Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Samick’s hand shoots through the air like a blur of mist and snatches my chin.
Already, my back is pressing against the wall—but his grip is firm, and he closes the slight distance between us, until he’s pushing my spine too hard against the tiles.
A guttural sound escapes me, a blend of pain and cold fear. Almost as cold as the ice sheeting his eyes.
I grab onto his wrist, nails cutting into his flesh. But it’s as though he doesn’t feel it at all.
His eyes are sleet. Slushed snow and ugly winter.
A rage I haven’t seen on him before.
It tugs the breaths out of me unevenly, a shuddering rise and fall of my chest.
My other hand keeps the towel in place, fingers tightly clutching it to my breasts.
“You sacrificed your friend, Emily,” he enunciates her name, like it’s a dagger unsheathed, “for your own safety. And you would do it again, woman. But you judge me.” His fingertips dig into the flesh of my jaw, pursing out my lips.
“You are the most self-pitying human I have come across in these lands. You pass judgement on others too freely.”
The pad of his thumb drags over my face, from my jaw to the corner of my pursed mouth. The pressure of his touch digs into my skin.
And his gaze drops—watching as his thumb drags along my lips, smushing them.
“You believe your pain is the only pain that matters,” he murmurs, like his mind has been swept away, elsewhere, and he hardly hears his own words. “That it is the currency of the worlds. But I have felt pain and suffering in most.”
His thumb slides back to the bone of my jaw, then presses, hard. His grip readjusts, angling my cheek to him.
“You are not special.”
I have no response for him.
His words aren’t what send a flurry of ice to my belly. It’s that his other hand leaves the wall, where it was flattened, and grazes down the side of my neck.
My wet hair is stuck to my skin. My temples. The curve of my neck. My shoulders. The burn of my cheeks.
Samick peels them off my skin, strand after strand.
I feel every touch like a crisp, cold breath on my pebbling flesh. It’s more than his touch, more than the chill of the air, that’s burning my cheeks.
He turns my face back to align with his—and I look into his eyes.
A breath whispers out of me.
“You lied,” I say, soft, a murmur that shivers.
He looks at me from beneath his lashes. Rich jade green eyes, smouldering with an intensity that I recognise.
I saw it back at the prison, when he studied me.
But I remind him of his prejudice, of his disgust. The assertion he made so long ago in the woods.
“You said we repulse you.” The unease is in my whisper. “You said you’d never want a human, that you’d never desire us.”
That stare burns beneath his lashes.
For a long moment, he is unchanging.
Then, slowly, he draws back. Not more than a couple of inches, but it’s enough to invite a lashing of light from the torch. Pale, unkind light.
It’s kind to him.
So many times I’ve thought of him as sculpted from marble and ice and stone. But it’s always been detached thoughts and observations.
Now…
Now, it’s like I see him. His body. Not as a man or even a monster, but as a male.
But most of the light is still blocked by his towering form, and so shadows swallow most of him.
He considers me, and I consider him back.
He fights the rage frosting over his eyes, lacing and threading, greens spilling over white; a clash in him unfolding right in front of me, and I’m trapped.
A coldness spreads through my chest.
With just one hand, he reaches for the towel, slowly. Holding my gaze.
He grabs a fistful of the towel just above my clutched grip, then tears it. Literally, rips a strip of the fabric, and the awful sound hisses through the bathroom.
My insides lurch.
He gives a final yank—and a strip comes free.
My throat thickens.
Still, my hand is bunched in the towel, holding it to my chest, frayed pieces clinging to my skin.
My fingers are as rigid as metal.
Samick lifts the strip of the towel, pulling it straight with both hands—
And he brings it to my mouth.
It muffles the gasp that hitches through me.
He gags me.
I jerk aside, my cheek turning to him, shoulder smacking into his arm, as though I can escape it.
But Samick predicts me.
And he’s faster.
The fabric slips into my mouth, and I’m spun around to face the wall before the pressure of his body pins me to it.
A whimper utters out of me.
It doesn’t pause him.
He ties the strip at the back of my head, tight.
Then his hand slides into the dampness of my hair, a pressure that pushes my cheek against the wall.
But his other hand—
His other hand drags down my spine, down the towel, taking it with him until the towel crumples to the tiles at my heels.
My skin pebbles. Both under his touch and the cold of the bathroom.
Fingertips ghosting along my hip, he brings his mouth to my ear, his breath crisp and sharp.
An ache is spreading in me—and I shut my eyes, tight, as though I can will it away, banish it from my body.
