CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I didn’t bother asking questions the next time; their sins were beyond explanation. Beyond atonement or forgiveness. My hand didn’t shake when I lashed out.
My feet strike the ground. I only manage a couple steps before I slam my shoulder into the frostbitten earth. I roll and hit my feet running. I already know where he is.
I sprint through the dull corridors, ignoring the questioning looks on every face I pass.
For once, I’m grateful for the monochromatic aesthetics that don’t hinder my flight toward the music room.
I careen around a corner, and it isn’t his music that reaches my ears but his roars.
The unmistakable sound of wood striking stone splinters through my skull and I run faster.
I smash through the door without breaking stride. He whips toward me and I tense, every feral shred of me opening an eye in response to him.
He’s in Stone, and from his blown pupils he’s lost in it. He bares his fangs, his face twisting with a snarl. I take in his heaving chest. His clenched fists and extended wings. A crack rends my stone heart as he pins me with hostile eyes it doesn’t recognize.
“This is because of me,” I whisper. “Because of what I said. Because I left.”
He laughs. The sound is hollow. It clangs through my skull, so different from the richness in my memory of it. “This is because this is what I am. A beast. And a selfish fuck to go with it, trying to steal your heart when mine will be good as ash in a matter of months.”
I take a step toward him. “I just got the strangest lesson of my life, and I was wrong. About all of it.” I dredge up the words that had flooded my mind before I’d shifted and leapt off that cliff.
“I loved my family. Losing them broke me. But I would never trade the time I had with them to be rid of the pain. I would rather have one day—just one fucking day, Griffon—of knowing what it is like to love you than to never know. And just an hour—a minute—of being yours will be worth every single second of agony that comes after.”
A shudder wracks his frame and he doubles over.
He roars again. The broken cry bounces around the room and burrows into my mind in a way I will never be rid of.
He sweeps a piece of a chair off the floor and launches it.
It hurtles at my face, and I duck just as it flies over my head and smashes into the wall behind me.
His expression shatters. “Go,” he pleads. “Before I hurt you.”
“No.” My voice is steady. My hands stop trembling. “I’m not leaving again.”
“Lydia.” His voice breaks and he drops to his knees.
“Please. I’m begging you.” Another shudder runs the length of his frame and he digs his hands into his hair, his talons gouging into his scalp.
“Hurting you isn’t something I’d survive.
” His wings bow around his slumped shoulders, their tips draped over the floor.
So much like the wary and broken flags on that bloody battlefield the phoenix had shown me. So tired of the fighting.
Well, tough shit.
“You aren’t giving up now, godsdamnit.” I surge toward him and fall into his lap. I cling to him, my lips imparting every word and shredded feeling I can’t.
A low moan rumbles through his chest as he crushes me against his body.
He turns us, and I tuck my wing before he cages me against the floor.
A wisp of smoke jerks my arms up and pins my wrists above my head as his lips devour mine.
I growl at the restraint and battle the wildfire that fights to burn me free.
His body stiffens above me, the magic on my wrists flexing with enough force to crush my bones in Flesh. His fangs sink into my lip and I gasp at the sharp bite of pain, but he shifts. His magic dissolves into a dusting of glittering black.
I fall into Flesh a heartbeat after him, Lakesh and the phoenix at my wrist obsolete in this moment. He is my anchor.
My emotions roared back, and I struggled to breathe under the suffocating weight of them. They warred on a battlefield of their own, hope sparring with despair, fear fighting to smother the glimmer of happiness that surged through me as I stared up into his raw expression.
I fisted my hands in his shirt. “I panicked,” I rushed out. “I just panicked. I didn’t expect to care about you. I thought I would come here to vindicate myself and kill you. But now the idea…” I shook my head.
His eyes roved the planes of my face and neck as he fought to drag himself from the turmoil of Stone.
“I’m yours,” I breathed. “Only yours.”
His mouth fell to mine again, but he jerked back a heartbeat later and hissed. He ran his finger over my bloodied lip. “I hurt you.”
I lifted my head to his hand and sucked on his finger, rolling my tongue over the tip. His eyes fluttered shut. “It’s already sealed,” I said breathlessly. “Now fuck me, Soot, before I lose my damned mind with you.”
A primal, deep-throated moan rolled out of him.
It ignited me, wetness soaking my thighs beneath the shred of cloth that still clung to me.
