17. The Library That Isn’t A Library #2
She was hot and tight and slick from what his mouth and his hand had already done to her, and the slide of him going in made her arch all the way off the table.
Her teeth set in the muscle of his shoulder.
His eyes closed because the look on her face was going to undo him before he was ready to be undone.
He paused at the hilt.
“Eli,” she said.
“Give me a second.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Just one second, beautiful, or I’m going to embarrass myself.”
She closed her eyes. She let him have it.
He looked at her in the firelight. The dark wave of her hair against the wood grain of the table. Her lips slightly parted. Her hand at the side of his neck. The bruise at her collarbone where his brother had been. The print of his own mark on the inside of her thigh.
He kissed her once, open-mouthed and slow. She tasted like everything he wanted his life to be made of.
Then he moved.
***
He moved in her slowly, controlled in a way that felt far more dangerous than rushing would have. He kept his eyes on her face. He kept his hand at the pulse of her neck. He moved his mouth to her ear, where his voice could reach her without having to be loud.
“Mine,” he said.
“Yes.” She screamed. “Yes.”
She came. It rolled through the bond in a slow rolling swell, and instantly the onyx and gold threads awakened.
She came with her teeth at his collarbone and her nails opening skin on his back.
He kept moving through it because it may have been the third one he’d promised her, but he wasn’t done yet.
He shifted the angle of his hips. He found the place she wanted him to find. She started building again before the first wave had finished rolling, and her hand came up to fist in his hair, and she was making noise with every stroke.
He moved faster.
His precision shattered. He let it. His hips pumped into her, hard and deep.
She was tight and soaking wet around him, and the sounds of them fucking filled the library between the breaths.
Her heels dug into the small of his back and pulled him deeper.
The table that wasn’t a table creaked under both of them, disrupting the peace of Eli’s library that wasn’t a library.
He kept his mouth at that tender spot just below her ear. He kept his voice low and soft.
“I want to bite you here.” He said it without slowing. “I want to give you my venom so badly my teeth ache.”
She arched off the table.
“I am not going to.”
“Eli.”
“Not today, but perhaps soon. When that day comes, beautiful, you will not have to ask me twice.”
She turned her head into his throat.
“Say it again.”
Eli’s mouth brushed hers once before he answered.
“I will not bite you tonight.”
“Not that part.”
His hand tightened slightly at the back of her neck.
“I’ll bite you on the day you ask me to.”
Serena’s breath caught.
“Promise?” she whispered.
“You have my word.”
The third time broke her.
She came hard against him with his name in her mouth and her hand tangled in his hair at the nape of his neck. Her teeth caught his shoulder through the open collar of his shirt while the silver thread flared hot between them.
Eli followed half a breath later with his forehead pressed against her throat and one arm locked tight around her waist, as if instinct had taken over somewhere in the middle of it.
Neither of them let go afterward.
Serena’s body still trembled under him while the library sat quiet around them in its dim yellow light.
Eli kept his face buried against her neck, breathing hard once against her skin before he finally laughed softly under his breath.
Not because anything about this was funny.
Because he was losing this fight completely.
***
When he pulled himself up on his elbows to look at her, she was watching him through a heavy-lidded warmth he hadn’t seen on her face since the porch in Magnolia Creek the morning after she’d moved into the garage apartment.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Hmmm.”
He moved down her body without hurry. He stopped at the inside of her left thigh. He pressed his mouth flat against the delicate skin there. He spoke the name of the mark into her skin in a language that wasn’t English.
The shadow-trail sigil came up under her skin in a slow dark seam Eli could feel through their silver-threaded bond. It settled. It stayed.
He kissed it once.
“This is not a claim,” he said.
She had her hand on the back of his head.
“It’s a way home. He can’t see it. My brothers and I can. If he moves you, we’ll know. When he tries to draw a binding circle, this will warn you before he closes it. When you walk out of his prison, beautiful, this is the line that one of us will follow to you.”
She was crying without making a sound about it.
“Eli.”
“Yes, beautiful.”
“I’m going to walk out.”
“I know you are.”
“Tell Tara I’m coming home. Tell Callum and Jasper that you guys have been my anchor, the only reason I haven’t lost my mind in here.”
“I will.”
She pressed her hand briefly to his face.
The architecture began to fold.
***
Eli came back to his body in the basement archive with sweat through his shirt and the silver thread still wrapped in shadow and singing.
The candles in the room had burned down a quarter inch each. The chalk circle of the bayou stabilizer was scuffed at the outer ring where his palm had been when the trail-sigil completed. The mark at the center of the workbench wasn’t wet anymore. It had set.
He laid his palms flat on either side of it. He breathed once, slow.
The tremor in his off-hand was quiet for the first time since the barn at the 37-mile property.
The spell work had cost him, but the price was not the same.
The bond was thinner than it had been; it would recover.
His glasses were fogged at the bottom. The muscles in his neck and shoulders had a deep ache that was going to stay there for a few days.
But the cost was a clean one, and the trail-sigil he had laid into the inside of Serena’s thigh was warm under whatever she was lying under in her prison, and the bond was stable.
He stood. His knees held. He walked up the basement stairs.
He slid the bolt back at the top of the stairs and went to the kitchen.
***
Tara was at the table.
She had a mug of tea in front of her. The kitchen was quiet around her.
Her hair was loose, and her shirt was inside out, and she was wearing one of Dex’s flannels over the inside-out shirt.
She looked up at Eli when he came through the basement door.
She didn’t say anything about the sweat through his shirt or the fog on his glasses.
“It’s done,” he said.
He sat down across from her. She slid a second mug of tea across without asking if he wanted tea. He drank it. His hand on the mug was steady.
The kitchen held them both inside the gray dawn.
He didn’t say anything else. She didn’t either.
The bond kept humming, and somewhere south and sixty miles down the gulf road, a woman in a cypress room of an old plantation outbuilding had a sigil at the inside of her thigh that was warm and waiting and pointing the way home, and Eli Voss laid his palm flat to the cypress of his mother’s kitchen table and let himself rest.