14. The Venom She Touched
The Venom She Touched
Ianthe
The wind raced over my flesh, damp and mean, but I barely felt it.
I’d buried my face in Skaros’s mane when his claws closed around my waist, and now the golden fur was all I could smell.
Earth and spice. Something darker underneath, muskier, from when he had been only vines.
His wings beat the air in heavy strokes.
“Can you hear me?” I whispered against his neck.
The answer didn’t come as sound. It resonated deep in my chest, warm and familiar. “Always. Even like this.”
I tightened my arms around him. “I thought I’d lose that. When you came back.”
“Never.” His wings tilted, carrying us above the clouds with ease. “The plant was a shell. This is me. All of me.”
I wanted to believe him. The part of me that had watched him dissipate into streams of death energy wanted nothing more. But the part that had learned to trust a whisper in the dark was still adjusting to his weight and his heat.
I pressed my palm flat against his chest and felt his heart hammering there, fast, hard, and alive. I still couldn’t convince myself this wasn’t another dream the Sickness had conjured to make my death—or maybe, his—easier.
We didn’t fly long. He banked toward a ridge beyond Phix’s garden, and his wings adjusted to catch the wind. He landed with a heavy thud, his leonine legs absorbing the impact effortlessly. Shifting me to one arm, he pressed his clawed hand against the solid stone face.
The stone opened, revealing a dark space inside.
It wasn’t magic I understood. It was old, older than the temple, older than the Weaveguards’ rites and Eryx’s medical texts. The rock recognized him and sealed shut behind us with reassuring finality.
His den was larger than I’d expected, and warm. A fire burned low in a sunken pit, casting amber light over the rough-hewn walls. Thick pelts lined the floor, old and worn in patches, the fur matted where someone had walked the same path many times.
“Your mother was here, wasn’t she?” I asked. It was the only explanation. Skaros certainly couldn’t have tended to his den while he’d been in his plant form.
Skaros’s chest rumbled. “She always knew me best. She trusted me, even when no one else did.” Still holding me, he took a deep breath, his wings half-furled against his back. “No one but you, that is.”
I lifted my head from his mane and looked at his face. Reaching up, I rested my hand against his jaw. The golden fur was coarse and warm under my fingers. “I trusted you before I even knew who you were.”
Skaros leaned into my touch. A low purr started deep in his chest, rumbling pleasantly against my own. “You knew I was your mate. Just like I did.”
He stopped at the edge of the pelts and set me down.
My feet found the thick fur. His hands moved to the ruined dress, clawed and careful, finding the seams. The fabric was stained with dirt and temple dust and the memory of locked doors.
He pulled it over my head and let it drop.
The air was warm against my bare skin. I let him look, and reveled in it.
For days, he’d been nothing but a whisper in my mind and a smooth vine in the dark. I’d learned to love a ghost who could only touch me as stems and leaves, as something green and patient that wound through my sickness without ever demanding anything in return.
Now I was standing in firelight, and the creature before me had claws that could tear stone. His wings could carry me over the city walls, and his tail could kill with a single strike. He was staring at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
I looked down at my hands. I was. “I’m not cold.”
“I know.” His voice was rough, barely above a growl. “I can feel it. You’re not afraid of me, but you’re afraid of something.”
“I’m afraid I’ll wake up. That this is another fever dream, and I’ll open my eyes on the temple floor, alone. Without you.”
He didn’t move. His eyes darkened, his pupils dilating, the amber vanishing almost entirely. His gaze traced my ribs, my arms, every patch of skin that had once been claimed by the Sickness. Then he looked down to my hips, my thighs.
He had been inside me before. He had filled me as vines, smooth and patient, while I was too feverish to know what I was asking for.
He had taken my mouth, my folds, my core.
But that had been dark and hidden, a forbidden secret we’d struggled for because we’d had nothing else.
Having him look at me now, with real eyes, made my blood run hot.
I stepped toward him. I wanted to see him, too. No, I wanted to touch him.
I raised my hands and pressed them flat against his chest. His skin burned beneath the tawny fur, hotter than the fire pit, hotter than fever. I trailed my fingers upward, mapping the hard muscle of his shoulders, brushing through the coarse strands of his mane.
