Chapter 41
LEAH
The words make me quake. Isn’t that what I’ve wanted? Someone who won’t let go, no matter how hard things get? I fist my left hand in Marcus’s t-shirt. He nuzzles along my neck, my jaw, higher, and my traitorous body responds. My head tips. The knife still separates us.
Marcus is standing here, my knife buried in his chest, and still he won’t let go.
Stab him, Leah.
It’s not my slayer instincts, but my heart.
“I should make you go,” I whisper. “I have a containment spell in the living room. Five feet away.” The words crumble as he sucks on my jaw. “I like you too much to hurt you, Marcus. I feel like I have been offered terrible choices. Keep you and kill you, or hurt you and make you go.”
He hums in his throat and nips gently at my earlobe. “Funny, that. I know what I’d choose.” His breath ruffles my hair. He urges me closer with a hand on my waist. The knife sinks in another centimeter. His blood perfumes the air between us, like cool iron. My nostrils flare.
“I like you too, slayer. I could never hurt you.”
I make a noise of distress.
He brushes kisses along my jaw. I tremble and let the knife drop.
He makes a pleased sound in his throat, and I respond with a sob and the frantic press of my mouth to his. It’s awkward at first, until he turns his head and our mouths fit together.
Our other kisses have been raw, needy, heated. This is…tender. I’ve never had a kiss like this. He kisses me while he flashes us upstairs. The world spins and dissolves. It reforms around me, and still my mouth is pressed to his. Still, his tongue is slick against mine.
His lips are plush and firm, and I cup his jaw with both hands and explore his mouth. He runs his rough palms down my sides, until they land on my hips and pull me against him.
He makes ragged sounds as I kiss him. He pulls at our clothes, but I can’t be bothered. My eyes are squeezed shut, and his lovely mouth and the blade-sharp edge of his jaw are the center of my world.
Dimly, I realize that he’s trying to get us naked, and I’m not helping.
“Leah.” He breaks the kiss. I chase his mouth. He laughs against my lips. “Clothes off, slayer.”
“We shouldn’t,” I sigh.
“Why not?” He nudges me back against the bed, mouth on mine. I tumble onto it, and with supernatural speed, he stretches over me.
I explore the planes of his face with my fingertips. Stubble, cool skin, hard bone. A ridge in his narrow nose where he must have broken it. A scar over his upper lip where he was cut. His body is a map of the horrors he’s experienced.
“I won’t be a part of hurting you any further.” I smooth the ridge of his brow with my fingertips. Even his eyebrows are luxurious. “I can’t leave Silver Falls, and you have your vengeance. Imagine binding yourself to me and discovering this isn’t what you want.”
His mouth twists, and I place my fingers over it.
I was shaking with emotion earlier, but now I feel clear. Warm and focused and certain of what I have to do.
“I won’t bond with you, Marcus Antonius. I like you too much for that.”
He nips at my fingers and gently removes my hand before he kisses me again.
“Last time,” I tell him. I mean the words to be cool and casual, but they arc through the air and linger heavily between us.
“Last time,” he rasps before he slides my shirt up and sighs a breath. His expression is wrecked. “Leah. I have to—” He sucks one nipple into his mouth, and I gasp and arch. His mouth is warm and soft and his teeth scrape delicious until one fang—
“Fuck,” I groan.
His hand finds mine and presses me against the bed.
“I know,” he says raggedly. He sucks my nipple hard, urgent, until it aches and I tremble on the bed. I rake my fingers through his hair and scrape my nails against his scalp. He groans his pleasure and kisses down my stomach.
I twist and arch at the rasp of his stubble. “Marcus,” I whine as he reaches my hipbone and nips. He skirts the most important parts, languid, taking his time.
His eyes laugh up at me. “My lovely mate,” he growls. “Look at you.” His fingers slip under the waistband of my underwear and pull them down. His gaze is reverent when I’m bared to him, and my cheeks warm. He looks—starving. “Look at you,” he repeats before he presses my thighs wider.
“Hurry up, vampire.” I arch to meet his mouth, and he grins, a bright flash in the moonlit bedroom.
“Patience, little slayer.” He sets his mouth to my thigh, tongue swiping possessively up the sensitive skin. I am needy and twisted inside, and he is so slow. I tug at his hair. He answers by shoving my legs wide enough to hurt and delving his tongue between them.
The flat of his tongue drags over my clit. He twists it, pushes it inside me. It is—the only word is obscene. I can hear how wet I am. He makes a pleased sound. His hand kneads my thigh.
For me, echoes down the bond.
That’s new. I’ve never heard his thoughts before. His mental voice is dark and silky.
I feel his pleasure at how wet and ready I am for him, how much he likes the taste. I flush hot. He really likes the taste.
For you, I send back, trying to show him how much I like what he’s doing.
I haven’t eaten in centuries, mate. His mental voice laughs at me. He pauses to grin up at me, eyes sparking. I hope you’re free all night.
He pushes his tongue back inside me. I clench. “Fuck,” I groan. All I can see is the bobbing top of his head, his broad, muscled back pushing me open, and the press of his hips as he grinds against the mattress. My belly twists. He likes this. As much as I like this. My stomach flutters.
