Chapter 7 #2
Harder. The same cheek. His blood smeared across my palm from where I'd touched his chest — dark and warm, and the sensation of his blood on my skin sent something savage through me that I didn't recognize and didn't want to name.
He moved before the sound finished echoing.
His hand caught my wrist. His body drove mine into the wall — stone cold against my back, him burning against my front. His mouth found my throat and his teeth sank in, not gently, not carefully, and the sound that tore out of me wasn't something a princess should be capable of making.
"I warned you," he said against my skin.
I grabbed his bleeding arm. He hissed — pain, shock — but I didn't let go. I looked at the wound. At the blood that wasn't red, that was the proof of everything the Light Court would execute him for.
I pressed my thumb into the cut.
His whole body jerked. A sound came out of him — guttural and wrecked — and it went straight through my stomach and settled between my legs. His blood welled around my thumb, warm and dark, and I dragged my finger through it slowly, tracing the wound from wrist to elbow.
"Ada." My name scraped raw. "What are you doing?"
"Touching you." I brought my bloodied hand up between us. His blood on my fingers — black-red, shimmering faintly with shadow. "Does it disgust you? That I'm not afraid of it?"
He stared at my stained fingers. The mask was crumbling. Layer after layer stripped away until what was left was just him — starving and terrified and wanting so badly it was eating him from the inside.
He caught my hand. Brought my bloodied fingers to his mouth. His lips parted against my stained skin, his tongue tracing the line of his own blood across my fingertips. Hot. Slow. His eyes locked on mine the entire time, watching my face as he tasted his own darkness off my skin.
My legs nearly gave out and the blood drummed in my ears. A whimper escaped me — thin, desperate — and I watched something ignite behind his eyes. The hunger shifted from anguished to predatory.
His bleeding hand slid down my body. Over the fabric of my nightgown, leaving a trail of dark smears across white cotton. My ribs. My hip. My thigh. He gathered the fabric in his fist and pulled it upward. Cold air hit my bare legs and I gasped against his mouth.
"Two weeks." His forehead against mine, breath ragged.
"Two fucking weeks watching you smile at him.
Watching him touch you. Watching you let him kiss you while I —" His hand found the inside of my thigh.
Blood-warm fingers against bare skin, sliding upward and in that moment I stopped breathing, waiting, his fingers were barely inches away–burning.
"While I destroyed training halls and cut myself open to see if my blood was still human. While I can’t close my eyes without seeing your face. "
Hakan slid his fingers over my clit, slick with his own blood, dark and warm, and I cried out so loudly his other hand clamped over my mouth. He was panting heavily, staring at me as he parted me and slid one inside me.
"Quiet, starlight." His mouth was at my ear, his voice wrecked and vicious at once. "Unless you want every guard in the Academy to find the Light God's daughter in a forbidden tower with a shadow-blood's hand between her legs."
I bit his palm. He groaned — broken, guttural — and his fingers moved.
There was nothing gentle about it, nothing like courtship.
This was possession. His bloodied fingers first circled my clit, with excessive slowness, before he eased them inside me.
I bit harder into his hand, trying to suppress my moans as the savage heat laced through my core.
Hakan was working me with a control that bordered on cruel, finding every nerve and exploiting it, and the wrongness of it — his shadow blood slick between my thighs, his darkness inside my body, corruption and divinity fused at the most intimate point — made everything sharper. Hotter. More.
I couldn't think. My head fell back against the stone and my hips rolled against his hand and I heard myself making sounds I'd never made — wrecked, guttural, begging sounds that didn't belong to a princess or a god's daughter or anything clean.
"You kissed him." His fingers curled inside me and I sobbed, his thumb continued to insult my clit, it felt so good, sweat gathered on my forehead.
"You stood under those pretty lanterns and you kissed him and I had to watch.
" Hakan started thrusting his fingers in and out of me, his thumb grinding with merciless precision. "Did it feel like this?"
"No." The word ripped out of me as he slowly removed his palm over my mouth. "Nothing — nothing feels like —"
"Like what?" He withdrew his fingers — almost all the way out — and I nearly screamed at the loss. I needed him, I was throbbing for him, ready to beg him to keep touching me. "Say it."
"Like you. Nothing feels like you. Please —"
He drove his fingers back inside me. Harder.
A third finger and the stretch burned and I keened — raw, animal, a sound the shadows swallowed before it could reach the walls.
His mouth was at my throat, teeth and tongue, and his hand was relentless between my legs, and his blood was everywhere — on my thighs, my nightgown, the wall where my hands clawed for purchase.
The climax built like a storm — pressure and heat and the collision of his darkness and my light, the two forces spiraling together.
When it broke, I shattered, and he didn’t stop, instead he picked up the pace as I rode his hand.
My back arched off the wall, light exploded from my skin — golden and violent — and it met his shadows and the tower blazed.
Dark and bright. Black and gold. Not fighting. Fusing.
Then it collapsed, but I felt that burning sensation everywhere. The light died. The shadows retreated. I slid down the wall on legs that couldn't hold me and he caught me, lowered me, his arm around my waist and his hand still between my thighs and both of us shaking.
He pulled his fingers free. Slowly. Watching my face as he did — the way my breath hitched, the way my hips chased his hand. Then he looked at his own fingers — dark with blood and slick with me — and he brought them to his mouth.
He licked them clean.
Slowly. Deliberately. His eyes on mine the entire time, watching me watch him taste his own shadow blood mixed with the wetness of my body. His tongue sliding between his fingers, his lips closing around each one, savoring it — the corruption and the divinity, mingled, inseparable.
I stared at him. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't look away.
"Now tasting you will be embedded in my mind forever," he said.
His voice was quiet. Almost reverent. "And every time I do, I'll know you're still on me.
That I'm still in you. That there isn't a single part of you that's clean of me anymore.
" A pause. His thumb pressed into the wound on his arm, slow and deliberate. "Good. That's how it should be."
We sat on the cold tower floor. Breathing heavily. His blood drying on my skin. His arm around me, shadows settling like a blanket, gentle now.
"Your blood is on me," I whispered.
"I know."
"Inside me."
His breath hitched. He pressed his face into my hair and I felt him tremble — not from cold, not from the shadows. From the weight of what we'd just crossed.
"This changes things between us," he said against my hair.
"I know."
"I can't go back to pretending."
"Then don't."
He pulled away. Looked at me with eyes that were slowly returning to green — something new in them. Not the arrogance, not the cruelty, not the mask. Something quieter. Proof that he was still capable of more than destruction, and that he knew it, and that it terrified him.
He kissed me. Barely there. His bloodied hand cupping my face, leaving dark fingerprints on my jaw.
"Don't tell Sarp," he said.
Quiet. Desperate. He knew what we'd just done in this tower was the most dangerous thing either of us had ever risked.
"I won't."
He nodded. Wrapped his arm. The blood was already slowing — darkness sealing the wound. I fixed my nightgown. Tried to wipe his blood from my thighs. It smeared but wouldn't come off — staining my skin the way he'd stained everything else.
I left the tower first. Took the servant passages back to my chambers. Ran a bath and watched his blood dissolve in the water — dark tendrils spiraling through the warmth like ink, like shadow.
I pressed my hand between my legs where he'd been and felt the ghost of him still there.
Above the Academy, dawn was breaking. Somewhere in the palace, priests were preparing for morning prayers. The court was waking to another golden day.
And I lay in water stained with shadow blood, my body still trembling, knowing that nothing would ever be clean again.
I didn't want it to be.