A thread of his smoke whipped out and wedged a chair that had survived his wrath under the doorknob.
An inferno blazed in his eyes as he fell on me.
This kiss was unyielding and sure. A claiming.
A promise. I clung to it with every shred I had left.
I arched my back and pressed my breasts against his chest, my navel into his rock-hard abs, my hips into his erection. I whimpered when the tightly drawn fabric around my thighs kept me from feeling him. I tore at the knot.
Griffon pulled back, his hand moving to shove mine aside. He paused, his greedy eyes raking over the rags wrapped around me. “What is this?”
“I burned it,” I gasped. “I lost my damned mind after I ran and burned it off on accident. I’m so sorry.” I fumbled the tie at my breasts. “Get it off,” I demanded.
He gave the effort less than a second before hungry fingers of smoke seized the bands around my chest and hips and ripped the fabric in half.
My breasts sprang free, the chilly air nipping at my peaked nipples.
I clawed at his shirt and ripped it over his head before attacking the buttons on his pants.
His smoke snaked around my wrists and tugged them up over my head again, the tendrils playing against my sensitive skin. I panted as I stared at him, his lips swollen from my kisses, his hair a ruffled disaster. “Pants,” I demanded, writhing against the floor beneath him.
But he pushed himself back on his heels and took his time perusing my body, his heavy gaze pausing on my breasts and between my thighs. I pulled my knees up and let them fall open. An invitation. A demand.
“Lydia,” he purred.
I was coiled like a spring, my body throbbing as he hovered inches away from me.
“What do you like?” His voice was husky and I couldn’t help the mewl that escaped my lips.
“If it is you doing it? Anything,” I gasped.
He moaned, his eyes feasting on me like he couldn’t decide which part to devour first. His deft fingers flew through the buttons on his pants, and he tore them off before settling between my thighs.
My breath hitched as his rock-hard length pressed into me, my hips jerking at the jolt of pleasure that shot through me.
His fingers slipped between us and through the veritable puddle between my thighs. His groan drowned out my heavy sigh but did nothing to mask the shudder that gripped me as he leveled his head with my entrance.
“Hands,” I gasped, tugging against his magic. “I want to feel all of you.”
The bonds vanished and I pulled him down as he drove into me, my cry ringing through the room in a note of pure ecstasy no instrument could ever hope to capture. I clung to his neck as he plunged into me, again and again, my breaths hot and quick against his sweat-slicked skin.
I slid my tongue across the deliciously defined line of his jaw before finding his lips again.
I moaned into his mouth as his tongue and cock thrust into me with the kind of wild abandon that torched every last shred of control I had.
This was sex like I’d never had it. Sex because every piece of me was feral for this male to be on me and in me, not for the escape, but because I wanted him.
My fingers dug into the muscles along his shoulders and the swell of his biceps, every inch of him distractingly taut from holding himself above me. I let my head slip back to the stone as I basked in the feel of him, the sounds of our heavy breathing and moans.
He thrust into me hard and went rigid, his head falling into the crook of my neck. I sucked in a wild breath and my eyes popped open. He burrowed his face deeper.
“No don’t stop,” I panted. “Why did you stop?”
His cheek was scorching hot against my skin. “Because I haven’t done this in a long time.” His words were muffled by how hard he had his face shoved into my neck.
He pulled out of me and I clung to him as he tucked me to his chest and stood in one smooth motion, my protest dying in my throat as he set me on the piano.
My breaths were ragged as he knelt and hooked my legs over his shoulders.
The sight of him on his knees for me drove me absolutely wild.
He grasped my hips and slid my ass to the piano’s edge.
He ran his tongue the hot, slick length of me and my head fell back, a gasp flitting off my parted lips.
“I knew there was something perfect about this piano,” he breathed, his breath and lips brushing against me.
I shivered and fell back on my elbows, watching as he drew my clit into his mouth and sucked.
He slipped two fingers inside me and hooked back against that sensitive wall and I sank onto my back, nearly toppling off that deliciously honed edge that he spurred me toward.
His tongue flicked and lavished and worked me into a frenzy, my breaths gasps, my hands white-knuckled on the edges of the piano.
I sucked in a wild breath, one foot off that cliff I was desperate to hurtle off when he drew back, his hot breath fanning over my throbbing core. “Stop…fucking…stopping,” I said, each word a ragged pant.
