Chapter 33
TORMENT
“I know that look in your eye,” Cat said with a note of warning. “We could be caught by the psycho siblings any moment now, or they could send another spy after us.”
“Let them.” I wrapped a lock of pink hair around my finger. “I’ll pluck their eyes out if they dare to look at you. Or your jaguar can have that privilege. I’m sure Madness would love to string them into a belt for you.”
“A belt,” she said with a laugh that hit me right in the chest, soft and rich, a husky, beautiful sound. “God, how many eyes are you thinking about excising?”
“Many,” I replied, fitting my hand to the warm curve of her hip to draw her closer, indulging in a slow kiss that brought my entire body to life.
My awareness of her burned, my need like a firework setting off rounds of explosions in my thumping heart, my twitching cock, my aching balls. “Beautiful—”
She cut me off with a kiss, pushing me down to the leaf-strewn floor and straddling my hips in answer to my unfinished question. I didn’t give a shit that a stick poked into my back, or the ground was cold and damp. My wife sat astride me; I’d endure a vat of piranhas if it kept her this close.
My hands landed on her hips, the generous sweep of them enough to make my cock jolt, brushing the shadows that separated us, a sheer, flimsy shield. Nothing at all.
“I love you,” I said between kisses, each one deeper, hungrier, messier.
The taste of her was all over me, scorched into my taste buds, the feel of her body imprinted on mine.
I would never get enough of this, even if we lived for a hundred years.
“I was so fucking afraid when we found you in that room.”
My hands tightened on her hips, fingers pressing into skin and softness.
“You looked right through us, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see these stunning eyes focus on me ever again.
Every time you look at me, I remember how goddamn lucky I am to have you back.
I nearly went mad in that mirror, not knowing if you were still vacant.
I nearly shattered the fucking thing with how many times it refused to show me where you were, how you were, if you were even still alive. ”
Her kiss this time was a whisper, a benefaction. “I thought Violence would shatter the mirror before we could get you out,” she said in a voice rough with emotion. A confession for a confession. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
I slid a hand into her hair, curved it around the back of her neck, and brought our foreheads to touch.
Her breath stirred across my lips, bringing with it the taste I’d craved since the moment I met Cat along with the velvet spice of something new: power.
“However long it takes, we’ll make them pay.
We’ll end everyone who helped them, and save the most excruciating, humiliating deaths for those two pieces of filth. ”
“However long it takes,” she agreed in a rasp.
“Good. We’re in agreement. But let’s make it official.”
The laugh that punched from her chest when I held up my pinky finger was finer than any song and sweeter than any wine.
She linked hers with mine and we shook, creating a binding vow.
I used the motion to bring her hand to my mouth, kissing every finger.
I was a little obsessed with every single part of her. 2
“They won’t lock you up again,” I promised her seriously, brushing a kiss to the blue veins in her wrist. So essential, so fucking fragile. How easy would it have been for those bastards to kill her? Too easy. “I swear it, Cat.”
“Never again,” she said with the ring of something she’d oft repeated. “For both of us. Any of us. Never again.”
I bound her up in my arms and pulled her down to my chest, revelling in the feeling of her breathing, her heart pumping, her warmth spilling through my skin.
I jumped out of my fucking skin when she reached under my black sweatpants and wrapped her fingers around my dick, pressing a slow, sucking kiss to my throat until I groaned too loudly for the public setting.
“Beautiful, we don’t have to—”
“Do you want to?” she cut in, pulling back enough to meet my stare. No, to admire the mark she’d made on my throat. I groaned again, my eyes slipping shut, squeezing tight when she pumped me in her fist. Her grip was sublime insanity, just the way I loved it. Within seconds, I was panting.
“So fucking badly,” I breathed. “But you’ve been through a lot—”
A strangled groan killed my voice when she sank down on me without warning, enveloping me in the hot, fluttering bliss of her pussy.
“Cat, god,” I groaned. “Kiss me.”
I was pleading, out in the open where anyone could hear, and I could not have cared less.
When she kissed me, I met her with hard desperation, teeth knocking, tongues warring, adoring, devouring.
The cold ceased to exist when she burned against me, my cock gripped by heat and pleasure so intense I couldn’t help but arch up into her, my hips flexing to surge deeper.
Her hand wrapped around the back of my neck, fingernails scratching lightly over my head, firing new sensations through me, and I lost it entirely when she began to bounce on me.
I ripped the cloak of shadows away from her body, throwing up a domed shield around us instead, needing to see the way she moved.
The sight unravelled what remained of my sanity until I was pure need, all instinct and no thought.
Her tits bouncing with each thrust mesmerised me, and in seconds I had them in my hands.
So fucking soft. So perfect, spilling over my palms as she rode me until every nerve and cell and sensation lit up in my body.
I groaned, capturing a pretty pink nipple in my mouth and sucking hard.
Cat’s moans joined the chorus of my own and her fingers dug into my shoulders, scoring my chest as she rode me harder, faster.
There was no illusion of this lasting, of being anything but frantic, mindless pleasure.
“Deeper,” I growled against her breast, a hand clasping her hip, grinding her down with every crash of her hips into me.
Goddamn, the feel of her ass on my thighs was heaven.