But it only intensifies. Turns painful almost.
Still, his fingers travel down my side, tracing my silhouette, slowly, so fucking slowly.
Words escape me.
I’m gagged, but I don’t even make a sound, not even an attempt at a strung-together sentence.
The first time his touch wandered my body, it felt like an inspection. A science experiment. The way he watched me was clinical. Even his actual touch was experimental, a calculation of the exact pressure and angle that pleases my body.
And he watched every feeling pass over my face.
Now…
Now there’s no inspection, no distance, no experiment.
His fingers curve along my back, then drag down the length of my spine, over the curve of my ass, then under—
A shudder runs through me, electric, all the way to my core.
He finds my heat, and his fingers slip inside.
They curl.
A moan withers out of me. Muffled. Gagged. But he hears it just fine in the quiet of the bathroom.
Melting into the tiled wall, my heels lift off the floor.
I meet him.
I give him access.
I invite him.
With two fingers inside of me, he stills.
His breath cascades over the shell of my ear—and I feel him, pressed up against me, against my back, his length.
But he doesn’t move.
I make an impatient noise.
My walls clench around him.
In answer, his fingers slip out of me.
“I was not pleasing you, Tesni,” he whispers, darkly. “I was feeling how ready you are.”
A cold sensation unravels through me.
“Re-ey?” My voice trembles, and it’s too muffled by the gag, like speaking with a mouthful of food.
Ready for what?
His lips brush over the shell of my ear, his lips soft as he whispers, “It will only hurt if you fight it.”
He tears away from me, spinning me around with his retreat, until my chest is pulled to his.
The glare of his dangerous gaze looks down on me.
My feet shuffle over the tiles, backing up, until my spine hits the edge of the sink, the counter, and the bottle of the avocado face mask is knocked off.
It strikes the tiled floor—and it might as well be a gunshot, I flinch so violently.
I can’t tear my gaze away from him.
The harsh torchlight rinses over him, the tension of his jaw, his muscles, as he looks down on me.
Then I yelp—
Because he throws me up onto the edge of the vanity, legs spread, and he moves to stand between my clenched thighs.
My hands come slapping down on the counter.
His eyes smoulder in the glare of the torchlight. Soft blond hair is stuck to his temples, damp like mine, and he still wears the glisten of the bathwater.
In the light, the water dances. It glitters. A dewiness that illuminates his muscles.
I look down—and I see how ready he is.
My throat bobs. I swallow, thick, and the sight of it, the length, the girth, the smoothness…
That ache in me worsens.
Samick’s chiselled jaw tightens.
He looks down at me, too. At my pink sex, on display right in front of him.
Like there’s a part of me still fighting to get away from him, the heels of my feet press into the edge of the counter—and my legs are one bad move away from pushing me back from him.
They don’t.
And I stay exposed.
Samick’s jade, shadowy eyes are fixed on it. For a heartbeat, two, he just stares at my slit.
The wetness is there. I feel it.
He probably sees it.
Then, a shadow slashes along his jaw again, and he drags his stare up my body, over my naval, my breasts, to my face.
He moves in closer, closing the slight gap between us, my thighs spreading more. And his cock grazes over my inner thigh, until it lands on the apex—and there, it tenses.
My defeated breath is muffled by the gag.
I slump.
The wall is hard against the back of my head. But I hardly feel it over the aching inside of me. A need that’s getting stronger and stronger.
Bet he feels it, too. My bubble.
My hunger. My unwillingness to feel it. The battle inside of me.
But ultimately, right in front of him, I surrender.
Knees bent, heels digging into the edge of the counter, hands flat, and slumped against the wall.
Something dark stirs in him at the sight of me.
He looks at me from beneath his lashes, his hand running up my inner thigh, guiding my legs even further apart.
And I think of a beast about to devour prey.
His other hand fists the base of his cock, long and smooth, and frightening.
My breath pins to my throat.
I might be wet—but wet enough for that?
Samick answers my worry. He presses the tip at my entrance, and his words come out low, “It will not hurt.”
If I don’t fight.
I’m not reassured.
A weight comes down on my insides, pushing my heart down to my gut—
And Samick nudges in.
Just a bit.
Just the tip.
As if predicting my sudden tension, all my muscles clamping at once, his hand on the apex of my thigh shifts, and his thumb grazes over my clit.
My moan is trapped by the muzzle.
He flicks over my clit again, then again, and again, slowly relaxing my body, luring my muscles into accepting his touch—his invasion.