20. Chapter Twenty
CHAPTER TWENTY
MAVEN
The air shifts the moment I speak his name. My skin tightens with goosebumps despite the lingering warmth from my shower. The silk nightgown clings to damp patches I missed with the towel, cool against my heated skin.
One heartbeat. Two. Three.
And then he’s there.
He sucks in a breath as if to speak, but whatever he’d planned to say dies somewhere in his throat.
Because he’s looking at me.
All of me.
I feel every inch of that white-shrouded gaze move down my body like a physical thing, tracking over the silk, the bare skin of my thighs, the collarbones I never thought twice about until this exact second.
Oh, no. What am I doing?
The confidence I’d scraped together in the shower evaporates like the steam it came from, and suddenly I’m just a woman standing in a cheap apartment in a nightgown I bought during a two a.m. spiral, trying to seduce a god.
This is humiliating. This will be a moment I’ll replay in my nightmares for the next decade, cringing so hard my teeth ache.
I couldn’t spell sexy if the word was blinking at me in blazing letters over a strip club. What in the actual hell made me think I could be it?
My arms twitch, itching to cross over my chest. Is it too late to undo this whole disaster and pretend I called him here to talk about the weather in the realm he calls home—
Ash’s throat clears.
It’s a low, rough sound that rolls straight down my spine and pools much lower.
His head tilts, that slow, deliberate movement I’ve come to know, and I feel his attention crawl back up my legs, over my hips, catching on the neckline of the gown before rising to my face.
There’s a weight to it. A hunger I can practically taste, thick and electric.
Heat crawls up my neck and spreads through my cheeks, but this time it isn’t shame.
It’s want.
Every self-deprecating thought scatters, and I forget about the flimsy gown, about the scars I’ve displayed.
I don’t think about the fact that I’ve never been the kind of person anyone chose.
Because he’s watching me like I’m the only thing that’s ever existed in any world.
Like I’m something to be devoured slowly. Savored and ruined.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that…and I cannot even see his eyes. I imagine the intensity of his actual gaze would disintegrate me in a second.
“Maven.” His voice is wrecked, dragged over gravel. “What are you doing?”
I know what I’m doing. I know it’s selfish. He deserves better than a stolen night with someone who’s spent centuries rejecting him. I know that giving in like this means I’m taking something for myself when I do not deserve it.
But I’m so tired of not wanting things.
Just once, I want to be the kind of person who reaches for what she craves instead of standing at the edge of it, calculating all the ways it’ll eventually leave.
So I close the distance.
Three steps across cold vinyl, and my bare feet carry me right into his space, into that pressure and heat, and my hands rise before I can talk them out of it.
The sharp line of his jaw greets my fingers.
My thumb brushes the corner of his mouth as his entire body tenses beneath my touch. A smile threatens to appear.
Instead, I tug him down.
For one terrible half-second, I brace for nothing, for an illusion and the disappointment of kissing a ghost through a veil my brain won’t let me see past—
But then his mouth is on mine.
His lips. Full and soft and searing, exactly the shape I traced on that rooftop with shaking fingers, and a sound escapes me that I don’t recognize.
It’s relief and desperation tangled together.
He tastes like nothing I can name—like chilly air when you’re hot and sweaty.
Or the ache in your chest when a song reminds you of something you can’t quite remember.
He goes still against me. Just for a beat. Like he can’t believe this is happening either.
Then his arms lock around my waist and…he takes.
The kiss turns molten, all restraint burning away.
I melt into him as he walks me backward until my spine meets the wall.
His hands are everywhere—cradling my skull, dragging down my throat, spanning my ribs like he’s trying to memorize the exact dimensions of me.
Millennia, he said. Eternity of watching and never touching, and I feel every one of them in the way he kisses me like he’s starving.
My fingers curl into the lapels of his coat. I don’t ever want to let go.
Then he tears his mouth from mine.
We’re both breathing hard, chests heaving, and I nearly whine at the loss. His forehead drops to mine as hands frame my face, thumbs stroking my cheekbones with a tenderness that makes my eyes sting.
“Maven.” Just my name. Then, rougher, “You need to understand what this is.”
My voice catches when I attempt to reply; I clear my throat and try again. “I called you here. I know what I’m—”
“No, you don’t.” His thumb presses gently against my lip, silencing me—there’s a distinct tremor in it.
