Enzo #2
Her blood rushed over my tongue, rich and dark and alive. I drank greedily before sense caught up with hunger.
All the while, she moved against me, using my body for her pleasure with the ruthless, trembling desperation of a woman who’d held my corpse yesterday and had no intention of being reasonable today.
Saints, I needed her.
She made a sound that might have been my name. Might have been a warning. Might have been encouragement. I chose the interpretation that kept her pressed against me.
The bond carried everything. The shock of the bite. The pleasure. The fierce satisfaction of feeding me herself. The way her pulse raced harder every time I drank. Her need to feel me inside her. Her release gathering at the edges, ready to break.
I pulled my fangs from her throat.
“Nadia.” My voice barely sounded like mine.
I dragged my tongue over the wound before lifting my head, smiling at the needy sound she didn't mean to let free.
Her throat bore fresh silver-lit punctures. My work. The thought hit harder than it should have.
Her eyes opened slowly. Dark. Hungry. Furious in exactly the way she got when she was enjoying herself too much to admit it.
“Better?” she asked, voice wrecked.
I looked at her throat. The flush across her breasts. The mouth I hadn't kissed yet despite having fed from her twice. A serious oversight.
I rectified it immediately.
I kissed her until neither of us seemed capable of remembering where one breath ended and the next began. Her hands slid into my hair, holding me there as though escape were possible or desirable.
It was neither.
When we finally broke apart, her forehead rested against mine. She was breathing hard enough to make the marks at her collarbone pulse with every inhale.
“Considerably better,” I murmured.
“Good,” she gasped.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
The bond blazed between us, bright enough to drown out everything beyond the bed—the keep, the dead, the impossible future waiting outside the chamber door.
Only this remained. Her hands on my shoulders. My forehead against hers. The steady, miraculous rhythm of two hearts still beating.
Nadia opened her eyes. There was laughter in them now. Relief. Something so fierce it made my chest ache.
“I almost lost you,” she whispered.
“You didn’t.”
“No.” Her thumb brushed the mark over my heart. “I didn’t.”
I turned my head and kissed her palm. “I love you.”
The words came out before ceremony could arrange them. Before strategy. Before the room without bodies I had imagined for them. Before I could polish them into something worthy of what she’d done.
Maybe that made them better.
Her face went utterly still. The bond went quiet, as if even it had stopped breathing. Then her hand came to the mark over my heart.
“Say it again,” she whispered.
“I love you, Nadia.”
Her lips trembled. Then her mouth found mine with a sound that was almost anger and almost relief.
The handprint over my heart answered the marks at her throat. She looked down at it, breath catching, and spread her fingers over the silver.
“My hand.”
“Yes.”
“My mark.”
“Yes.”
“Mine.”
The word should have sounded possessive. It sounded like she was making sure the universe heard her.
“Yours.”
Then I kissed her again before either of us could say something too soft to survive.
There was no slowness after that. No reverent patience. Reverence had its place. This was not it.
Need sharpened every movement.
She reached for my cock. Apparently, we were done pretending either of us intended to behave.
It pulsed under her grip, aching at her touch. She rose on her knees as she settled the head against her slick opening. I caught her hips in my hands, preventing her from sinking down.
“I want your eyes, baby,” I murmured.
Darkness flashed in her irises as they met mine.
Only then did I loosen my hold, letting her sink down on me, inch by slow inch. One of her hands was braced on my shoulder, the other pressed over the mark on my chest.
My body no longer felt borrowed. Her blood burned warm through my veins, strength returned to muscle and bone, and every movement answered cleanly instead of aching.
But hers was still the power that filled the room. A kingdom’s worth of magic beneath her skin. A day’s worth of terror demanding proof.
She took it. Took me.
And when I pulled her closer, matching her instead of simply following where she led, something shifted between us. The bond flared bright and hot, no longer one-sided, no longer her anchoring me alone.
Every breath she stole, I gave back. Every inch she claimed, I answered.
Until neither of us could have said who was holding whom.
The urgency didn’t fade.
It became rhythm. Breath. The brutal, beautiful proof of skin and pulse and hands and heat. She rode me like she meant to anchor both of us to the bed, to the chamber, to the living world that had tried to separate us and failed.
I met her there.
Every time her hand pressed over the mark on my chest, the bond flared.
Every time my mouth found the Open Door at her collarbone, she trembled.
Every time she sank down harder, every time I pulled her closer, every time I lifted my hips to meet her, the room narrowed around the impossible fact that we were both here.
Alive. Together.
Not beneath the Open Door. Not on the courtyard stones.
Here.
When she came, she said my name like an accusation. I followed with my mouth against the marks at her throat and both hands locked at her hips, holding her through it while the bond burned bright enough to make the chamber vanish.
For several breaths, neither of us moved. She stayed over me, forehead against mine, her body trembling in small aftershocks she would absolutely pretend didn’t happen. I wisely didn't mention them.
Her fingers rested over my heart. Mine rested at the small of her back. The mark beneath her palm warmed and cooled, answering the silver at her throat.
“Still with me?” I murmured.
Her eyes opened. Slowly. Dangerously. But her words laid their hooks in me in a way I knew she meant them with everything in her.
"Always, you arrogant bastard," she whispered. "I'll always be with you."
I caught the back of her neck and dragged her back to me, because whatever restraint I had left had apparently decided it had survived enough for one lifetime. She made a sound against my lips, soft and ruined, and that was the end of any civilized plan I might have pretended to possess.
A breath later, I had her beneath me, moaning my name as we came together again. There was only my mouth at her throat, my name breaking from her lips, and the desperate, furious rhythm of two people proving, again and again, that death had not kept either of us.
Eventually, she folded against me, face tucked into the curve of my throat, her body heavy and warm and utterly spent in a way I didn’t think even Nadia could resent.
The room settled around us, the fire low, the gray light deepening toward afternoon. Nadia’s breathing slowed against my skin. The bond eased into that familiar, impossible pitch.
Home.
I held her and closed my eyes.
For now, the keep could wait. The dead could wait. The gate to Mrachgorod, the prisoners, the councils, the throne, my father’s prophecies, every godsforsaken demand waiting outside the door.
All of it could wait.
The woman I loved slept against my chest. Her mark lived over my heart. And I was alive to hold her.
For a little while longer, that was enough.