Chapter 24 – Lily
LILY
“Let me heal you,” Cassini says, his fingertips ghosting over the tender bruises blooming across my throat.
After he drank from me in the bathroom, he wrapped me in the softest towel he could find and carried me to the bedroom, laying me down with the consideration of someone handling a precious artifact.
Now he’s curled around me protectively, still fully clothed while I’m bare except for the terry cloth, his lips pressing tiny, apologetic kisses along my shoulder and collarbone.
His hand moves with ghostly tenderness along my skin, cataloging each mark—the vampire’s brutal claw marks, the puncture wounds from his own fangs, the tender bruising and scuffs from being slammed against brick walls. Each touch is so feather-light, it’s as if he’s afraid I might shatter.
“How will you heal me?” I whisper, shifting so I’m pressed even closer to the solid slab of his chest. Despite everything that’s happened tonight, I’ve never felt safer.
“My venom has magical properties, my love,” he murmurs against my skin, his breath cool and soothing. “I can lick your wounds, and you’ll feel no pain. Your body will put itself back together almost instantly.”
“Will it hurt?”
“The opposite.” His thumb traces the edge of a particularly dark bruise, and I suppress a wince. “It will feel…good. Maybe a little euphoric. My saliva contains natural endorphins.”
I turn to study his face in the soft moonlight filtering through my bedroom curtains. There’s guilt written in every line of his face, self-recrimination in the set of his jaw. He’s been apologizing with his hands for the last ten minutes, mapping my injuries like he’s memorizing them.
“You don’t have to,” he continues softly. “I know I’ve already taken so much from you tonight. I ask for too much. I know that. I just want to do this for you.”
But I’m already tilting my head back, exposing the column of my throat to him. “I want you to.”
He kisses my temple and trails his lips down to the first mark. When his tongue makes contact with my skin, a shock of warmth spreads through me, followed immediately by a floating, weightless sensation.
He’s right—it doesn’t hurt. Instead, there’s a tingling that borders on pleasure, like tiny champagne bubbles fizzing through my bloodstream. Each gentle stroke of his tongue sends ripples of contentment through my nervous system.
“Better?” he asks, pulling back to examine his work. The worst of the bruising has already faded, and the dull ache dissipates with it.
“Much.” My voice comes out dreamy, slightly slurred from whatever supernatural cocktail is now coursing through me. “I feel kinda high and tingly. Whatever it is…it’s good shit.”
A soft chuckle rumbles through his chest. “That good?” He moves to the next mark, taking his time, savoring the taste of my skin and running his flat tongue along the curves of my body. “You need rest. Go to sleep and let me take care of you.”
But I can’t rest. There are two things I can’t stop thinking about.
The first is the fear of what I’ve committed to do tomorrow night and the reality of it.
I’m taking a huge risk by even being there amongst creatures that would drink me dry given half a chance.
Not only will I be in enemy territory, but I’ll be spying on them, and I run the risk that they would either kill me on the spot or kidnap me and use me like some kind of human polygraph if they discover what I truly am.
All because I’ve committed to a suicide mission to rescue a girl I don’t even know, to help a man I can’t fully trust, so I can hunt for breadcrumbs of insight about a woman who abandoned me.
Then there’s the other thing. The growing heat between my legs. The feel of Cassini’s tongue on my skin and the memory of it elsewhere. The venom that lives in his mouth, the same one that he used to heal me, he once used in a far more intimate place, and my body remembers it all too well.
And it wants more.
The fear is easier to deal with. Maybe I should heed Cass’ warning and leave him to go to that club alone tomorrow, but what kind of person would that make me? A coward? A weak-willed woman? I’m neither.
No, I run toward mess, chaos, and ugliness when I see it.
That’s nursing. That’s life. Feeling the fear and pushing through it to do something good with all the pain.
When my mother was lying in a motel bathtub with her wrists and throat cut and enough drugs to kill a rhino in her system, no one helped her.
Not the clerk who checked her into the seedy downtown shithole.
Not the dealer who supplied her. Not the junkie who was in the room with her, who robbed her as she lay bleeding.
Back then, I was too small to run toward the mess.
But I’m bigger now.
There’s no way I’m turning away from this. I’m committed now. Even if what happened at the Jackalope scared the shit out of me.
The other problem, the one between my thighs, is also dangerous. I want him, and I want him all the time. My pure, unbridled desire for this man is all-consuming, and it clouds every decision, recoloring red flags through rose-tinted glasses.
Ordinarily, a macho, peacocking display of violence, like back at the bar, would send me running for the hills, but the truth—that I’m so desperately trying to fight—is one that makes my cheeks burn with shame.
Watching him lose control of his inner beast. Seeing eyes glow amber when he’s squeezing the life out of someone, the way they do when he’s feeding on me, doesn’t just make me feel safe and protected.
It turns me on.
I don’t just tolerate his monstrous parts. I like them.
Fuck, I love them. It’s terrifying, but it’s true. I think the blackest parts of him are my favorite.