He’s not as composed as he wants me to believe.
“I do not know how to want you gently, Maven…your soul was promised to me, but I didn’t need a promise to crave you.
I would have found you across a thousand more lifetimes, torn through every world, and bled the universe dry just to taste the whisper of your name on my tongue.
” He sucks in a shaky breath. “If I do this—if I let myself have you the way I’ve craved—there is no undoing it.
You will belong to me. Wholly. In every way that matters, and a great many that you cannot yet imagine. I will never let you go.”
The knot in my stomach tightens, but it isn’t fear. Or—it is, a little. But it’s the good kind. I think.
“I’ve belonged to you for a long time, apparently.” I try for dry, but it comes out breathless. “Bit late for a warning label.”
He doesn’t laugh. His hands tighten on my face, and when he speaks, his voice drops so low I feel it in my sternum more than hear it.
“I need the words, flower. I have waited too long and wanted so badly to have you. So say it. Tell me you want this, that you know what you are choosing, and I will spend the rest of eternity worshiping the choice.”
My eyes flood simply because he’s asking. The terrifying god who could take whatever he wants stands before me, shaking as he awaits my permission, when not a single person in my whole life ever bothered to ask if I wanted anything at all. Dr. Voss doesn’t count—I pay her to do that.
Something dark in my chest cracks open, and instead of the empty ache that usually lives there, warmth pours out.
“I want this.” I press the words against his mouth, relishing the shape of his lips under mine. “I want you. I don’t care what it costs. I’ve got nothing left to lose anyway.”
A shudder rolls through his whole frame, and the sound he makes—low, reverent—is one I’ll carry with me forever.
“You have everything to gain,” he corrects, and then he’s kissing me again, deeper this time, unhurried, like now that he knows I’m his he can afford to take his time.
Large hands slide down my sides, tracing the silk, and when he reaches the hem, he pauses. Not from hesitation—his need thrums in the air between us, thick enough to choke on—but as if he wants me to know he’s savoring it.
“Do you have any idea,” he murmurs against my throat, dragging his mouth along the line of my jaw, “how long I have dreamed of this? Of the sounds you would make? The way you would feel beneath my hands…” His teeth graze the tender spot below my ear, and my knees nearly give out.
“Every inch of you is a gift I never thought I’d receive. ”
“You’re going to talk me to death before we even—” My words dissolve into a gasp as his palm slides up the outside of my thigh to push the silk higher.
He smiles against my neck. “There she is.”
Heat licks up from wherever he touches, and every nerve I’ve spent years numbing with medications and dissociation lights up like the entire city grid at once. I’m shuddering, but not from panic. This is different. This is what it is to be alive.
His fingers find the strap of my gown and ease it down my shoulder, following the movement with his mouth, pressing a kiss to the bare skin. Then the other side. He’s so careful, so adoring, and when the silk finally slips down my body to pool at my feet, I don’t feel the urge to cover myself.
I let him look, scars and all. I’ve never been ashamed of them or sought to hide them, but in this moment? I’m almost proud to have them with the way he admires me.
And when his breath catches—when this composed, ancient being becomes utterly undone at the sight of me—I understand, for the first time in my entire existence, genuine desire. He wants me.
Wants. Needs, if I read his body language correctly.
“Mine,” he breathes as he grips my waist to lift me against him like I weigh nothing at all. “Say it back.”
My legs wrap around his lean frame. “Yours.” The word tastes like the first thing I’ve ever meant.
He carries me toward the bed, and I stop thinking about tomorrow, about the cost of my decision, and all the reasons I don’t deserve this.
For once, I just let myself have it.
He lays me down on the mattress like I’m something breakable. Thankfully, the springs barely protest under our combined weight.
The overhead light is off, but the city bleeds through my thin curtains—the perpetual amber glow of urban life.
“I still can’t see you,” I whisper.
His face rubs against my palm as he leaves a kiss in the center. “You’ll see me soon. When you join me in my world, you will look upon me every day for the rest of forever.” His voice frays at the edges. “And I will never tire of watching you look.”
His mouth finds the hollow of my throat, any coherent thought scattering on nonexistent wind as he sucks the space between my collarbones.