My gaze drifted past his chest. Resting on the furs behind him, swaying with a slow, restless rhythm, was his tail.
It was long and thickly segmented, leonine at the base where it met his spine, before giving way to something harder, more armored.
The scales were dark gold, almost bronze, each ridge catching the firelight.
It ended in a wickedly curved barb. A single drop of venom gathered at the tip, viscous and gleaming.
It was a weapon. The part of him that made him a nightmare to the rest of the world.
I walked around him, keeping one hand on his flank. His fur gave way to shorter, denser hair along his ribs, then to the scaled hide where his tail began. I reached for it.
Skaros stiffened. He let out a sharp hiss, shifting his weight to pull the barb away.
“Don’t,” he warned. “The venom—”
“Won’t hurt me.” I cut him off. I believed in him more than I did in anything in this world.
“I’ve killed with that tail. I’ve watched men convulse and die before they hit the ground.”
I didn’t pull back. I knelt behind him, catching the thickest part of the tail where the scales were still warm from his body heat.
Smooth and firm, they had a completely different texture from the fur on his chest. They felt almost like the vines had been, alive and responsive.
I ran my palms over the segmented ridges, stroking them with the same care he’d shown me from the first moment we’d met.
The tail twitched. The drop at the barb swelled, beaded, and fell. It struck the pelt near my knee. The fur hissed and smoked, turning black at the edges.
I didn’t flinch. I traced my fingers higher, closer to the barb.
“I love you,” I whispered, resting my cheek against his fur. “In the dirt. In the vines. And like this. I’m not afraid of any part of you.”
The venom dropped again. This time it landed on my bare thigh.
It didn’t burn. It spread like heat, like the first sip of strong wine, like sunlight through closed eyelids. My breath caught. The warmth pooled between my legs, sudden and shocking, a potent arousal that had nothing to do with thought or choice.
Skaros shuddered. I felt his tail go rigid under my hands. “Ianthe,” he breathed. “What—”
“We exchanged so much,” I said, my voice unsteady. “When you were healing me. You were in my blood. I was in yours.” I stroked the scales once more, and another bead formed and fell. “Your body knows me, just like mine knows you.”
The tight restraint keeping him still finally snapped.
Skaros turned, moving faster than my eyes could track. His large hands caught me by the waist, claws pricking but not breaking skin. Lifting me off my feet effortlessly, he carried me backward. He brought us down together onto the deepest pile of pelts near the fire pit, pinning me to the floor.
His heavily furred body covered mine. He braced his weight on his forearms, trapping me beneath his chest so he wouldn’t crush me. The golden curtain of his mane fell around us, blocking out the rest of the room, creating a world of our own.
“Mine,” he growled.
“Yours,” I answered, opening my legs to cradle his weight.
Skaros lowered his head and nuzzled my skin, his breath hot against my neck. He bit lightly at the side of my throat. His tongue dragged over the same spot, rough, but it soothed what his teeth had woken.
But he was nowhere near done with me. He moved lower, his mane brushing over my chest as he closed his mouth around my breast. He carefully held the aching peak between his teeth, his tongue lashing over my nipple with each harsh stroke.
It was too much. It was exactly enough. I arched beneath him, my hands tangling deep in his mane, pulling him closer. The temple’s stone floors were gone. The sickness’s insidious rot was gone. All of it was burned away by his mouth.
Skaros shifted his weight. He moved down my body, his hands gripping my hips to hold me still. He nudged my knees wider apart with his broad shoulders and buried his face between my thighs.
The first rough stroke of his tongue ripped a gasp from my throat.
He devoured me, the heat and pressure of his mouth relentless.
His tongue laved over my wet folds, again and again.
Each pass scraped against the sensitive flesh with that coarse, ridged surface.
I thrashed on the dark furs, my heels digging into the floor, my nails scoring his shoulders.
He gripped my hips as if I might escape, making sounds against my flesh like he was tasting something he’d been denied for years.
He didn’t stop until my thighs were shaking, until I was panting, until I was so close to the edge that one more breath would send me over. Then he pulled away.
