Chapter 26 #2
“Yes?” His voice is a breath at my throat.
Can he feel it against his lips, the rhythm of my heart?
A-live, a-live, a-live.
But there is something more now too. Something that, in one blisteringly lovely moment, is both wonderful and terrible at the same time.
Love-d, love-d, love-d.
I stop, push Bram off me, and sit up. My hands are shaking in my lap, birds with clipped wings.
“I’m sorry,” comes Bram’s voice. “I shouldn’t—”
“It’s not you,” I say. My breath is coming in short puffs, chest heaving and crashing like a storm at sea. “It’s me. There’s…there’s something wrong with me.” I look down at my hands, the scars running silver at my wrists.
“What?” Bram’s voice is gravelly, his face twisting. One hand reaches for mine, but I pull away.
When I look up at him, his face morphs through my tears.
“My father used to tie me to a chair. Used to make me memorize the Blessed Scripture because he thought it would make me better.” My lips tremble. “You are not the monster, Bram. Because…because I am. A Reaper.”
“Oh, Adelaide.”
The sound of my name in his mouth is enough to send my heart racing. He cups my jaw, pulls me closer. One hand slips across my waist, settling at the small of my back. I press my hands against his chest, maintaining distance between us, something to lessen the pain.
“Bram, what happens when—”
“Stop,” he murmurs again, lips against my hair.
“Stop what?”
“You’re always worrying about the future. And right now, gods below and above. Addie.” The sound is nothing more than a choked groan, thick and heady. “I need you here.”
My knees go shaky, and part of me hates this man who turns my brittle bones to molten flame. And yet, at the same time, loves him for it. That’s what frightens me the most. The loving. Something I have not felt in so many years.
“Why?” My own throat clogs with foolish tears.
“Must you make me explain it?” He rests his forehead against mine. “Because you came. You could have chosen to stay behind, where it was safe and warm and alive. And yet you risked it all to come here. To save me.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he presses a finger to my lips.
“I know you came for your mother. But the fact you are still here after…after everything…Adelaide, don’t you get it?”
My entire being screams at him not to say it. Please don’t say it. And yet something so deep inside my bones—it might be the most original piece of me—wants nothing more than to watch the shape his lips make when those three little words spill from them.
“Don’t say it, Bram,” I whisper, wanting with each breath to take the words back. “I can’t hear you say it, not yet.”
“When?” His voice is a gentle groan in my ears.
“When we’re safe. Only when we are safe.”
He nods, knowingly, and tucks his fingers beneath my chin, pulling my eyes up to meet his. There, in the ruddy light, he is alive. Those eyes like twin flames, cheeks rugged and filled with warmth. My fingers brush his lips, and he shudders beneath my touch.
“Then, if anything, let me show you.”
The air blazes, nothing but heat and caught breath between us.
My stomach fizzes, but I don’t care about that.
Don’t care about the Haunts watching us from outside or my mother’s face made from the patchwork skin of all the dead women I have buried.
Even Ransom, the man who I thought only wanted to be made whole, vanishes from my thoughts, taking his rot and sold soul with him.
And all I am left with is Bram. Beautiful, broken Bram. Who tasted poison one night and never woke up. Who, for years, waited. Waited for me to find the bell, to fit all the jagged pieces back together, and to bring him home.
It was never about Mother. Never about making my family whole. It was always about Bram. This beautiful man who only deserved to live.
I reach up to tangle my fingers in his shaggy hickory curls. “Yes,” I say, voice thick with emotion. “Yes, you can do that.”
Bram needs no more encouragement. In a single motion, he takes me by the hips and spins me, pulling my body down against him on the floor.
His skin burns beneath mine, and for a single moment, I feel the steady thrum of his heart through his shirt.
His mouth tastes of honey, of spilled coffee on old books.
His fingers dance across my back to find the laces of my bodice.
They are clumsy things, and I almost laugh when he struggles to gain purchase.
“Is this your first time undoing a lady’s stays?” My lips tease his throat.
He pulls back, face red. “Actually, Addie, I should say this is my first—Well, I’ve actually never—”
A smile splits my lips. I nudge him gently with my nose, voice so low it barely makes sound. “Me too, Bram.”
