7. Posy
— ? —
Posy
He’s crumpled on the marble beside the tub, two fallen candles guttering on the floor where they went down with him, the towel still knotted at his waist. That towel is the only thing about him that survived the last two minutes.
His skin has gone gray, actually gray, the color of old ash.
His eyes are closed. His chest isn’t moving.
“No, no, no.” I drop to my knees beside him, my grandmother’s journal abandoned somewhere behind me, and his eyes flutter open at my voice. They’re dim, those silver eyes that were burning holes through me minutes ago. Dim and full of resignation, which is somehow worse than pain.
“Posy. You should go.” A rasp, barely sound at all.
“Like hell I should.” I reach for him, and he flinches, pressing himself back against the wall, away from me.
“Don’t touch me.” The words come out broken. “I can’t… I don’t trust myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The hunger.” His hands are trembling against the floor. “It’s too strong. If you touch me, I might not be able to stop.”
Understanding lands cold.
He’s starving. He told me he was fading and I didn’t grasp how literal he was being.
He’s been running on willpower and the dregs of one drop of my blood, and now there’s nothing left.
He’s dying, right here on my grandmother’s bathroom floor, minutes after holding me upright with steady hands so I wouldn’t ever guess, because he refuses to take from me without permission.
“You idiot,” I breathe. “You absolute idiot, why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did not wish to burden you.” His eyes drift closed. “You have enough to process. I thought I could last longer.”
“Well, you can’t.” I grab his shoulders, ignoring how he tries to pull back. His skin is cold under my hands. Not cool the way it was before. Cold, the temperature of a body that’s stopped arguing. “Valerian, look at me. Look at me.”
His eyes open. Barely.
“You need to feed. Right now.”
“I cannot…”
“You’ll die.”
“I will not take from you like this.” Each word costs him. “Not when you don’t…”
“I’m giving you permission!” I grab his face between my hands, forcing him to focus. “Do you hear me? Freely. Openly. Whatever magic words you need, consider them said. Now drink.”
“Posy…”
“Drink. Now.”
I shove my wrist against his mouth.
For one agonizing moment, nothing. He lies there, gray and still, my wrist pressed to his lips, his breath shallow against my skin.
I can feel him fighting it. The war is right there in the tremor of his jaw, in his hands fisted against the marble, his whole body locked against the thing I’m offering.
“Please,” I whisper. “It’s okay. I want you to.”
His eyes open. They’re black. Completely black, no silver left anywhere, and the look in them isn’t human and isn’t safe, and I should be terrified.
I’m not.
Then his fangs sink in.
The pain is quick and small, gone before I finish registering it. And then.
Oh.
Pleasure crashes through me, a tide with no shore.
It starts at the bite, where his mouth seals against my wrist, and it doesn’t stay there.
It rolls down my arm, across my chest, and settles between my legs with an intensity that pulls a cry out of me.
My knees buckle. I collapse against him, my free hand fisting in his damp hair, my body arching without consulting me.
“Oh god,” I gasp. “Oh god, what…”
He’s drinking. I can feel the pull of it, the steady draw from my veins, and every swallow sends another wave through me.
Nothing in my life has prepared me for this.
It’s intimate in a direction I didn’t know existed, my blood becoming his, his relief pouring back down the same channel, gratitude and hunger tangled together until I can’t tell which of us is making the low sound.
Both. It’s both of us. My hips are rocking against nothing.
My nipples ache against my shirt. Everything below my waist is throbbing, clenching around emptiness, begging.
His arm comes around my back, supporting me when my spine gives up its opinions, and even starving, even shaking, he’s careful with me. That’s the detail that undoes me. He’s dying, and he’s careful.
“Valerian, please,” I sob. “I can’t…”
He pulls back.
His tongue drags across my wrist and the punctures seal beneath it, skin knitting closed. His eyes are bright again, silver relit, color flooding back into his face. Alive. Present.
He looks at me, and the hunger in his expression collapses into horror.
“Posy, I’m sorry.” His voice is wrecked. “I didn’t mean to… the bite, it causes…”
“I know what it causes.” I’m trembling, my whole body strung tight with unspent need, so wet I can feel it, every nerve ending howling. “Don’t stop.”
“You what?”
“Don’t stop.” I grab his wrist before he can retreat. “Please. I can’t… I need…”
I don’t have words for what I need. He watches my face while I fail to find them, and the horror drains out of his expression, and what floods in after is darker.
“This is…” He swallows hard. “This is the venom. The bite rouses the blood, it’s a feeding mechanism, I should have warned you…”
“I don’t care what it is.” I’m past embarrassment, past everything except the ache. “I need you to finish it. Please, Valerian. Help me.”
He doesn’t move, listening to me the way he listens through doors.
“Your heart,” he says, low, “is telling me everything you won’t.”
“Then stop making me say it.”
He moves.
One moment I’m kneeling on the floor clutching his wrist. The next I’m on my back on the venerable chaise by the window, because Victorians apparently furnished their bathrooms, and Valerian is above me, between my legs, hands braced on either side of my head.
He’s still damp from the bath. The towel has survived, a small bureaucratic miracle.
“You may banish me with a word,” he says roughly. “At any moment. It will be obeyed. Do you understand me?”
“I understand. The word isn’t coming.”
His hand slides down my body.
