19. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
She finds me in the library just after midnight.
I hear her coming, the determined rhythm of her footsteps, the ragged edge to her breathing that reports her state before she reaches the door.
She’s been strung wrong all day, ever since her midnight interview with my cousin, wearing a particular quiet, the kind that means she’s doing arithmetic she hates.
I set down my book and turn just as she reaches the door.
Her footsteps stop outside the door.
I listen to her stand there, hand on the knob, heartbeat spiking, settling, spiking again, a woman conducting a full parliamentary debate with herself on my threshold.
I want to call out but… I don’t know why I stay silent instead, and give her the dignity of the argument, and hear the exact moment she loses it, or wins it, the two being indistinguishable where we’re concerned: her pulse plants its flag, the knob turns, and she comes through the door already moving.
She’s beautiful. She’s always beautiful, a constant ache I’ve stopped trying to treat, but tonight she’s wild-eyed and vibrating with an energy that needs somewhere to go.
Her dark hair is tangled from her own hands.
She’s wearing one of my shirts, stolen from my closet, the hem at mid-thigh and her legs bare below it.
Those legs. I’ve mapped every inch of them, and I want to learn them again. Every time, the way I learned them the first time.
“Posy, what…”
She crosses the room in three strides, takes two fistfuls of my shirt, and bears me down onto the settee, climbing after me in the same motion.
I go. I could’ve stopped her with a finger, and the look in her eyes says the falling is the point. She wants me off-balance. She wants me beneath her.
I am delighted to be furniture.
“What’s gotten into you?” I ask, though I can guess. My cousin, planting questions with both hands.
“I need to stop thinking,” she says, rough and desperate, climbing onto my lap.
“I can help with that.”
“I need to be in charge.”
My lips curve. “Even better.”
She makes a sound that’s half laugh, half sob, and then her mouth is on mine, hot and demanding, taking without preamble. I let her set the angle and the pace, my hands resting light on her hips, and when she pulls back her eyes are too bright.
“Mircea asked me what I’m going to do when I get old and you don’t.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. Time, forever, all of it.” She shakes her head hard. “I need out of my own head. I need to feel something that isn’t fear.”
“Then use me.” I slide my hands up her sides, her warmth pouring through the thin cotton. “Whatever you need, little bride. I’m yours.”
She kisses me again, teeth catching my lower lip, and I groan and roll up against her, and she gasps because I’m already hard and she’s wearing nothing under my shirt.
“Hands,” she pants. “Keep your hands up. Above your head.”
I obey, lacing my fingers against the settee’s arm. The position leaves me stretched out beneath her, exposed, entirely at her mercy, and my whole body approves of the arrangement.
“Good,” she breathes. “Stay like that.”
She sits back on my thighs and looks at me. Really looks, amber eyes traveling down my chest, and I let her, because I want her to see exactly what she does to me.
“You’re so…” She shakes her head. “I still can’t believe you’re real sometimes.”
“I assure you I’m very real.” I flex my hips upward. “Shall I prove it?”
“Hands stay up.”
“Yes, my queen.”
Her breathing hitches at the title, and I enter it in the permanent record with great satisfaction.
She undoes my shirt buttons one by one with fingers that aren’t steady, and I hold still for it the way I’d hold still for a coronation, because that’s what it is, in the only church I attend anymore.
Each button is a small deliberate act. She could tear the shirt off me.
She’s done it. Tonight she wants the slow version, the choosing version, and when she finally spreads her palms across my chest I close my eyes, because her hands are warm and alive, and every point of contact reports directly to my spine.
“Cold,” she murmurs, not a complaint.
“Warm,” I answer, meaning her, meaning the hands, meaning everything within a mile of this settee.
“You’re perfect,” she murmurs, tracing muscle. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Not in centuries. Never the way you mean it.”
“I mean it.” She bends and presses her lips to the scar over my silent heart. “Every part of you.”
I want to touch her so badly my hands shake with the discipline of staying put. I want to flip her under me and worship the spiral right out of her. She asked for control, so I grip the settee and give it.
She straightens, takes the hem of my stolen shirt, and pulls it over her head.
My breath stops. It stops every time. All that living warmth uncovered in lamplight, the flush of her spreading down her chest, and the scent of her want rising in the cool library air until my fangs ache with it.
“Nothing in any century has looked the way you look right now,” I tell her. “Nothing has ever come close.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“I have never just said anything in my life.” I strain against my own hands, and the settee’s wooden arm complains. “Let me show you.”
