Chapter 43
Iroll over sleepily in the early morning, swearing I hear Kivi’s voice humming softly, “She must accept the bond.”
I must be dreaming. I roll over again, finding Pip, tugging him in close before falling back to sleep.
I awake wearily to the sound of morning jays chirping merrily.
Pip is curled up in the hollow of my stomach as soft lips graze my shoulder.
A heated pleasure simmers in my veins as memories of those lips come flooding back into my mind.
I shiver, remembering the recklessness I let rule me last night.
I jump up in bed, slapping the covers across my bare chest.
S?las stands up, lifting an arched brow at my reaction.
Fuck. I raise my shields I left down when I set my magic free.
S?las takes another step back, feeling my shields block him out. A dash of fear sweeps over his face before he bites down on it, hiding it behind a clenched jaw.
Every muscle in my body aches, but there’s a delicious soreness between my legs I try to shove from my mind.
But it’s too late… I gasp in the flood of intimate memories, blood-simmering, vulnerable passion.
It’s too much. My legs itch to run, knowing to the depths of my soul, if I give in to him completely, there is no coming back from a love like that.
Ugh, my fucking muddled mess of a brain. I mean a connection like that. Yes. A connection because I’d let myself foolishly dream I was someone I wasn’t. Someone capable of more than just survival.
S?las’ smoky voice breaks the chaotic storm of thoughts lashing my mind. “You should eat, Luxsula.” He nods towards the table shimmering with silver-capped dishes. “Before that one figures out how to fly over there.”
I follow his gaze to the side of the bed, where Pip is hovering unsteadily. He has wings!
Pip wobbles through the air, trying to synchronize his movements. Quite clumsily. I can feel his hunger as if it’s my own.
I wrap the sheet around me, stepping to the side of the bed. I grasp Pip in my arm, his little wings settling along his back. They’re speckled with white spots and swirling patterns that remind me of a night sky colliding with the sunset.
“We should both eat,” I murmur, padding my way to the table.
Pip doesn’t wait for me to lift the silver cloche, pummeling into it, knocking it off with a spine-stiffening clang as he scarfs down half the plate.
I grab a few pieces of bacon and a fluffy pastry filled with meat and cheese before it’s all devoured.
S?las saunters over to the table slowly, hands in his pockets, violet and indigo reflecting off his raven waves as they fall into his face. His tattooed fingers thread through his hair, and I heat at the thought of exactly what those fingers did to me last night.
A smug smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth as he sits across from me. His slow perusal greedily takes me in, studying my every feature as his black ribbons caress the golden shield of my mind.
The sensation skips a shiver down my spine, which he takes full advantage of. The starry stained-glass window in my mind blasts open. Black ribbons swirl all around me, gently binding me, preventing me from closing the latch. I think about blowing it shut, but then shadows swirl around my mouth.
“What are you doing?” I snap.
“I’m preventing you from blocking me out,” he croons, leaning in, lazily resting his chin on his tattooed knuckles.
I try to fight him in my mind, but I can’t budge. His shadows tighten, pulsing a bolt of pleasure through me. My knees tremble beneath the table, a reedy breath tumbling from my lips.
“As much as I’d like to devour your pleasure once more—you yourself said, tomorrow is for answers and rational decisions.” His eyes deepen. Mine widen.
“I didn’t say that out loud or even think it along our linked tether,” I rasp. His face is unamused by me stating the obvious. Apparently, there’s more I need answers to than I realize.
“The answer to the questions you seek are one and the same.” A knowing smirk heats my skin. His eyes darken with feral desire, a hunger that can never be satiated.
I shift in my seat, holding myself back from the magnetic pull to be closer to him. Fuck, sometimes that draw feels stronger than any power I can comprehend. A force that’s suffocating to fight. What is he doing to me? I need a cold shower to keep my head straight.
“We should really finish this conversation before you shower,” he muses.
I’m too busy trying to keep my traitorous body from pouncing him to figure out how he’s using his shadows to fucking read my mind in this bright room. His Shadowsense power Ritherin-shit should not be working right now.
“Why? So I can lose control with you again?” I bite out.
“If I took you fully on this table right now, we wouldn’t leave this room for the rest of the day. I’d keep you screaming my name until you lost your voice and every part of you was marked mine,” he growls. I stumble back into my seat at the thought of it.
Aching heat pools between my legs, my breath becoming unsteady. I’m clearly not the only one struggling with control. I’m far too tempted to let him make good on his threat, but I know he won’t let me escape promising him once more.
I close my eyes and will my legs to move to the bathroom. I leave the bedroom sheet on the floor just to torture him.
I hear him coughing up his kahvi as I march my way to the shower.
My shower is anything but cold, despite the freezing water temperature. Every graze of my soapy hands feels like his as black velvet ribbons slip along my mind.
Memories of last night flood my mind. But they’re not mine.
I feel the way my skin feels beneath his touch.
