Chapter 6 #2
Then he goes lower. His mouth drags down my ribs, cool against the heat of my skin, and every inch of the descent hits me in two places at once, his lips on my body and his wanting arriving in my chest, so I feel what this is doing to him as clearly as I feel what it’s doing to me.
He presses his mouth to the curve of my stomach, lingering there, the breath he takes against my skin steady and deliberate, and then he moves past it to the crease of my thigh and his tongue follows the line of it and my legs fall open for him before I’ve decided to let them.
By the time he settles between my thighs I’m already shaking.
He starts slow. One long stroke of his tongue from my entrance to my clit, dragging the flat of it with full pressure, and the sound I make hits the ceiling.
He does it again. Slower. His hands press my hips into the mattress, holding me still for it, because my body is trying to chase his mouth and he won’t let me set the pace.
He circles my clit with the tip of his tongue in passes so tight and deliberate I can feel him reading every response before I voice it, adjusting to what I need a half second before I know I need it.
My hands strain against the shadows’ grip.
The cool of the witch-dark against my wrists and the cool of his mouth between my legs and my own heat pouring off me in waves, and the three temperatures make something I don’t have a name for.
He presses two fingers inside me and I gasp and the gift hums louder.
He curls them forward, finding the angle that makes my vision blur, and his mouth seals over my clit and sucks while his fingers work that spot, measured and precise, and the pressure builds low and tight and bright and the sheets lift an inch off the mattress at the corners and neither of us cares.
He keeps going. He has never done anything by halves and tonight is no exception, his mouth and his fingers working me open in a rhythm that has my voice breaking, and he reads every response before I can voice it, so he knows, always knows, when to press harder and when to ease back and when to hold still and let the wanting build until I can’t think through it.
The air around us vibrates with the gift, a low sustained frequency that resonates against every point of contact, and his fingers press deeper and his tongue moves faster and I’m saying his name and it isn’t a request.
“Maximus.”
“I know.” Against me, and the sound of it nearly finishes the job. “I have you.”
I’m close. He can feel it. His fingers curl harder and his mouth goes relentless and the peak crests sharp and bright and breaks over me, and I cry out against the shadows’ hold while my body tightens around his fingers and the bond pours the wave into him and he groans against me and takes everything the wave gives him.
“Up.” I pull against the shadows and they release, and I drag him up by the hair and he comes, his mouth wet, his eyes dark and his discipline gone. “I want you. Now.”
He settles over me. The tip of him presses against me, thick and hot, and he watches my face while he pushes in, inch by inch, stretching me open around him while my body adjusts.
He’s big and the fullness after what his mouth just did to me makes me gasp, and his jaw clenches at the sound, the restraint costing him everything.
When he’s deep he stills, his forehead dropping to mine, and for one breath neither of us moves, each of us feeling both of us, the doubled sensation of being filled and filling running between us until I can’t tell whose body is whose.
Then I roll my hips, and the stillness is over.
He pulls back and drives into me and the force of it shifts us both across the bed, and I wrap my legs around his hips and pull him deeper and the angle changes and the sound that comes out of me is wrecked.
He finds the rhythm, hard, relentless, every stroke landing with the same precision he fights with, and I meet him, and our hearts settle into one beat and then break it, racing each other.
The heat builds in waves, each one arriving taller.
His rhythm deepens the instant the bond tells him I need it deeper.
My nails score his back when the want spikes through him and lands in me.
The dark he let loose is everywhere now, a second skin on both of us, cool against the fever we’re generating, and the gift presses outward from my chest until the air itself hums with it.
Between his dark and my force the room has stopped obeying physics and neither have we.
He shifts his angle, one hand sliding beneath my hips to tilt them, and the next stroke hits a place that makes my voice break apart entirely.
He does it again. Again. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, my ear, and the things he says against my skin in that low wrecked voice are mine and only mine, and the words land in my body and in my blood simultaneously and I am climbing and he is climbing and neither of us is going to last.
“Look at me,” he says, when I’m at the edge, when he can feel it building in both of us at once. “Celeste. Look at me.”
I look at him. Nothing in his face but me. Undone, above me, mine.
And when it takes me, it takes him in the same breath, because the bond doesn’t let either of us go alone.
It crests through both of us at once, one long bright cascade with two names in it, his pleasure pouring through mine and mine through his, wave after wave, until there’s no seam left where one of us ends, and the marks burn at their brightest, and the only sounds in the room are his name and mine and the two of us forgetting how language works.
After, we lie tangled in the wreck of the bed, my warm spine against his cool chest, the marks dimmed down to embers, our hearts slowing out of their shared sprint. His palm finds the curve and settles there.
The marks pulse slow now, matched, twin embers in the dark. My heartbeat comes back down to its usual impossible rhythm and his keeps time with it, and under my own, the two small fast ones go on undisturbed, steady through all of it.
“They didn’t notice a thing,” I say.
“They noticed nothing,” he agrees, solemn, his thumb moving over the curve, and through the bond I can feel him smiling, the real one, the one almost nobody alive has seen.
I turn in his arms. In the ember light his face is open in a way it only goes in this room, no command in it anywhere.
I put my hand against his jaw, and he turns his mouth into my palm, the same place he kissed on the training floor, and for a while neither of us needs a single thing more than this.
“The war,” he says into my hair, eventually, not moving.
“Still waiting.”
“Let it.”
We overdraw the hour by a wide margin, and nobody comes to collect.
After, I go to the medical wing.
The page came in while we were otherwise engaged, and went unanswered for the length of the engagement. Catherine, surfacing, lucid enough to talk, per the standing order Maximus left with the medical staff. He went back to Adrienne and the eastern knot, an hour and change late. I took the page.
I tell myself the rest is diligence. We have a captive of Konstantin’s with a head full of his methods, and somebody with rank should lay eyes on her while she’s lucid, and I have rank, and I’m not afraid of much.
All true. And not the whole of it.
I found her first, in that sealed room, and I haven’t been able to stop turning her over in my mind since, and I’d rather walk straight at a thing than let it sit behind me where I can’t see it. I’ve always been like that. It’s half of how I ended up fighting strangers for money.
Catherine’s sitting up when I come in, the sedation worn off, and she’s different from the disoriented woman the sweep team carried out.
Composed. Watchful. Her dark eyes track me from the door to the chair, and I know trained watching when I see it.
I spent years across a cage from it. I respect it.
“You’re the one who opened my door,” she says.
“I am.”
“Celeste.” She turns my name over once, slow. “Your people say it outside my door. They think the sedation makes me deaf.” Her eyes drop to my hand, to the ring. “He married you.”
“He did.” I sit. Standing would tell her I’m braced, and I’m not giving her that. “How are they treating you?”
“Well. Carefully.” A small pause. Her nostrils flare, barely, a motion so controlled it’s almost invisible, and her eyes come back to mine with something new behind them.
“You came from him.” Not a question. The scent on my skin, in my hair, unmistakable to a vampire who spent years memorizing that particular combination of cedar and cold, and she’s telling me she caught it before I finished crossing the room. “His scent is all over you.”
Ah. So that’s the first pin. Not just I knew him. I know his scent on a stranger’s skin. I know exactly what you were doing before you walked through that door.
“It usually is,” I say, pleasant. I don’t shift. I don’t cross my arms. I let the sentence sit where I put it and do its work.
Her composure holds, but just. The briefest tightening at the jaw, there and gone, filed.