Chapter 22 #2
It’s like staring into a cosmic abyss, into an eldritch void, and the vertigo is real. I feel like at any moment I’ll tip over and fall into them forever and ever.
“There’s my girl,” he murmurs softly, that low voice that sinks somewhere deep in my chest. The voice pulls me back, gives me my balance even as I lie here on this bed.
Then he pushes into me. Slow, slower than he ever has, one long inevitable slide that doesn’t stop until he’s to the hilt, and the angle’s different, deeper, like he’s reached a place in me that’s been waiting for him, and the cold of him is inside my body now making a home.
He doesn’t move. He stays in me with his forehead to mine, and his hand at the side of my face, and his black eyes on me, breathing against my mouth, not moving for a long, long moment.
Then he fucks me. With deliberation and control.
Like he’s decided to be inside me for the next hour, the rhythm steady and deep, the angle finding the place that undoes the rest of me that I thought just came undone, his thumb at my temple and a reverence on his face I haven’t seen him give me before, like a man on his knees at an altar.
He doesn’t say mine again. He doesn’t say yours. He says foxglove, love, Iris, low and dragged, again, and again, as if reciting a prayer he’s kept to himself for centuries.
His hand moves from my face to my shoulder and grips hard, and at the join of my shoulder and my neck I feel a point that isn’t the pad of a thumb.
It’s his nail.
But it’s longer than a nail.
And sharper.
I gasp.
He doesn’t ask if I’m all right, doesn’t pull back to check, doesn’t soften his grip. He keeps fucking me and his thumb bears down until the point breaks my skin, the small pain bright in the dark, and I feel the wet of my own blood under his thumb where he’s opened me.
But the sound that comes out of me isn’t protest. In the dark, with his voided eyes on me and his cock in me and his sharp thumb at my throat, the sound that comes out of me is the sound the old version of Iris would be ashamed of.
It’s more.
I want more.
He hears it. The reverent expression leaves his face and something older…ancient…comes up underneath.
He fucks me harder. The slow goes fast, the reverence goes hungry, his other hand down at my hip now with sharp points at every fingertip, and I feel them drag up my side as his hand moves, thin, shallow lines of skin opening under fingernails that aren’t fingernails anymore.
He bites my shoulder, the sharp teeth returning and the pain is blooming hot, and I make a sound that’s half cry, half moan, but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t lift his mouth, fucking me and biting me and dragging claws down my side in red lines, and I’m not telling him to stop, and he isn’t asking, either.
I come around him yet again, with my blood under his thumb, his teeth in my shoulder, his claws at my hip, and his cold, damp body flush against mine, and it goes through me like a meteorite—fast and obliterating—and he’s still going, still fucking me, the hunger not done with him.
He pulls his mouth off my shoulder. It’s wet, blood at the corner of it, and he looks at me with his fathomless eyes, the discipline he’s held for weeks finally gone, and what’s on top of me now is the part of him that’s been under the surface of the man all along. Lurking just under the water.
“You know,” he rasps.
I make a breathless sound.
“Tell me you know what I am.”
I find my voice. It’s small, barely there, but it’s mine. “I know.”
A long, shaky breath leaves him, and he swears.
Then he comes inside me, hard, with his forehead pressed to my collarbone, and the sound he makes isn’t a word in any language I know, instead it’s primordial, low, dragged out of his chest, the feel of him spilling into me isn’t hot, but the cold of the deep sea.
He stays in me a long time after. The black bleeds slowly out of his eyes, and when he lifts his head from my collarbone, they’re Alasdair blue again.
His teeth are blunt, and white, and straight.
The points at his fingers are gone into tidy nails.
But there’s blood on his mouth, and under his thumb, and a thin, wet trickle of it running down the curve of my shoulder, a reminder of what he is, and can turn back into at any moment.
He doesn’t apologize for any of it. He looks at me and waits for me to say something with all the patience in the world.
I find my voice again. “I know what you are.”
He doesn’t move. “So tell me what I am.”
I swallow hard. “A monster.”
He lets it sit in the dark for a moment. Then he says, “Aye.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “And you knew, you knew this would happen.”
“And I warned you that things would change,” he points out firmly.
“I thought—I thought you’d become emotionally distant if I slept with you,” I stammer. “Not become an actual monster!”
He gives me a careful, albeit bloodstained smile, and his hand comes up and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear with a softness I’ve felt from him the nights before.
“Oh, I never became a monster, Iris,” he says, melancholy tinging his voice. “I always was one. You just took me off the leash.”
The words hit deep and hard and I’m already wrestling with them.
He was always the monster.
I just took him off the leash.
I took him off the leash, the one that the previous Galloways had held taut for who knows how many centuries.
But while I grapple with the truth, he pulls me in slowly, his arm coming around, his hand at the back of my neck under my hair, folding me into the hard chill of his body, then draws the quilt up over us both.
The smell of the bay is in my hair where his mouth rests.
Outside, the loch is silent in a way it hasn’t been before.
The bay is silent because there’s nothing in it tonight.
The thing that lives in it is in my bed.
“You’re a monster,” I whisper.
I don’t mean to say it again. It just comes out, the thought slipping loose, said into the dark against the cold of his collarbone, to remind myself of what he truly is.
He hears me. Of course he hears me.
“Yessss,” he hisses against my hair.
It goes through me. It isn’t a word, so much as the shape of one made by something whose mouth wasn’t built for the language.
His hand at the back of my neck shifts, fingers sliding up into my hair, his breath at my temple. “How does it feel,” he begins, “to just get fucked by one?”
I don’t answer right away. I don’t have the words for it; the words I have aren’t the right ones. I feel the slow undoing of every line I’ve drawn for myself since the first time I crossed his threshold, and what I feel isn’t regret, horror, or love. Not yet. It’s something stranger than all three.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt so alive.
His hand tightens in my hair, just slightly. Enough that I know he’s waiting.
“Good,” I eventually reply. Because that’s all there is to say. Because it’s the truth.
He goes very still against me. Then his arm tightens around my waist, slow and possessive, and he kisses the top of my head once, soft, the same kiss he’s always given me.
At the same time, it isn’t, and I lie there with my answer in the air between us, but I don’t take it back.
Good.
It feels good to fuck a monster.