Chapter Thirteen #3
“You will both burn.”
Too late.
Too late.
I was alight.
Burning.
“You are destined to destroy each other.”
With a moan, I broke our kiss and sat upright.
Henri didn’t let me get far.
Chasing me, catching me, he wrapped his vicious arms around me and did something I never expected.
He hugged me.
Violently, wickedly.
He crushed me with pain and possession and pleasure.
Binding me to him, he found my lips again, and when he kissed me...the world ended.
He licked me. Fucked me. Suffocated me.
He squeezed me to him as if intent on breaking all my ribs with his depraved embrace.
His arms screamed danger. His thrusts delivered bliss. His kiss utterly destroyed me.
I trembled as he invaded my body with dominance and delirium.
And...something happened.
My mind went achingly quiet. All premonitions and warnings blanked out.
Nothing else mattered but us.
Together.
As one.
That strange kind of meditative quality from our last kiss cloaked my mind all over again. Like falling stars. Like breaking dawn. Like the best kind of sleep and dream and fantasy.
I descended into it.
I relaxed as everything became gossamer and gauzy while somehow becoming intensely carnal. Exquisite eroticism feathered out from where we were joined, seeping into my veins, and flowing through my bloodstream like pure light.
Each thrust echoed with miniature earthquakes in my bones.
Aftershocks rippled again and again in my heart.
The longer he plunged inside me, the deeper the sensations became.
I lost track of where I ended, and he started. Our breathing synced, panting and wild directly into each other’s lungs.
In a rush of tingling, shimmering pleasure, my physical form dropped away, and I swore our souls weaved together.
I felt him.
All of him.
The dark spots of his childhood. The black shadows of his present. Our energies coiled and knotted, binding us together as our pace increased and his hug tightened, and I spiralled up and up and touched that blinding supernova where all rapture manifested.
I cried out as he took me so hard, so completely.
I sucked on his bottom lip as I begged him to come.
But...as wonderous and as euphoric as this moment was...I couldn’t trip over that final edge. A barrier prevented me. The final hurdle before flying free.
“Come,” he growled. “I can’t last much longer.”
God, yes please.
I wanted to.
So, so badly.
“I-I can’t...”
Was it the pain my body suffered? The drugs in my system? The strange tantric magic I’d somehow stumbled into for the second time?
All three of those things ought to push me screaming into heaven.
Yet...
Not enough.
Not enough!
I impaled myself on him.
He grunted as he thickened inside me.
“More,” I moaned. “I need more.”
“Don’t tell me that.” He kissed me like a feral beast, teeth clacking, tongues knotting. “You should stop me. Fight me off...don’t fucking encourage me.”
He yanked me harder against his chest and sank his teeth into the side of my neck.
Sharp. Monstrous.
I almost came.
Almost.
He licked away the sting, stopping me from soaring into the stars.
I wanted his teeth. Needed those pinpricks of pain.
“Again. Bite me again.”
“What?” His pace stuttered.
“Hurt me.”
His eyes flashed in the darkness, full of silver fury. “No.”
Temper made me sharp. “You made me this way, and now you’re denying me?”
He couldn’t reply.
“Do it.” Leaning forward, I pressed my throat to his mouth. “Bite me. Mark me.”
He moaned as if I’d torn out yet another vital piece of him.
The hot puff of his breath. The promise of his teeth.
“Please...” I arched again, offering myself up, begging him to take the bait.
His heart pounded against mine. A drumbeat full of tribal war.
“You’ve killed me twice tonight,” he breathed just before he pounced.
“You are destined to destroy each other.”
I gasped as his teeth sank into my throat.
The pressure of his bite.
The puncture of his incisors.
I screamed.
Not in pain.
But in ecstasy.
His hips pistoned up, bouncing me on his lap as he hugged me and fucked me, bit me and loved me.
I tumbled into that blinding light.
My body detonated with a million blazing shards. Rippling with ecstatic waves, I became one with life and loss and love.
Henri roared beneath me.
His orgasm spurted in thick, body-wracking jerks.
I lost track of time as we transcended that bed, that room, that fortress, and for a few microseconds of freedom, we weren’t blood and bone but air and energy instead.
And then, it was over.
And the crash back to earth hurt worse than anything.
Every injury from today welcomed me back. Every awful bump and bruise.
“This match will not last.”
Wincing, I sank into Henri’s tight embrace.
I didn’t care he almost suffocated me.
I didn’t care I was trapped on his lap and his body still speared inside mine.
It was just us.
Clinging to each other in the dark.
“You will both burn.”
I’d been injected with a contraception, collared, cuffed, and imprisoned. I’d been hunted, shot, abused, and tormented, and somewhere along the way, I’d become a different creature.
I still didn’t know who that creature was.
I didn’t know how I felt about needing a dash of pain to erupt my pleasure.
But what I did know was...I’d been warned about this.
Adversity had found me, and if I believed in fate and star-crossed destiny, then Henri wasn’t just a man who’d targeted me and made my life a living hell...he’d been drawn to me.
Just like I’d been drawn to him.
Because we were the same.
We were one.
And this was fate in all its agonising glory.
Maybe I’d feel different in the morning.
Perhaps I’d laugh at myself for entertaining such crazy things like twin flames but...as his body twitched in mine, and he sucked in a haggard inhale, another bubble of hope expanded.
If our destiny was to destroy each other, what if I made a different choice? A choice to save him instead?
Maybe that was what the Vedic astrologer had meant.
That ending up with him wasn’t a choice, but how I reacted to him was?
What if I stepped into his nightmares and maybe, just maybe...figured out how to drag him back into the light?
Ever so slowly, I shifted off my knees, disengaged, then sat back on his lap and wrapped my legs around him. My feet burrowed beneath his stacked pillows, and I hugged him.
I clung to him like a koala all while fresh pain waked through me.
He fell on me, wrapping me in the biggest bear hug of my life.
The way he held too tight.
The way his biceps bunched, and his face burrowed into my hair.
It hinted this might be his first true embrace.
A full body enveloping.
And if that was true, I was sad as well as grateful.
I grew drowsy.
A drugged kind of sluggishness that made my tongue far too free.
Keeping my wits just enough to be wary of the cameras, I pressed my lips to his ear. “If the man who told me to play along with him is still in there, then...play with me, Hen.”
His thighs stiffened to rock beneath me.
He sucked in a shallow breath.
I closed my eyes and poured my plea into his soul, all in order to save mine. “Play along with me, okay? You’re still in there. I know you are. You’re still good. We don’t have to destroy each other.” I kissed his ear as my eyes prickled with tears. “Get us out, Hen. Please...”
Sudden light-headedness tangled my tongue.
A rush of panic for asking such things.
And then nothing but deep, dreamless sleep.