He doesn’t rush. Even now, with me shaking underneath him, he doesn’t rush. His palm drags over my breast and I arch into it with a gasp. He pauses there, cupping me through my shirt, his thumb finding my nipple and circling until my breath goes ragged.
“There it is,” he murmurs, listening. “Your pulse just changed. It changes here.” His thumb drags again, slower. “And here.”
“You’re narrating my heartbeat.”
“I’ve read nothing since they closed the lid on me. Allow me my library.”
I can’t even laugh. It comes out as a whimper, because his hand is moving again, down over my stomach, pausing at the waistband of my jeans long enough that I sob with frustration. Then the button gives, the zipper rasps, and his hand slides beneath the fabric.
He exhales through his teeth.
“The venom started this,” he says, and his fingers slide through exactly how ready I am, and my back bows. “It isn’t the venom keeping it going.”
“Shut up and…”
“And what?” His fingers move, unhurried, learning me. “Say it, Posy. My kingdom for the rest of that sentence.”
“Touch me.”
He touches me.
His fingers find my clit and circle once, twice, and I nearly come on the spot. He stills immediately, denying me the edge, and the sound I make is frankly criminal.
“Patience, little bride,” he murmurs. “I’ve waited a century. You can survive one minute of mine.”
He pushes my jeans down and I kick them off with zero dignity, underwear following, and then I’m bare from the waist down and spread out beneath him, and he sits back on his heels and looks at me, a starving man shown a banquet and told to say grace first.
“A hundred years in the dark,” he says quietly, “and nobody warned me about you.”
Then he lowers his head between my thighs.
The first touch of his tongue makes me scream.
He licks through me slowly, thoroughly, unhurried as a man reading marginalia, and his tongue is cool against all my heat and the contrast wrecks me.
I’m writhing against the cushions, hands fisted in his hair, sounds pouring out of me that the portraits downstairs are going to gossip about for a decade.
“This is just…” I gasp as his tongue circles my clit. “You’re helping me. That’s all this is.”
He pulls back just far enough to speak against my flesh. “Then help me.”
His tongue plunges inside me.
I arch off the chaise with a cry, thighs clamping around his head.
He works me in deliberate strokes, his nose pressing against my clit with every pass, and the pleasure stacks and stacks until I’m sobbing with it.
His hand slides up to palm my breast, and somewhere in there it’s under my shirt, his cool fingers on bare skin, and I don’t remember granting the territory and I’m not filing a complaint.
“More, please,” I beg. “I…”
He knows. His tongue withdraws and two long fingers slide into me without resistance, and he crooks them into a spot that whites out my vision as his mouth seals around my clit.
He sucks.
The orgasm detonates.
I shatter around his fingers, wave after wave, screaming his name or possibly just screaming, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t ease, just works me straight through it until I’m boneless, and there are tears on my face.
“There, my bride,” he murmurs against my thigh, pressing kisses to the skin there. “Fall. I’ll be here when you land.”
The aftershocks roll through me, each one pulling another whimper loose. His fingers gentle, stroking me down from it. His thumb is still moving over my nipple in soothing passes.
“Please, again,” I hear myself say, shameless.
His fingers curl.
The second one builds faster. I’m sensitive and primed past bearing, so that a few strokes and one pass of his tongue tip me over, and this one is deeper, a long rolling swell instead of a detonation. I ride it out with my hands in his hair and his name in my mouth.
When it fades, I’m boneless. I couldn’t move if the house were on fire.
The bathroom is steam and slow dust and the sound of two people trying to remember how breathing works, and his cheek is resting against my thigh, and for one unguarded moment his eyes are closed and his expression is naked gratitude, and I get to see it because he doesn’t know I’m looking.
Valerian pulls back.
He moves so fast I can’t track it. One moment he’s between my thighs; the next he’s across the room, back to me, shoulders heaving.
“Valerian? What’s wrong?” My voice comes out hoarse.
He doesn’t answer.
“Valerian, look at me.”
He shakes his head. His hands are fists at his sides. The towel has survived even this, and it’s hiding exactly nothing about what the last few minutes did to him.
“Did I do something wrong?” I sit up slowly, wincing at the sweet ache. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I need a moment.”
“A moment for what?”
He laughs, and there’s no humor anywhere in it. “To remember that I’m meant to be honorable. That I promised not to take advantage. That what just happened was survival, not…”
“Not what?”
He finally turns.
His eyes are blazing, brighter silver than I’ve ever seen them. His fangs are fully out. And his face is hunger, and under it a tenderness I am absolutely not ready to catalog.
“Not what I wanted it to be,” he says quietly. “Not what you deserved.”
He won’t meet my eyes.
I open my mouth to tell him he has nothing to apologize for, that I asked, that I begged, actually, and there were witnesses, namely him. Before I get a word out, he’s gone. The door clicks shut.
I lie on the chaise, half-naked and thoroughly undone, and stare at the ceiling.
My body is still humming. My wrist tingles where he bit me. And somewhere in this house, a vampire king older than this country is hiding from me because he thinks he did something wrong.
“What the hell,” I whisper to no one, “just happened?”
Through the wall, low and rough, his voice finds me anyway.
“I can hear you thinking, Posy.”
“Then come back and explain.”
Silence answers.
It keeps answering all night.