His chuckle was the sweetest song as he swept me against his chest again, his lips glossy with my arousal in the faint light drifting through the windows. I hooked my ankles around his hips as he pinned my back against a wall.
“As you command.” His voice was rough, his breath hot and hitching in my ear, as he thrust into me and fucked me.
His pace was relentless and I dug my fingers into his shoulders as that delicious tension built back to a precipice that I plunged off, hard and fast and without mercy.
I clung to him as I cried out, my hands fisting in his hair. He plummeted after me, his jerking hips wringing every last shred of pleasure from my release. His palms flattened against the wall above me, his face burying in my neck again.
“Fucking fate,” he breathed into my shoulder. “I want to devour you for all eternity and cease to exist at the same time.”
“Wh—” I started, but the meaning of his words struck my sex-addled brain like a blow. “Griffon,” I panted. “Look at me.”
He nuzzled deeper, but I hooked my finger under his chin and forced his face up. His gaze found the wall before sliding to mine. My heart broke at the shame that drenched those lovely brown eyes.
“Do I look anything but completely, utterly, sinfully satisfied?” My eyes were hooded, my hair felt a damned mess, and I couldn’t help that my lips kept falling open with the quick gasps that still raced up my throat. I knew I looked as thoroughly fucked as I felt.
I reached up and wrapped my fingers around his wrist. My eyes never left his as I slid his hand down the wall and over my shoulder until it rested on my galloping heart.
I trailed his fingers over my still-peaked nipples, my body flexing at the teasing brush of his callouses.
His breaths were as ragged as mine as I dragged his hand lower, over my stomach and between my thighs.
His fingers slipped through the wetness that slicked my clit, his hilt and abdomen.
I brought his hand to my mouth and slowly ran my tongue up one of his fingers before sucking my arousal off it.
His eyes fluttered shut. “That could happen a thousand times, and it would be the thousand best orgasms I’ve ever had.
” I moved on to his next finger. “And I will not allow you to feel shame.” A smile spread over my face.
“That first time I saw you in Flesh, back at Dray’s, I remember thinking you looking like the living embodiment of Arawn’s statue in Vircann.
” I leaned into him and whispered, “Don’t tell him I said so, but I bet you do it better. ”
A tight breath left him and that shame slowly faded from his eyes. He withdrew, the pleasant fuzziness in my head withering a little at his absence, and set me on my feet. His hands hovered near my elbows.
I swatted at them. “I can stand. Barely,” I muttered.
His smirk about did me in as he gathered his clothes off the floor. He dragged his trousers back over his exquisite body, then carried his shirt over to me. I lifted my arms and his heavy gaze tracked my breasts as they rose up my chest.
“This goes against every instinct in me.” He sighed, then lowered the shirt over my head.
I buried my nose into the neckline, hiking it up around my thighs, and drowned myself in his cedar and cinnamon scent. The heady aroma thickened the fuzzy cloud in my mind, and I was suddenly so tired. His eyes were agonizingly soft as he watched me breathe in his scent.
He scooped me up and cradled me against his chest, his bare skin warm under my knees and back. A smoky whip tossed the chair aside and opened the door. I wrapped my arms around his neck and nestled my face into the crook of his shoulder.
“Why do you always smell like cinnamon?”
I felt his smile against the top of my head. “It’s my soap. My mother used to make this apple cinnamon pie that filled the kitchens with the most incredible smell. It…reminds me of a time that was happier. Easier.”
“I like it,” I mumbled. “It makes me want to lick you all over.” To that point I trailed my tongue over his neck, his skin salty with sweat and sweetened with just a hint of that cinnamon. His answering growl rumbled through my chest.
It wasn’t my bed he gently, carefully laid me in a few minutes later. His silky black sheets and fluffy pillows were drenched with that scent, and I burrowed into them. I tossed a heavy finger in the general direction of his legs.
“Off.” I wiggled out of the shirt and tossed it on the ground beside the bed.
I watched with half-shuttered eyes as he obeyed and crawled into the bed beside me. He tugged me against his chest, his body pleasantly warm and heart a steady rhythm against my back.
“Good night, my Little Ember.”
“It was the best night, Soot,” I grumbled. My eyes drifted shut, and oblivion claimed me.