16. Posy
— ? —
Posy
I don’t let go of his hand until the bedroom door is shut behind us, and then I shove him toward the bed.
He goes. A creature who just put his cousin in the dirt without breathing hard lets a librarian push him backward across a bedroom, and the going is what undoes me, the way all that leashed power keeps choosing to be mine.
“Posy, what’s gotten into you?” His eyes have gone black-silver, tracking me as I come after him.
“I just watched you beat someone into the ground for me. What do you think?”
“That was a training exercise.”
“That was a mating display, and you know it, you took your shirt off.” I plant a hand in the center of his bare chest and push him down onto the mattress, and he lets me do that too, sprawling back on his elbows, still wearing the garden and the fight on his skin, watching me with dark delight.
My whole body is still humming from the terrace, pulse thudding low and insistent, thighs slick from an hour of watching him move. “Shut up and take off your pants.”
“So romantic.”
“Valerian, now.”
“As my queen commands.”
We crash together rougher than we’ve ever been.
My shirt tears somewhere in the removal and I could not possibly care less, my bra surrenders to fingers that have learned it, my jeans peel away with my underwear inside them, soaked and abandoned, and his pants follow, and then it’s skin, all of it, his cool body and my burning one, his mouth hard on mine and my nails dragging down the muscles of his back hard enough that he growls into the kiss, and the growl lands directly between my legs.
He flips us, pins me to the mattress with his weight, and I arch up against him, shameless, grinding, wet and entirely out of patience.
He pushes inside me in one long stroke and my vision whites at the edges. Full. Taken. Exactly where every nerve in my body has been campaigning to be since he took his shirt off in a garden, and my hips are already moving, greedy, before he’s even settled.
“There,” he grits out, forehead dropping to mine. “There, gods, there.”
We find a rhythm with teeth in it, nowhere near the reverent first night or the interrupted heat on the library rug.
This is jealousy and an hour of watching each other across a garden, and I meet every thrust with my heels dug into the backs of his thighs, and the sounds coming out of me have completely stopped consulting my dignity.
The pressure builds fast, coiling low and tight, my skin fever-hot everywhere his mouth lands, throat, jaw, the swell of my breast.
His mouth. His mouth on my throat.
“Bite me,” I gasp.
He freezes.
Everything freezes, his hips, his breath, the whole beautiful machine of him going statue-still above me while I clench around him, frantic, right at the edge.
“Posy…”
“I can’t stop thinking about the book.” The words tumble out, ragged and certain. “The chaise was your venom saving your life. The pillow was you protecting me. I want the real thing, Valerian. I want your fangs in my throat while you’re inside me. I need to feel it. I need to feel you. Please.”
His eyes have gone storm-dark, and the war in them is visible, want against fear, and the fear is winning.
“Blood and pleasure together,” he says roughly, “strain even a king’s control. If I take too much. If you say the word exchange while my venom is in you and I’m too far gone to refuse…”
“Then here’s my clear head, before the venom.
” I take his face in both hands. “Listen. I am not asking for forever tonight. I’m not going to ask for forever tonight.
Whatever I babble at the peak of the single greatest orgasm in recorded history, the answer is already no, and you have my permission to ignore me completely.
One bite, Valerian. Just the bite. I trust you. ”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep earning it.”
He looks at me for one more suspended moment, buried inside me, his whole body strung tight.
Then he breaks.
His hips drive forward and his rhythm returns, deeper now, deliberate, and his mouth drags down my jaw to my throat with open intent, and just the graze of his fangs against my pulse pulls a sob out of me.
My whole body draws taut, chasing it, the coil at the base of my spine winding tighter with every stroke, and his voice arrives at my ear in gravel.
“When you finish, little bride. Not before. I want everything at once.”
“Then move like you mean it.”
He moves like he means it.
The build is vicious and fast, his hand sliding between us, his fingers finding exactly where I need them, the wet sounds of us filling the room, and I’m climbing, cresting, right at the shivering top of it, and I feel his lips part against my throat.
“Now,” I sob. “Valerian, now, please…”
He holds me at the crest one final unbearable second, his rhythm never faltering, his breath cool against the thunder of my pulse, and the anticipation alone nearly finishes me, every muscle in my body drawn to its limit, suspended, begging.
His fangs sink in as I shatter.
The world detonates.
I see stars. Actual stars, bursting across the black behind my eyes, and then the black opens and I’m not behind my eyes anymore.
I leave my body. There’s no better way to say it.
The orgasm and the venom and the pull of his mouth fuse into a single ascending wave, and I ride it up and out of myself entirely, and for one impossible, suspended moment I am looking down at a woman arched off a bed in a vampire’s arms, dark hair wild across the pillow, his mouth at her throat, her face transfigured.
She’s beautiful. We’re beautiful.
Then the wave crests again and I’m inside him.
His hunger and his awe pour through me in one current, a century of starving dark and the taste of me ending it.
I feel my own blood land in him, warmth spreading through a body that forgot warmth, and under the hunger there’s the other thing, the enormous thing, his devotion, vast and mine, wearing my face at the center of it.
I feel my own heartbeat from the outside, from his side, the drumbeat he outlasted a century of silence to hear, and I finally understand what he meant through a kitchen door on the first night: it does sound beautiful.
It sounds like an address. Everything at once.
A supernova with my name on it, going off in slow motion.
I crash back into my body still coming, aftershock stacked on aftershock, clenched around him as he groans against my throat and follows me over, and I’m sobbing, laughing, clinging to him with every limb while the aftershocks tear through me in diminishing brilliant pulses.
His fangs slide free. His tongue passes over the punctures, sealing them, tender as the bite was wild, and then he gathers me against his chest and holds me while I shake. He’s trembling too. That’s the detail I’ll keep forever: the ancient king, trembling.
“Posy, speak to me.” His voice is wrecked. “Are you alright?”
“I can’t…” Words are somewhere back in my body of origin. “I don’t have… again. Do that again.”
He laughs, helpless and unsteady, into my hair. “Give me a moment. Give us both a moment. You stopped breathing at the end.”
“I stopped everything at the end. I left. Valerian, I left, I was up there, I saw us, and then I was in you, I felt…” I pull back far enough to look at him, and my eyes are wet and I don’t care. “I felt what I sound like from inside you. The heartbeat thing. A hundred years.”
His expression opens completely, nothing guarded left in it.
“Now you know,” he says simply.
I put my head back on his chest, over the scar, over the silence, and we lie tangled in the wreckage of the bed while my pulse descends through the atmosphere. His hand strokes my spine, unhurried passes. My throat throbs, twin points of sweet ache, and I press my fingers to the marks.
“Will they scar?”
He takes my hand, kisses the fingertips, then leans in and presses his lips to the marks themselves, unhurried, thorough, a signature over a signature.
“I hope so,” he murmurs against my skin. “I hope they scar, and I hope you catch them in every mirror, and I hope you think of exactly this each time.” His thumb traces my jaw, tilts my face up to his. “Because I intend to think of nothing else for a decade at minimum.”
From somewhere deep in the house, distant and unmistakable, comes my house guest’s voice at conversational-for-vampires volume:
“THE WALLS ARE NOT THICK, LOVEBIRDS.”
I make a sound of pure horror and pull the blanket over my head. Valerian doesn’t even flinch. He tucks the blanket around me, gathers me closer, and calls back, perfectly serene:
“THEN LEARN FROM THE MASTER, COUSIN.”
“Oh my god.” I’m going to die under this blanket. “We’re getting him a hotel.”
Valerian presses a kiss to my throat, right over his marks, and I feel him smile against my skin.
“We’re getting him a coffin.”