He doesn’t respond, just fucks me with his tongue and rubs my clit with his thumb as I gasp and tremble on the bed.
“There are benefits to a mate who doesn’t need to breathe.” I manage the words. His chuckle is a rumble against my thighs. The orgasm is twisting tighter in my stomach. I want it. I chase it, hard, and he responds by pressing me to the bed with one broad hand.
“Patience,” he growls.
“Marcus,” I demand huskily.
His gaze flicks up to mine. His mouth is wet. “My mate is not patient,” he teases. “You want me to fuck you, Leah?” His smile turns cocky. “Or do you want me to bite you?”
I swallow hard. “Both,” I rasp. “As long as there’s no danger of the bond sealing.”
He shakes his head. “No longer. The bond deals in pain now. Not pleasure.”
Before I can ask what that means, he dives his head down again and sinks his fangs into the vein at my groin. Pleasure slaps me. It’s a tornado, and I’m at the center, awash in sensation as he pulls on my vein and the orgasm short-circuits every nerve ending.
I’m still coming when he pushes inside me.
I can feel myself pulsing around him, and I dimly register the ragged sounds he makes as he wedges himself deeper.
I try to tell him down the bond that I like the stretch, like the way he steals my breath.
I like working myself onto him and feeling like he might not fit.
I like the patient way he holds himself and the tautness of his arms as he tries not to hurt me.
I tell him all of this and get a jumbled mess of images back.
The way he sees me—like there’s a fuzzy, champagne-colored overlay on my features.
The hot spark in his chest when he gives me pleasure.
The tightness in his stomach. The need he has for me—an ocean of it.
It’s feral and greedy and it would kill for me.
My eyes fill.
“No one has ever felt like that for me.”
He nods, eyes silver. “I do.” He cups my jaw and pushes all the way inside. I moan, lids fluttering. “I do, Leah,” he rasps. His eyes are heavy, and he looks seconds from coming. His hand finds mine. His mouth meets the edge of my neck. My pulse greets him, as if he owns that part of me.
I twine my arms around his neck. I am overwhelmed with sensation—the orgasm rapidly building behind my belly button, the thick ridges of his cock, the anchoring weight of his hips and his stomach.
But more than that—it’s the seesaw of the breaths he doesn’t need to take but makes anyway, the raggedness of his groans, the clutch of his fingers.
“I do not want to let you go,” he says. He kisses me again, and I hope he can’t taste my tears.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I tell him.
He rocks his hips and I cry out.
“I have never wanted anything like I want you,” he says huskily. “There will never be another like you, Leah.” He kisses my temple, my cheekbone, my jaw, frantically thrusting, like he can keep me with him.
My heart feels like it’s going to crack. I know with certainty that when he leaves, I will break. One week with him has given me a window into what I’ll miss when he’s gone.
I kiss him back as we rock. His jaw, his ear, his mouth. “Marcus,” I plead. I’m so close, and I think he can feel it, because he grips my hips and uses my body to fuck himself, like I was made for his pleasure and he for mine.
His face twists as he comes, shaking, silent, the tremors contracting his stomach and knocking his head back. It’s the sight of his pleasure that sends me over the edge, the force of it pinwheeling through my stomach and lighting sparks down my limbs.
It shakes me with force I didn’t expect. But then again, nothing with Marcus has been like I expected.
He’s still shaking above me, still thrusting, his face now twisted in—pain? Unease knots inside me. With a snarl, he pulls out and leaps back, blurring as he hits the wall. Plaster dusts his hair and shoulders.
“Marcus.”
His eyes are black, lips curled, fangs extended.
I edge warily toward him, and he leans heavily against the wall.
“No further,” he rasps. He groans and doubles over. “Fuck.” He braces one arm against the wall. His whole frame is tense and tremors shake him.
I don’t know what to do. “Do you need to feed?”
“No,” he gasps. He flashes to the far side of my room, eyes wild. “The bond. Fuck. It will pass.”
“How do you know?” It hurts to see him like this, twisted with pain, his eyes wild. My fists clench and unclench. I’m still wet between my legs, still naked, and my heart howls inside me. We had more time.
“It’s just the beginning.” Each word seems to take effort. “The bond will push me to claim you, and the spasms will get closer and closer together until I can’t stand to be near you.”
There’s an echo of his agony down the bond, and my vision blackens.
“I’m sorry, Leah,” he rasps. “I’d take it if I could. I’ll cut the bond tomorrow night, I promise.”
After we kill his brother. After he disappears forever.
My heart clenches.
“I didn’t want it to end like this.”
“I know,” he says heavily. His eyes are shut. His mouth is a thin slash. “Is there somewhere else I can sleep?” The final word comes out on a groan. Blood drips to the ground from where his fingernails dig into his palms.
“Marcus.” I step closer, and he snarls.
The sound arrows straight to my chest. It feels like we’ve gone back in time to one week ago. Just a slayer and her prey again. All the tenderness from this week has been snuffed out by the pain.
“Nowhere lightproof. The bathroom, maybe? I’ll go. You’re too big for the tub.”
I grab a pillow off the bed, but when I turn, he’s already gone.