“Are you all right with it?” His hands regain their fortitude, trailing up my back. “With you and me, I mean?”
I lean my forehead against his, brush the twitch of his lip with my finger, and study the way his shirt is already sloughing off the hard muscle of one shoulder.
In truth, I don’t know if I will be all right with anything, really.
But maybe this is the beginning. One gentle, brilliant falling into healing.
Maybe this is how I learn how to love, even if now isn’t the right time to hear those words.
I brush a thatch of hair from his face and sit back on my heels, pulling him up to meet me.
“With you, Bram Avery, everything is perfect.”
He groans, the sound low in his throat, and it sends ripples warming me to my core.
In a single, fluid motion, he rolls me over onto my back, and I am breathless there on the floor of the church.
He straddles me, thighs pressed against my hips.
My hands reach up, finding the brass buttons of his shirt.
I undo them one at a time, the waiting sending heat to the space between my legs.
Bram maintains searing eye contact, his pupils blown wide and shadowed with a desire that damn near takes my breath away.
I unclasp the last button of his shirt, laying the fabric wide, and run my hands over the hard plane of his chest, his stomach.
My fingers trail down a dark line of hair disappearing beneath the waist of his breeches.
His entire body shudders. “Addie.”
The ache in his voice is undeniable, and when I run my hands along the length of him, I know why. Even for our clothes, I feel every hard inch of him, and it sends my hips bucking forward.
He grins and dives toward my neck like a starved beast. I form my fingers around his hard ridge, and a growl echoes from his lips. He catches my hands with his, splaying them to the sides.
“You first.”
His words send shivers along my legs, and faster than I can blink, he tugs the loose sides of my bodice down around my shoulders.
Lips like velvet trail my throat, the jutting bones of my shoulder, landing on the soft mounds of my breasts.
I moan at the gentlest touch while he runs his tongue over my skin and sucks my nipple between his teeth.
The sounds release something in him, animalistic and feral. His muscles tense, and he rips his breeches from his body, tears the silk of my bodice until I am exposed to the navel.
To hell with this dress. With its scent of bitter almonds and poison.
Another shiver ripples down my spine when Bram pulls back, studies every inch of me like I am some rich jewel. His length, now free of his breeches, is long and hard and so beautiful. My center aches with more need than I ever thought possible.
Bram trails his hand down between my breasts, pressing against my stomach. My back arches at the touch, and I reach for him, taking him in my palms. He groans, leans down, and buries his face in my hair.
“Addie, you’re a work of art.” Slowly, he presses my legs apart and pushes my skirts up around my hips.
I gasp when the cool air touches my heated flesh.
With hands on the ground at my sides, Bram stares at me, the eye contact threatening to tear me apart.
“What are you doing?”
His smile simmers with devilry, the light from the sky pooling red around his head. A holy icon from the depths of Hell.
“Do you want this?”
“Yes.” I barely breathe before the word is spilling from my mouth. “Yes, Bram. I want this. I want you.”
He braces his hand against the floor of the nave and slides his length into me, filling me up until I think I will burst. I edge so close to pleasure my heart races into my throat. Every inch of him burns, makes me ache beyond desire. It morphs to something like hunger. For him. For this.
I flex my fingers and reach up to twist them through his hair.
He moves with slow, deliberate thrusts, drawing out the moment, keeping his eyes fixed on mine.
I trail my hands down his shoulders, nails raking his back.
He looses another groan from his throat, falling over me, drawing out and pressing in again.
I move with him, the slick ache drawing lower into my stomach. His tongue slices my throat, then up against the sensitive hollow behind my ear.
“Addie.” His breath is hot on my skin.
“Don’t stop,” I gasp. “Please, gods below and above. Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t. Instead, he thrusts harder and deeper until I am sure I will come apart there in all the bloody light.
Bram sends me teetering toward the edge of oblivion with each press, each breath from his throat.
My fingers flex and release, succumbing to the darkness, the truth.
I am no vicar’s daughter. No cursed creature, touched by Erybrus.
I am the daughter of both darkness and light. Of earth and Heaven and Hell. I am poison and healing in one. A Reaper. Neither for the light nor the shadow, but for something in between.