He crawled back up my body, settling his weight between my spread legs. His amber eyes burned in the dim light of the fire pit. He looked down at me, completely feral, driven entirely by his need to mate. The blunt, heavy head of his shaft pressed against my slick entrance.
It felt different from the smooth vines I remembered. The skin was incredibly hot, and as he shifted, I felt the distinct texture running along its length. Tiny, firm barbs, angled backward like the barb on his tail.
He pushed forward and buried himself inside my welcoming body. His shaft stretched me to the breaking point. As he drove deep, the firm ridges caught and dragged against my slick inner walls.
It was raw, physical ownership. The scrape of his barbs staked a brutal, undeniable claim on my body, igniting a wild heat that death energy never could.
“Mine,” he snarled, hiding his face in my neck.
Skaros set a hard, punishing pace. The thud of his body against mine echoed in the den. I wrapped my legs tightly around his waist and took every deep thrust. He was relentless, and I was unraveling, the coil in my belly pulled so tight my vision blurred.
“Skaros,” I sobbed aloud, my voice shattering. “Please—”
He answered with a deep, vibrating roar against my collarbone. He slid his hands beneath me, tilting me higher, angling me to take him deeper. He drove inward and held me there, his weight crushing me perfectly into the furs, his hips flush against mine.
Instinctively, I tilted my head, offering myself to my mate. All bride markets had their own practices, and all monsters their own ways to claim. But somehow, I knew this was what Skaros wanted.
Skaros sank his teeth into my skin and bit down hard. The blood welled up, hot and immediate, the pain bright and sudden. But it was exactly what I’d needed, what I’d hoped for. It anchored me to the earth just as the orgasm ripped through my body.
I screamed, pleasure erupting through me in suffocating waves. My muscles clamped down hard around his thick length, wringing every drop of sensation from the feel of his body inside mine.
At the exact moment my release peaked, a sudden, searing heat flared on the back of my right hand.
The magic of Asphodelia surged through the den, vicious but soothing.
It recognized the choice I’d made in the infirmary and understood the words I’d spoken on the city’s dimly lit streets.
It acknowledged the beast who had answered both.
Skaros, the silent guardian who’d helped me when no one else could, the manticore who’d carved a roaring path through an avenue of Weaveguards.
The heat pulsed in time with my racing heart, sealing the bond deep into my very soul. A glowing mark manifested on my hand, its graceful amber lines mimicking Skaros’s scorpion tail.
The place where his teeth had broken skin began to burn too.
The bond that had formed between us became infinitely more powerful.
I felt him in my mind, not as a voice I could choose to hear, but as a presence that had settled into my skull.
His fear, his relief, his desperate, aching love, all of it poured into me at once, too much, overwhelming.
“Skaros.”
I didn’t say it aloud. I couldn’t. But I felt him hear it, the way he had heard me when he was only vines and I was dying.
“Ianthe.” His voice in my mind was raw, barely human, a growl shaped into meaning. “I can feel you. Your heartbeat, your scent, your desire. Even where I’m not touching you. Especially there. I can’t stop feeling you.”
“Then don’t,” I sent back, and I didn’t know if I was comforting him or begging him.
Skaros groaned against my neck. His massive frame shuddered. He drove his hips forward one last desperate time and poured his own release deep into my core.
He held me tight against his chest as the tremors slowly faded from our limbs. His breathing was harsh and ragged, stirring the golden strands of his mane where they fell across my face. He didn’t pull out of me. He simply let his heavy weight settle over my body, burying his face in my hair.
I let my head fall to the side, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath.
I lifted my right hand. The skin across the back of my knuckles was glowing. The intricate mark was the undeniable proof of what we had done. I wasn’t a dying woman anymore, and he wasn’t a scattered ghost haunting the dirt.
I dropped my hand to his back, burying my fingers in his thick tawny fur.
Skaros eased back just enough to look down at me. He pressed a soft, lingering kiss to my shoulder, his rough tongue licking the blood away from the bite wound. With Asphodelia’s magic at work, it would likely soon disappear. But the mark on my hand would stay forever.
The den was quiet. The fire pit cast long, shifting shadows against the basalt walls. For the first time since the thorns had taken root in my blood, I closed my eyes without bracing for the pain, perfectly safe in the arms of the monster who had claimed me.