“Hands stay up.”
“Then allow me my words.” I hold her gaze and let her see all of it. “Your body is a temple I intend to spend eternity praying at. Your taste is finer than any blood I’ve known. I could live on nothing but you and count myself the wealthiest creature in existence.”
Her thighs clench against my hips. I can feel her heat through my trousers now, and I bite back a groan.
“That’s very poetic,” she manages.
“I told you. I used to write poetry.”
“Mircea says it was terrible.”
“Mircea has no taste.” I roll up against her and she gasps. “I would write you a thousand terrible poems if they made you smile. I would fill libraries.”
“Recite one.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re pinned under me and completely at my mercy. Recite one line of your terrible ancient poetry, Valerian, or I stop moving.”
“That’s extortion.”
“That’s negotiation. You were a king. You should recognize it.”
I look up at her, flushed and imperious astride me with her hands planted on my chest, and I am helpless in every way that has ever mattered.
“Her heartbeat is the only country,” I say quietly, “I have ever wished to die in.”
She stares down at me. The teasing drains out of her face, and what’s left is bare and wide-open, and her hips have stopped and neither of us cares.
“That’s not terrible,” she whispers.
“I wrote it an hour ago. Standing outside your door. The old ones were terrible. The new ones have better material.”
“Shut up.” But she’s smiling now, the fear loosening its grip on her face. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m ridiculous and I’m yours. The two coexist.”
She laughs, real and bright, and then her fingers are at my waistband, impatient, and I lift my hips to help her, and her hand closes around me with a grip that whites out my thoughts entirely.
“Posy…”
“Quiet, you. I’m in charge, remember?”
“How could I possibly forget.”
She rises on her knees, positions me, and pauses there, poised at the very top of me, and looks down with her hair falling around her face and her lower lip caught in her teeth, and makes me wait through one full, deliberate, monstrous heartbeat.
“My queen has a cruel streak,” I manage.
“Your queen is savoring.”
Then she sinks down in one merciless glide, taking me to the hilt, and the sound we make together isn’t quite human from either of us.
She’s scalding and shaking, braced on my chest, nails carving crescents, and for a moment neither of us moves because moving would end a perfection and we are both, suddenly, misers.
“You feel…” She exhales hard. “God. You feel…”
“Finish the sentence at your leisure. I’ll wait here.”
“Ridiculous,” she gasps, and starts to move.
Slow at first, experimental rolls of her hips, hunting her angle. I watch her face and catalog everything, every flutter and gasp, the concentration line between her brows, and when she finds the spot that makes her breath break, I memorize its coordinates for the rest of my existence.
“That’s it,” I murmur. “Take what you need. Use me thoroughly.”
She plants her hands and picks up the pace, rising and falling with growing urgency, and the library fills with the wet, obscene music of us. She’s climbing fast. I can feel it in her grip, hear it in her breathing, and my hands are shaking against the settee arm with the need to help.
“Can I touch you?” It comes out ruined. “Posy. Please.”
“Hands stay…” She gasps mid-word. “Stay up.”
I nearly sob.
She leans forward, changes the angle, rakes her nails down my chest hard enough to mark, and the sting sharpens everything, and I drive up to meet her next stroke and she moans her approval.
“I can’t…” A frustrated sound, half laugh. “I’m trying to hold you down and you’re too strong, I can’t pin you hard enough, it’s like trying to arrest a statue…”
“Then I will hold myself.” I press my wrists harder into the settee arm, straining against bonds that exist only because she spoke them. “Command me, my queen. I am entirely at your mercy.”
She laughs, breathless and surprised, and her whole expression tips over, desperation into warmth, into unmistakable joy.
“You’re ridiculous,” she says again.
“You’re radiant. We’ve established both.”
She rocks down onto me, chasing it now, head tipping back, and the long bare line of her throat catches the lamplight, and my fangs ache with wanting. But she hasn’t asked. I don’t take what isn’t offered.
“Valerian.” Strained, urgent. “I want… I need…”
“Tell me. Anything in any world.”
“Take over. My legs are shaking, I can’t keep the rhythm, I need you to…”
She doesn’t have to finish.
I move, one hand at her hip and the other cradling her spine, and flip us in a blur, and then she’s beneath me on the cushions with her legs locked around my waist.
“Better?” I’m already moving.
“Yes. God, yes.”