How every kiss he lays along my neck drives him mad with desire.
How he imagines how tight and wet I will feel sliding along the length of his cock.
He wishes I had promised him what he wanted.
What he has been longing for. So he can give all of himself to me. And take all of me. Every last piece.
I feel his control slip when I call him mine.
Unable to resist giving in, regardless of the sadness etching into his bones at my continued refusal to make the promise he begs for.
I feel his pleasure as if it’s my own, drowning in how his heart aches for more of me.
I feel him come with me as his mind fractures, and an eerie dark voice beckons to him from a distance.
He’s shaking in ecstasy with me as the voice grows louder.
I feel him leave to change and raise his shields against the voice, but not to me.
His body curls around me, his heartbeat synching to mine as peace and happiness fill his soul, pulling me in tighter as he feels my thoughts about how, tonight, I am his, and he is mine.
I feel his yearning for a future where we are together, dreamers full of hope, where anything is possible.
The cold shower does nothing to cool the chaos burning through my veins, experiencing the passion and hope of last night even more deeply than I’d felt it myself.
I step out of the frigid water, trembling from emotions that aren’t even mine. My eyes flick to the mirror, going wide at the shadows swirling in my skin beneath my breasts. I almost slip on the floor, scrambling to get a closer look in the mirror at the arched lines dancing inside my skin.
What the actual fuck?
I try to wipe them off to no avail. A memory smolders to life, the searing pain of his shadows on my skin when I called him mine. Too lost in the heady mix of pleasure and pain to realize he was legitimately marking my skin.
The heat in my skin bristles into rage as mist swirls around me. I thought my words had escaped his promise, but apparently, I’m not as clever as I thought.
But that doesn’t make sense. I said he was mine, not the other way around; at least, not in that moment.
If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure words matter, because I did feel like I was almost willing to give him all of me.
I should have known my indulgence couldn’t escape consequences.
Not when the universe revels in her efforts to break me.
The thoughts tumble from my head as a tattooed finger traces the shadows beneath my breasts.
I bite my bottom lip, hard, stifling the moan his touch rouses. The pain clearing my mind as I spin, grabbing my towel and wrapping it around me.
He pins me between his arms against the counter. My breath is held captive, pinned beneath his possessive presence.
His shadows tremor as he grapples to control them around my body. He leans closer, arctic eyes darting to my lips as he tilts his head, licking the metal tang of blood dripping from my bite. Emboldening our darkness in a synchronized groan neither of us can control.
Now, my demands don’t seem to care for answers and being rational.
No. Bad Savaé.
I need answers, despite the beautiful damn distraction in front of me.
“I told you we should have finished this conversation before you showered,” he growls darkly along my neck, like I’m his prey to devour. My hand lurches out, stamped in the exposed V of his leather battle vest, nudging him away, which brings his mind back to me. Clearing his eyes of pooling pitch.
“Are you going to tell me what the fuck your shadows are doing in my skin?” I attempt to hiss, but his hand finds its way along my hip, dragging the sound into a moan.
“Our bond.”
“What do you mean our bond?” My voice falters, mind mincing on that word.
“I shouldn’t have lost control last night before you were ready,” he murmurs, foolishly apologizing for something he knows I wanted. Well, maybe not the marking part, but the rest of it I had most definitely recklessly wanted.
“What do you mean our bond?” I repeat, summoning more strength to my voice.
“Our mated bond,” his smoky voice whispers, as if he hopes I don’t hear him. Uncontrollable trembling pitches through my nerves.
He wraps me up into his arms as the strength leaves my legs, realization sinking in. The answer to my questions. Everything suddenly making sense as I struggle to remember how to breathe.
My mind crumbles as all the subtle pieces I’ve ignored click into place.
The air whooshing from my lungs as I gasp in understanding.
His conditions—all of me or none at all.
Click. The melancholy when I told him I couldn’t.
Click. The magnetic pull between us, why our magic is drawn to one another.
Why he’d been asking me to listen before I was bonded to Calais.
Why I could see his black ribbons swirling around me before we shared a mated bond between our dragons. Click.
His plea for me to stab him through the heart to save him a life of heartache because I didn’t feel the same way he felt for me.
The terror while I bled out in his arms. The fury that someone had nearly killed his mate.
The breaking in the eyes yesterday when I saw him as mine but still refused to act on the truth written within both of us.
The agony of being infinitely in love with me without mine to ever be in return. Click.
I was so obsessed with pushing him away, lost in my fear, that I missed the answer burning right in front of me. A fucking bond.
That’s why he can read my thoughts. How he could push his memories into my mind, feeling them as if they are my own. Why, even as deeply as I feel him, he feels everything far more deeply. Click, click. Fucking click.
Perhaps his fingers truly do feel like stardust when he touches me, finding its way home…
And that kiss. When I kissed him, I thought I had imagined our souls touching, but they had found one another.
Two halves of a whole.