Chapter 13 #2
He'd been on the balcony with Fly, his throat raw from honesty he hadn't wanted to give, even as the pressure built in him. He could feel her losing control of her body, her thoughts, her desire, collapsing into the energy she’d filled him with.
The wings lifted from his back at the memory of transforming in an almost pleasure/pain reaction to her forcing him, as if the power wanted to release the essence of his eagle in response to her inability to control it.
To him, though, it had felt like the full weight of her heart driving straight to his soul.
He swore the font almost sighed.
When Easy and Twister had arrived, he’d felt their discomfort, and he knew that Fly’s words were not only true, but if he didn’t do something now, they were going to be useless, mindless.
The pull hadn't been metaphorical. It had been a physical hand at his nape. Not a hand. A direction. The mountains, the estate, and the air itself had all reoriented around a single coordinate, which was the library, which was her.
He'd moved before Fly had finished asking him to.
He'd walked through the open door of the library, the sound of his own pulse drowning out everything else, and she'd been at the alcove against the stone wall like an animal that had been cornered by something it couldn't name, and she'd turned her face to him with her mouth open and her chakana glowing through her shirt.
Now he was at her bedroom door, and in a deliberate move, he pressed his palm to the bite at his neck, his shoulder bleeding lightly where her nails had broken the cotton and scored him through it.
The pain was perceived as pleasure. The blood registered as ownership.
She'd marked him. She'd wanted him to bear her evidence.
She stood at the foot of the bed. The response from him had blown out her hair, and it was loose and disheveled around her stunning face.
Her shirt was displaced where his hands had gripped her.
Her mouth was swollen from his teeth, and the kiss he hadn't yet given her, which made no sense and made every sense at once, because that mouth had been kissed for a year in his dreams. Her breasts were rising and falling with the same rhythm as his chest. Her chakana was glowing through the silk so clearly he could see the cross-shape lit from underneath.
Her eyes were the dull gold gone molten, orange threads dancing through the gold like fire under glass.
She was the most lethal thing he'd ever stood in front of. She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever stood in front of. The two facts were the same fact.
The animal in him took over.
He took a step forward. She held her ground. Her chin came up. Her bared teeth caught the late-morning light through the windows.
"Killa."
His voice didn't sound like his voice. The register was lower.
The cadence was older. He'd said her name in the library a hundred times, and it had sounded like a man saying a woman's name.
He'd just said it like a king claiming a country.
He recognized the difference inside his own chest. He didn't stop to examine it.
"Come here," he said.
She didn't move.
He took another step. The bedroom was large.
The carved wooden bed at her back was the same bed where he'd woken just over six hours ago to find her sleeping in a wisp of silk beside him.
The bed where she'd told him she'd been afraid of herself with him.
The bed where he'd told her she could be afraid and still let him stay.
His voice rasped out. “Take off your clothes. Your body is screaming for me, and I fucking want to see what's mine."
For a heartbeat, he thought she would defy him. He saw the flicker of the warrior in her eyes, the stubborn refusal to be commanded. But then something shifted. The orange threads in her gaze softened, and she gave him a slow, deliberate nod as she stripped. He closed the distance.
She'd finished running. Her body had brought him to this room, and her body was holding position.
He reached her, and his hands went to her hips, lifting her in one motion, turning to settle her back on the bed.
He came down over her with his weight braced on his arms, and her legs came up around his hips and locked there, the hot, slick core of her driving him mad.
The bite mark on his neck pressed against the warmth of her skin as he lowered his mouth to her throat in answer, the hard, searing tips of her nipples scoring his chest.
His lips on her neck, he sucked, drawing the blood up under her skin in a long, slow pull where her pulse was beating. She gasped, her hips lifting against him, and he marked her in his way as she'd marked him in hers. Her chakana glowed against him, a beacon that drew him.
He pulled back enough to look at her. Her face was open. The walls were down. Everything he'd been trying to reach for since Venezuela was right there in front of him, raw and unguarded and waiting. He breathed her in, his whole body shuddering with the force of what he was feeling.
"Killa," he whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he had no name for. "You have no idea." Her hands tangled in his hair, her touch gentle, questioning. "I'm going to ask you one question," he said. His voice was still in the lower register, rough and hoarse.
She looked up at him, her eyes burning with the intensity of the vision he'd just seen.
"I'm not going to ask you anything else for a long time.” The mountain sang. The Veil pressed. The world waited. “Do you want this?" He closed his eyes. Do you want me?
She stared up at him, his aching dick nestled against the heart of her desire, and he wanted it with the kind of need that felt as heavy as centuries, his body knowing it had waited longer than this life for her to be free to choose.
His gut clenched hard, his body trembled with a foreign emotion that locked him up and sent fear cascading through him.
Her hand gripped the back of his neck, that feral need in her dragging him down.
"I want you," she said, her voice a rasp. "I want you so much it scares me, but refusing you is impossible, not because we’re the lock and key, not because the stars are pushy bastards, but because I choose to. I choose you."
Relief hit him so hard it felt like grief.
His mouth came down on hers, and the world he'd been carrying since the moment he'd first seen her in Venezuela tipped over the edge it had been balanced on for a year, and the universe, which had been waiting for the twist, got it.