Chapter 21 #3
He doesn’t relent, doesn’t give me time to adjust. He just yields to a desperate urge to claim, to bury himself so deeply I can never escape. The bond crashes over us, a storm that might leave no survivors.
I have all of him, now. There’s no space left between us, no separation. We’re one body, one breath, one pulsating, needy heartbeat thundering in the dark.
He pulls back, the friction exquisite, and tilts his hips forward again, driving me into the mattress.
Pleasure detonates along every nerve—my pleasure, but also his, doubling back on itself through the bond, an endless circuit that only amplifies itself.
I can’t think, can’t resist, can’t do anything but ride the shockwave of every thrust.
A growl emerges from the deepest part of him. “Shadows below, Princess. Sariah. My mate. Oh, fuck.”
I cling to him, and he dives into another kiss, taking my bottom lip between his teeth. He sucks gently, even as he drives deeper—forceful on the way in, languid on the way out, angry and gentle, punishment and pleasure. Each snap of his hips shakes the foundations of my body, my soul.
My fingers dig into his back. I fall into him, or fall apart, maybe, become nothing but one long surrender as he delivers this beautiful punishment.
He finds a spot inside me I didn’t know existed, one that makes my vision go dark at the edges, then celebrates his achievement with a thick grunt of satisfaction.
Goddess. I need more. I can’t understand how I ever feared him, how this could possibly be the same man who terrified me in my father’s throne room.
He tangles his hands in my hair—hands that have ended a life right in front me. He kisses me with lips that have lied and cursed and sinned. Pleasures me with a body that has fought and killed and suffered.
But none of that has any place here. None of it even touches us.
He gets as lost as I do, caught in the same current, swept away by the same overwhelming tide.
He cares about nothing but this, us, and I can scarcely believe he has all this devotion inside him.
That this purity has somehow survived, against all odds, alongside the brutality and pain.
It’s as unexpected as finding a tree springing from barren earth. It’s wondrous. It’s a miracle.
So much that I’m falling to pieces, right here beneath him. My eyes burn, tears overflowing, a few escaping to streak down my temples.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp. “You’re not hurting me. The opposite. I’m only crying because—”
“Shhh.” He drags his mouth from mine, kisses each tear before it can disappear into my hair. “I know why. I know why.”
A wet sound of need cracks me open. “Don’t stop.”
“Never.”
His rhythm quickens, his strokes becoming more insistent. My body clenches around him as we somehow move beyond thought. We become nothing but slices of sensation, caught in a spiral of ecstasy.
There’s the rhythmic flex of long muscles beneath my fingers. His scent, rushing down my throat. His lips, finding mine again, fusing our mouths together, a clash of tongues and want and heat. His hand beneath my back, crushing me to him.
And that spot, inside me. Goddess, that spot. I angle my hips, giving him better access, and he takes it, coiling me tighter with every thrust.
Oh, goddess. Oh, shadows below. This is even better than promised. Better than prayer, than wine, than devotion, than the most satisfying fight he’s ever had in his life.
The pleasure builds and builds and builds. My fingers go numb, my entire life force gathering in my center. Until suddenly, it’s exploding outward, a hot wave that has me convulsing beneath him, around him, with him.
I can’t tell if I’m shouting or if he is. Can’t tell whose hands are digging into whose skin, whose heart is about to burst. We’re just one indrawn breath, one shattered cry, one endless peak of ecstasy that seems to have no end.
It lasts, feeding itself, my bliss driving his driving mine, and I cling to him like he’s the only solid thing in the universe. Right now, I think he actually is.
When I finally come back to myself, I’m shaking, Amriel is, too, his face buried against my neck as he drinks in my scent, his breath coming in great heaving gasps. We stay like that, locked together, neither of us willing to move. Out past the window, stars flower in the sky.
He finally lifts his head, looking down at me with eyes that have gone dreamy and sated. “I told you I’d show you.”
I blink up at him, or try to. I don’t seem to have authority over my body right now, not even my eyelids. I’m too drunk, too full, too complete. “Show me what?”
“What I believe in.”
That pierces the fog just enough that his meaning makes it to my brain. “But you said you didn’t worship sex. That you hadn’t had it in a century.”
“I don’t. And I haven’t. But this”—he presses my hand to his heart, flattens his against mine in return—“this is what I meant, what I was talking about. I told you I’d show you, if you ever came back.”
I blink once, then again, until the haze that surrounds him recedes. He stares down, his loose hair catching the blue shimmer from the bathtub, and I only have to behold him to know what he means. Because I felt it, earlier. Still feel it now, humming in the spaces between my bones.
“I understand,” I say.
His mouth regains some of its cocksure tilt. “So tell me, then. Has your goddess ever made you feel like that?”
I yelp in indignation and slap at his shoulder.
He squeezes me tight in response, crushing me to him even as he slips free of my body and flops onto his back.
I end up with my cheek mashed against his chest, his thigh wedged between mine.
His fingers coast up and down my spine, a casual affection that has me burrowing into him, reveling in his scent, his solidity.
I heave a contented breath and let the silence settle.
So. That was sex.
It wasn’t what I imagined. Like nothing I could have imagined, because it went beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. It was…sacred. A prayer we spoke to one another, together, a wish being granted as it was being asked.
I curl closer, but Amriel’s attentions pause, his whole body tensing. When I glance up, his eyes have gone distant.
The bond still simmers between us, but the connection has grown muted, enough that I have to actually ask. “What? What is it?”
He flicks a glance down his cheeks at me, then away. “It’s my other half.”