Cassini’s tongue traces a nasty scrape on my hip bone, and the sensation steals a groan from my throat. I flip onto my back, and he looks up at me expectantly. His open mouth tantalizingly close to where I need him to be.
“Is everything okay, fiore?”
“I want you,” I whisper, my voice thick with need.
This is more than just physical, more than just about silencing the anxious terror that’s coursing through my veins. More than satisfying the itch that’s been growing since he drank from me moments ago. This is a need so raw I’d die if I couldn’t have it.
“I need you inside me,” I croak.
He stills, his body rigid above me. My hand comes up and cups his cheek, my thumb brushing over his smooth, cold skin. He’s still worried about what he’s done to me, what he’s putting me through. I need to show him that I’m all in, that I’ve chosen this, even the broken, ugly parts of it.
“Are you sure, my darling?” he asks, his voice raw with emotion. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I want it to hurt.”
He doesn’t need any more encouragement. His hands are on me then, pushing aside the towel, his touch no longer hesitant.
He pulls me up to him, his mouth finding mine in a brutal, hungry kiss that leaves me breathless.
I can feel the venom on his tongue, the memory of what it can do to my body, and I moan into his mouth.
I lift my hips, rubbing against him, and a low moan escapes his throat. He pulls back just enough to look at me, his eyes glowing amber in the dim light. I can see the monster in them, the one I love, the one that makes me feel safe.
I writhe under him, and he pins my hands above my head, his touch no longer gentle, but firm and unyielding.
His pants brush against my bare thighs, the hard, dense muscle of his body pressing down on mine.
The soft towel is a forgotten mess at my feet, and all I can feel is the intoxicating friction of his clothes against my skin.
There’s a feral desperation in the way he kisses me, his tongue plunging into my mouth, his teeth grazing my bottom lip. I can taste the venom on his tongue the same venom that made me feel so light and euphoric. Now, it’s a different kind of high—a primal, intoxicating rush of pure want.
My hands find their way to his chest, tracing the lines of ink-marked abs.
His skin is ice-cold, and his heart is a frantic drum against my palm.
I want him to lose control. I want him to take me with the same ferocity he used to subdue that vampire.
I want to be the thing he loses himself in.
I want him to give in to his monstrous parts, to stop fighting the hunger that consumes him, to give me all of his darkness, all of his rage, and all of his desperation.
“I’m not fragile, Cass,” I whisper, my voice thick with craving. “I want you to stop treating me like I’m made of glass and just fuck me. Tell me I’m yours. Promise me.”
His jaw clenches, and he looks at me like he’s afraid of what he’ll do next. He’s so used to being the one in control, the one protecting, but now I’m the one pushing him to the edge.
I grab his face and pull him down to me, kissing him with all the desperate need that’s been building inside of me since the first night we met.
And then he pulls away.
His hands release mine, and he sits back on his heels, putting distance between us that feels like a chasm. The loss of his touch is immediate and devastating, like a bucket of ice water thrown over my burning skin.
“What the—” I start, but he’s already reaching for the towel, pulling it up to cover me with gentle, clinical movements that make me want to scream.
“You need rest,” he says, his voice detached and distant as he presses a soft kiss to my forehead—the kind of kiss you’d give a kid, not a lover. “The sun will be up soon.”
The dismissiveness in his tone ignites something indignant inside me. I sit up, clutching the towel to my chest, my whole body trembling with a cocktail of arousal and rage.
“Bullshit,” I snap. “It won’t be up for hours. You can’t use that excuse with me. What’s the real reason?”
He won’t meet my eyes as he stands, smoothing down his shirt like nothing happened. Like I wasn’t just writhing underneath him, begging him to take me. Like he wasn’t just as desperate as I was.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the words sound hollow. “I just don’t want to hurt you again. Tomorrow night…be ready. Wear something dark, something that would fit in at a vampire club.” “I’ll be back at nine to get you.”
“That’s it?” My voice cracks with disbelief. “You’re just going to…leave? After that? Why do you always do this to me? Do you get off on rejecting me or something? Do you love it when I beg for scraps of your affection?”
He doesn’t answer, so I force myself into his head.
I’m not just a human spirit box. I’m a whole fucking person, Cassini. I have needs, too.
“Cass?”
Cassini!
He finally looks at me, and there’s something desperate in his expression that makes my rage falter for just a second.
But then his mask slides back into place, and he’s the untouchable vampire again.
“Get some sleep, Lily.”
And then he’s gone. The front door closes with a soft click that echoes through my empty house.
I sit there in the dark, hair still wet, my body still aching with need and my mind reeling with rejection.
Again. Once again, I’ve thrown myself at him and been turned away like I’m asking for something I don’t deserve.
The venom flowing through my amped-up nervous system makes everything feel heightened. The humiliation, the anger, the desperate want that he’s left me drowning in. I want to scream, to break something, to chase after him and demand an explanation.
Instead, I pull the towel tighter around myself and try to pretend my heart isn’t shattering into a million pieces.