I loved every single place our bodies touched, obsessed over the scratches she left on my skin, the graze of her soft stomach over mine, the tingling whisper of her hair on my skin.
Every sensation shot me higher, until the hot, pulsing grip of her pussy was too much to take.
She was close; I felt it in throbs around my cock, felt it in her stuttering thrusts, heard it in her spiralling cries.
“Fuck, beautiful, just like that.” I rolled her nipple between my thumb and forefinger, her other caught between my teeth as words poured from me.
“Don’t you dare stop. You’re going to come with me, understand?
This pretty fucking cunt is going to choke the life out of my cock, and each needy throb as you climax is going to suck every last drop of cum from me until you’re so full it oozes out. ”
I might have been dead for hundreds of years, but that didn’t stop the instinctual urge to fill her pussy, her womb, her belly until there was no part of her that didn’t belong to me.
“You’re mine,” I said, the words pouring from my soul itself. “Now and forever, until there’s nothing left in this world, you are mine.”
Her back arched, eyes glassy with pleasure, and it filled me with satisfaction so deep a growl slipped free.
My girl, my love, my wife, my obsession.
Being away from her for days felt like years apart.
I wouldn’t take my eyes off her ever again.
I’d find a way to sleep with my eyes open so I could watch her as I rested.
“Tor,” she said, breathless as her pussy clenched in ever more desperate throbs, her ass crashing into my thighs. “I need to—please let me bond you.”
“Oh, fuck yes,” I blurted, my hands going to her waist, quickening the roll of her hips, fitting to the dip between her curves like it was sculpted for my hands alone. “Been waiting for you to claim me, beautiful.”
She kissed me hard, sucking on my tongue, bruising my lips, taking ownership of my mouth, and my body jolted into hers when a foreign sensation plucked at my chest. The involuntary movement buried my cock as far as it would go, enveloping every last inch in maddening, sucking heat.
She was right on the edge, sexy whines falling from her lips.
It took a single brush of my thumb to her clit to send her shaking, moaning over that edge, but I kept up the stimulation, stroking circles around her throbbing nerves until a powerful spasm ripped my own release from me.
My mouth fell open, and I had no idea what sounds I was making because my entire body plunged into a pool of warmth, and I swear to god I floated out of my damn body.
Holy shit. I’d never come this hard in my life. When I came back down to find Cat’s mouth caressing mine, I was so boneless I wasn’t sure I had bones. She kissed me again and drew back with a laugh so full of beautiful joy that I clutched her closer.
“Holy shit, Cat,” I groaned, still fucking floating.
I was surrounded by warmth so potent and intense, it was like I didn’t have my sweatpants shoved past my ass, my shirt askew from my wife touching me, scratching me.
I was covered in her marks, and it sent a thrill through me, so intense I knew I’d be half hard again in a minute.
“Can you feel me?”
This was what being bonded felt like? “Feels like warmth and comfort,” I said, awed. “Like I’ll never be cold again.”
She beamed, her silver eyes full of light. “It feels like when you hug me, but constant, and deep in my soul.” She kissed my jaw, my cheek, and the bridge of my nose, and I fucking melted. “I love you, Tor.”
“I love you too, my beautiful wife.”
“I like that name a lot more than the other one you call me,” she remarked, carefully sliding off my cock. If we were indoors, I would have rolled her beneath me and plunged back inside. But we were out in the open, in the grounds of an academy run by fucking lunatics, and we weren’t safe.
“You don’t like being called my cute little succulent?” I teased, putting my dick back in my pants and getting to my feet, helping my girl up. I was sad to wrap her in a cloak of magic, but the shadows were necessary. No one else was allowed to see her naked. Only us.
“What if I called you my cute little Torment?” she quipped, checking the shadow covered her body.
“I could live with that,” I replied with a grin. “In fact, I encourage it.”
I held out my hand to her, thrilled when she laced our fingers together without a second thought.
My wife. My bonded wife. I could feel her, reaching through every part of me, warmth and love and reassurance so deep I wanted to close my eyes and luxuriate in it.
But we had a family member missing, and only so much time to search for her.
“Sore?” I asked when we began to walk, watching her gait.
“In a good way,” she replied, a deadly smile on her face that pushed my self control to the limit.
“Let’s finish searching the area and get back to the room. I’m going to go mad if I don’t get inside you again. Properly this time.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “That wasn’t properly?”
“You came once. Damn right, that wasn’t properly. Our next round will have a four-orgasm minimum.”
Her laugh loosened something in my chest that had been there since I saw her vacant-eyed after Violence’s torture. I debated grabbing her up and running back to Lawrence Hall right now, but we veered back onto the path then, and the gates came into view ahead.
“Is that… blood?” Cat breathed, all happiness gone from her.
She quickened her pace, and I followed, refusing to let go of her hand. I thickened the shield around us, my head on a swivel for death gods. It was blood, dripping down the gates, pooling on the ground beneath.
And when we came close enough to see the whorls of iron, the shield that had once been Ford School of Medicine but now was twisted into Cruelty’s delusional school, there was something that hadn’t been visible from a distance.
A lump of fur, hanging from the gate’s latch, speckled with blood.
“Oh god,” Cat breathed, the colour leaving her face. “Peach’s foot.”
They’d dismembered her.