Devon #3
The silence after his teeth left me rang like a bell. We lay there—threaded together, mouth to pulse, breath to breath—and the words I’d never been taught unfurled in me with the authority of something carved on stone long before I was born.
I didn’t plan to speak. The vow rose anyway, burning the soft inside of my mouth until I let it out like steam from a sealed room. My palms slid up his chest to cradle his face, to make sure he was the only one who could hear.
“Before heaven and void, I choose you. I bind my light to your shadow. Where you walk, I walk. Where you bleed, I bleed. You are mine, as I am yours.”
Something answered. Not the house. Not the night.
Us. It snapped into place with a bright sting that felt like a star pressed to my sternum.
The warmth rolled outward in concentric waves—through breastbone and ribs, down my belly to where we were still locked, back along my spine to those old wounds.
His eyes blew dark and wild at the first line; his hips jolted at the last.
“Kazimir,” I breathed, as if I were both warning and invitation.
He broke. The control he ruled a city with abandoned him as his body found the same cliff and leaped.
He drove into me hard, once, twice, a sound leaving him that would have made men kneel, and then I felt him.
The thick, pulsing flood, the hot surrender of him spilling deep, claimed and claiming.
The knowledge that I did this to him—my vow, my body—pushed me over again like a hand on my back.
I clenched around him, milking every last shudder from his spine, my own orgasm cresting and breaking in a ragged chorus I could not have orchestrated if I tried.
I would have been content to drown there, but my body had other plans.
It started as a tightening at the base of my skull, a bright, rotten-sweet pressure that reminded me of migraines and thunderheads.
It shot down my spine in a lash of electricity and pooled, hot and uncontainable, under the skin between my shoulders where the scars lived.
My back arched off the bed without my permission; my thighs locked down around his hips; a sound tore out of me that I didn’t recognize as mine.
“Devon.” His hands flew to my upper arms, fingers firm, not restraining, bracing. “Devon, look at me.”
I couldn’t. I leaped from the bed and landed on my knees on the floor.
My eyes slammed shut as another spasm seized me, more violent than the first. Every muscle in my back clenched like a fist. The skin over the scars went molten.
It was too much heat for flesh, too much light for bone. The pressure demanded an exit.
It found one.
The first tear was a bright, liquid rip—not of meat but of some membrane I couldn’t name.
There was a split-second of pain so clean it stunned me silent, and then a roar of relief like surf.
Something unfurled from me—first on the right, then on the left—exploding outward into space with a rush of displaced air around me.
Feathers. Not white. Not anything so obedient.
They were purple, the color of late twilight and good wine, lit from the inside with an oil-slick iridescence that caught the dim and threw it back in impossible colors—amethyst, cobalt, a flash of peacock green that wasn’t green at all.
They were wide and beautiful, trimmed in gold.
The scent in the room shifted—ozone, stormwater, something clean that had nothing to do with linen.
Kazimir knelt in front of me. He stayed, an anchor at the center of the hailstorm.
Another spasm seized me; my body bowed again, a drawn bowstring about to be loosed.
A cry tore loose—no words, just the sound of something beginning.
Light sparked behind my closed eyelids. Then the worst of it ebbed, and the pain resolved into fierce, breath-stealing fullness.
My shoulders throbbed, raw and holy. The new limbs trembled and then steadied, instinct older than memory arranging shafts and vanes into order.
I collapsed into his arms, every muscle emptied, my cheek pressed to his chest. I couldn’t open my eyes yet; tears slid, hot and certain, across my cheeks.
If someone had asked me to stand, I would have wept with laughter.
It felt like being hit by a city bus and then waking up in a body that was finally mine.
The nightmare had been of being small and weaponless.
This was the opposite. Weight spread behind me—warm, alive, mine.
I shivered once, not from cold but from the shock of relief.
I lifted my face on a long delay and found his, that impossible mouth, those eyes I could drown in.
I managed a smile that was more truth than expression.
“You’re mine, King of kings,” I whispered, voice wrecked and triumphant.
Something like prayer moved through his features. He bent as if to answer me with his mouth, and my wings—which had always been better at sense than I was—curved down and around us both, a purple, iridescent tent against the dark.