I stiffen. Oh, goddess. The Shadow. Why didn’t I consider that he could see us, feel us? That just this morning, he was denied my kiss, and then I turned around and gave myself to his other form?
“Is he all right? Where is he? Should I go talk to—”
“He’s fine. He’s…” Amriel’s eyes move back and forth like he’s searching the distance for answers.
“Happy. And jealous. Incredibly jealous, and confused about being jealous of someone who’s him, and wound so tight I think he might actually explode, and…
” He snorts, then rolls toward me and pulls my face into his chest, the scar I gave him pressing into my temple.
“Just do me a favor and fuck him the next time you see him, all right? I’m tired of listening to him obsess.
Of hearing him ruminate inside my head. It’s endless, and it’s especially annoying when I’m just trying to make it through the day in one piece. ”
A tiny gasp slips past my lips. I turn that over and over, wondering if I’ve somehow misheard. “You want me to do this with him, too?”
He makes a sound that might be a protest or a confirmation or both. “It’s unconventional, I know. But this whole situation is unconventional. And I don’t expect you to deny a mate bond. No fae would.”
I linger over that. “But…you wouldn’t be jealous?”
He hums into my hair, his breath stirring the drying tendrils. “I got to have you first. I won. That’s what matters.”
I frown. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a contest.”
“I’m a man. Everything’s a contest.”
“Amriel. That’s not an answer.”
He sighs, long and deep, and pulls back far enough to meet my eyes, brushing the backs of his fingers down my cheek. “Look. I’ll be jealous. But only a little, because it’s still me. I’ll get to feel it, too. Feel you. And it’s such a small price to pay if you’ll just…”
He swallows down whatever words fill his throat, his gaze angling away from mine.
“What?” I prompt. “If I’ll just what?”
He stares at the window as if it’s suddenly become the most interesting thing in this room. “Just don’t go back into the labyrinth, all right? You can be mine during the day. His at night. Or both of ours at once. Whatever you want.”
My eyes pop wide as I try to absorb that. “But what about your curse? What about me breaking it?”
He yields to a hollow laugh. “I’ve endured it for two hundred and twenty-six years. What’s an eternity more?”
The question sounds casual on the surface, but a wealth of meaning simmers beneath, evident in the strain around his mouth. Because he’s asking me to stay without actually asking. Offering up centuries of his own suffering in return for keeping me.
I can’t help it—I clamp my fingers over my mouth, moved beyond speech. “I—I don’t…”
His eyes dim, his hold on me slackening. “Right. It’s…sorry. Never mind. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re free to use my gyre, if you want.”
“Your gyre?”
He grunts. “Yes. It’s in my pocket, on the floor. Take it and go home. Transport back to Aethrolia. You know how to use it, by now.”
The words drop into me like a boulder into a well, summoning a violent eruption of feeling. He’s letting me go? Letting me go free?
“But…” That one word burns up all my breath, and I have to gulp down more before continuing. “What about the Claiming?”
His eyes return to mine. The glow there has died, and I can’t help but feel responsible. “The Claiming is only as good as my enforcement of it. I’m allowed to relinquish my rights. Give up what the treaty has granted me.”
“But why would you do that?”
His lips press together. And I know that he won’t say it, that he can’t. That even if I lie here all night, waiting, not a single word of apology or love will pass his lips.
“Because…” he starts, then trails off. He blinks back the flicker of emotion in his face, glances at the ceiling for a few moments before continuing.
When he speaks again, gravel roughens his voice.
“The treaty was never really about that. I only asked for my mate so that when I found you, I could force you into the labyrinth. Because I thought I would hate you. That I’d detest any heir of Alanna’s. Only…I don’t. As it turns out.”
Such a simple statement, and yet the pause that follows almost gives the impression that he’s said something else, admitted something else.
“I…” My voice fractures around the edges. “I have to think about this. I need time.” Because right now, I don’t know a single thing, still too dizzy to feel my way toward any kind of truth.
“That’s fine,” he says, but I can tell he’s already resigned himself to my answer, because his jaw hardens to steel.
“Can I have until tomorrow? To decide?”
“Of course. But in that case, I just have one last question.”
I inch toward him. “Which is?”
“Could I show you what I believe in again?”
My eyes flare, my mouth opening, but he fills the pause before I can.
“It’s just…if you’re only here until tomorrow, I want to spend that time doing what I believe in. You know. Worshiping. Or whatever you Aethrolians call it.”
Silence rings through the room, the air thick with all he’s holding back, with the unsaid confessions hanging between us.
“Amriel…”
“Just don’t wake me up,” he says gruffly. “All right? When you go. Don’t say goodbye. Just let me sleep. Let me not know for a little while longer.”
I flinch. Good goddess, he might as well have fashioned the words into a stake and driven it through my chest. I blink madly, battling the tears that try to hurl themselves down my cheeks.
I want so badly to ease his torment, but I can’t promise to stay. To abandon my future, my home. I’m too fragile, too raw, and after what we just did, I feel like a blank slate inside, a story waiting to be written.
The only question is…which one?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
“Kiss me,” I manage, between tumultuous breaths.
His eyes change, taking on a depth that almost scares me.
But he does as I ask. His hand sweeps up to cup my jaw, and he kisses me with all the longing and dread one man can hold, with all the words he can’t bring himself to say.
Instead, he writes each one with the desperation of his mouth against mine.
Before I know it, I’m underneath him, my legs instinctively parting, my arms threading around his neck as he sinks into me all over again.
Except I don’t do what I promised. I don’t think. About anything.
I just feel.