm breathing hard again, and the need is rebuilding already, stoked by the bonds that are wide open and feeding sensation in both directions.
"More," I say. "I need more of you."
"You have me." He strips his shirt over his head in one motion.
Water hits his bare chest, running in rivulets down bronze skin, over the lean muscle of his shoulders and arms, tracing the scars that map so many years of existence.
He's built like a predator. Not bulky like Kael, not marble-carved like Seraph.
Something in between. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, the kind of strength that comes from centuries of deliberate movement.
I put my hands on him. Flatten my palms against his chest and feel his heart hammering under my fingers. Fast. Desperate. For all his control, for all that commanding voice and those precise, demanding touches, his heart is racing like mine.
"You're shaking," I say.
"I've been lying in a bed for an hour feeling you hurt." His jaw is tight. "I thought you were going to lock me out again. Rebuild the walls. Make me stand on the other side and listen to you drown."
"I won't." I press my mouth to his chest. Over his heart. "Not anymore."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
His hands go to his pants. I watch him strip away the rest of his clothes with the efficient grace of a man who doesn't need to see what he's doing, who learned his own body the same way he learned mine, through touch and memory and muscle knowledge.
The wet fabric hits the marble floor with a heavy muffled thwack.
He's hard. Thick and straining, the evidence of what feeling me come did to him through the bond. When I wrap my hand around him, his breath hisses through his teeth and his hips jerk forward.
"Careful," he grits out.
"Why? I thought you didn't do gentle."
"I don't." His hand closes over mine, tightening my grip, showing me the pressure he wants. "But if you keep touching me like that, this is going to be over embarrassingly fast, and I intend to take my time with you."
He pulls my hand away. Reverses our positions so fast I gasp, and suddenly I'm facing the wall, my palms flat against the marble, his chest pressed to my back. His mouth finds the curve of my neck, and his hands settle on my hips with a grip that says stay.
"Right here," he says. "Like this. I want to feel you against me."
His cock presses against the curve of my ass, hard and hot, and I push back into him instinctively. His groan vibrates through his chest and into my spine.
"Tell me what you want," he says against my ear. "Be specific. I want to hear every word."
"I want you inside me."
"How?"
"Hard. Deep. I want to feel you tomorrow."
He makes a sound that's half growl, half something broken. One hand leaves my hip, and I feel him position himself, the blunt head of his cock sliding through the wetness between my thighs. He notches against my entrance and holds there, not pushing in, just pressing. The tease is exquisite agony.
"Croesus," I warn.
"Say it again. What you said before. About what I do to you."
"You make me feel wanted."
He pushes inside me. One long, relentless stroke, filling me completely, and the stretch makes me cry out and brace harder against the wall.
He's thick enough that the fullness borders on too much, and he holds there, seated to the hilt, his hips flush against my ass, his breath ragged against my neck.
"Fuck," he grits out. "You feel... Raven, you feel..."
"I know." Because through the bond, I can feel what he feels. The tight, slick heat of my body gripping him. The way his nerves fire with every tiny movement. The devastating awareness that this, right here, this connection, is the truest thing either of us has ever had.
He pulls back. Drives forward. Sets a rhythm that's exactly what I asked for: hard, deep, punishing in the best possible way.
Each thrust presses me into the marble wall and sends sparks racing up my spine.
The water pounds down over both of us, and the steam is so thick now that the bathroom has become a world of heat and sound and sensation.
"I think about this constantly," he says, his voice strained with effort and need.
"When you're training with Seraph and I can feel his hands correcting your stance.
When Kael stands too close and your heart rate changes.
When Lysander looks at you and you don't look away fast enough.
" His hips snap forward, and I moan. "I think about this.
About being inside you. About the sounds you make that are only for me. "
"Jealous," I manage between thrusts.
"Always." He changes the angle, lifts my hips, and the next thrust hits something deep inside me that makes my vision go hazy. "I'm Greed. I want all of you. Every sound, every sigh, every time you come, I want it to be mine."
"It is. Right now, it is."
"Right now isn't enough." His hand snakes around my hip. Finds my clit again. Works it in tight circles while he fucks me against the wall, and the dual sensation is devastating. "I want forever. I want every day of whatever time we have left. I want to be the reason you forget you're scared."
"You are," I gasp. "You are, I can't think about anything else when you're..." I lose the words.
His fingers and his cock are working in concert, driving me toward a second peak that's building faster and fiercer than the first. The bonds are amplifying everything again.
I can feel Lysander's desire layered over mine, can feel Dorian's abundance stretching the pleasure wider, can feel Kael's heat adding an edge of ferocity that makes every nerve ending burn.
"I can feel them feeling you," Croesus says again, and there's something almost savage in his voice now. "Every one of them wants you right now. Do you understand that? Six fallen angels, and they can feel exactly what I'm doing to you, and they want to be where I am."
"Let them want." I push back against him, meeting his thrusts, taking him deeper. "I'm here. With you."
"Mine." The word is guttural. Absolute. His hand works my clit faster and his hips drive harder and I'm right there, teetering on the edge, my body clenching around him as the orgasm builds to something almost unbearable.
"Look at you," he breathes, even though he can't. Even though he's never seen me, not the way others do. "You're glowing. I can feel the light under your skin. The heat of it." His mouth drags along my shoulder. "You're the most valuable thing I've ever held in my hands. And I've held kingdoms."
I come undone.
The second orgasm slams through me with a force that wrenches a scream from my throat, and this time the bonds don't just carry the sensation outward, they echo it back.
Lysander's desire ricochets through the connection and hits me like a wave, prolonging the peak.
Kael's bond surges with heat that borders on pain and pleasure at once.
Dorian's abundance makes me feel like I'm expanding, like the pleasure is too big for one body to hold.
Even Idris sends a tremor of something through our link, wordless and raw.