I drive into her with measured strokes, each one angled where she needs it, and she arches off the cushions, and I bend to catch her nipple in my mouth and she cries out loud enough to scandalize the shelves.
“Bite me.” It spills out of her between moans. “Please. I need to feel you.”
“Where?” I lift my head and wait, because this part is always hers. “Tell me where you want me.”
She grabs my hair and guides me down, past her stomach, to the soft crease of her inner thigh.
“Here. I want it here.”
I grin against her skin. “A new address. I approve.”
I nip once, a tease, and she whimpers, and I keep moving inside her in shallow strokes that hold her exactly at the edge, and her whole body is begging before her mouth catches up.
“Please, Valerian, please…”
I bite.
My fangs sink into the sweet flesh of her thigh and her blood floods my mouth in the same heartbeat her climax floods the room.
She comes apart around me, pulsing, screaming a sentence with my name inside it, and her pleasure pours through her blood, rich and laced with her own ecstasy, and I drink her joy straight from the vein while she shatters.
I thrust through it, chasing, and my own release unmakes and remakes me in one long white pulse as I spill into her, fangs still set in her thigh, her taste still singing on my tongue.
We collapse together in a tangle of limbs and unsteady breathing.
I seal the bite with my tongue, pressing one last kiss to the twin marks on her thigh, my signature in a place only I will ever read, and rest my head on her stomach, listening to her heart gallop, then trot, then walk.
Her fingers find my hair and move through it absently, and the library holds us, lamplight and the ruin of our clothes, and I think, with the last operational corner of my mind, that I have attended feasts thrown by emperors and this settee is the finest hall I’ve ever been welcomed in.
“You’re laughing,” I observe, because she is, quiet giggles shaking her ribs under my ear.
“You’re ridiculous. And I’m happy. Is that allowed?”
“It is mandatory.” I kiss her hip, then her stomach. “I want you laughing and thoroughly satisfied for the rest of eternity.”
She cards her fingers through my hair. “That was different. Good different.”
“You needed to hold the reins for a while.” I trace idle patterns on her hip. “There’s no version of you I don’t want, Posy. The one who commands. The one who steals my waffles, should such a one ever exist. Bring me any of them, all of them, in any order.”
“That’s a dangerous offer.”
“I’m a dangerous creature. It’s on brand.”
She untangles herself eventually and pads across to the mirror over the mantel, ostensibly to repin her hair, and I watch her catch sight of my shoulders in the reflection, the four parallel lines her nails left, pink against the pale, and I watch her decide not to look away.
Her chin lifts. Pure, unrepentant satisfaction crosses her face, the look of an artist reviewing a signature.
“You’re admiring your work,” I observe.
“Maybe.”
“They won’t last. I heal.”
“Then I’ll make more.”
My whole body approves of this policy at a cellular level. “I look forward to the maintenance schedule.”
“See that you do.” She turns from the mirror, insufferably smug, wearing my shirt and her handiwork and nothing else, and I add the image to the permanent collection, filed under reasons the box was worth it.
“We have forever to try different things.” I say it lightly. It doesn’t land lightly. “If you want forever.”
She goes quiet.
“What were you spiraling about?” I ask softly, already knowing.
She mumbles it into my chest. One word. Forever.
I hold her tighter and don’t push, and I’m still holding her when I notice what the pleasure-flush was hiding.
I tip her chin up. She’s pale. Paler than exertion explains, the warmth draining out of her face to reveal a washed-out cast beneath, and I count backward through the past weeks with a cold feeling gathering in my chest. The bathroom floor. Her throat. Her thigh, minutes ago.
“You’re pale,” I say.
“I’m fine.”
“You are paler than you should be. I have fed from you too many times, too close together.” I brush her hair back, and my hand isn’t entirely steady. “Red meat. Iron. I will make a list.”
“You’re banned from lists.” But she’s smiling, soft and drowsy.
“I am not banned from caring for you. Tomorrow we find you proper food. Whatever replaces what I’ve taken.”
“Valerian…”
“This is not negotiable. You are precious to me. I will not fund my hunger out of your health.”
She sighs and doesn’t argue, which should be my first warning, because Posy always argues.
Her breathing slows and evens into an excellent imitation of sleep.
Her heartbeat doesn’t imitate anything. It stays quick and troubled in the dark, circling, and I hold her through the night while we both pretend, and neither of us says the word that’s keeping us awake.