Chapter 17
Kazimir
Amber lamplight painted the leather sofa in inviting hues.
The glass that overlooked the main floor wore its smoke-dark tint.
I could have turned ruthless. I could have taken without a word.
That was the man I had been, sometimes, before I learned that vows meant little if your hands could not keep pace with your heart.
“My turn,” I said, voice low enough the room seemed to lean closer to catch it.
She smiled, soft and wrecked and sure, hair a pale storm tumbling around her shoulders.
I brushed it back with slow fingers and kissed her forehead.
The contact was simple, and it shook me.
I wanted to fall to my knees and pray against her ribs.
I wanted to show her that power never stood taller than when it chose to serve.
I set about undressing her as if the cloth were sacred.
The zipper at her spine yielded with the obedient whisper of a well-trained thing.
As the dress slackened, I kissed the point of her shoulder where the fabric first gave way.
It tasted like skin warmed under stage lights, clean sweat, a hint of the perfume that was not perfume but her—cool air off a winter river.
She shivered when I pressed my mouth to the tendon at her neck, so I did it again, then let the dress fall.
The sight of her should have made me brutal.
Instead, it made me careful. My palms smoothed down her arms, over gooseflesh that rose at my touch.
I worked the straps from her shoulders as if they were garters binding wings.
Her breasts broke free of their polite architecture, and I breathed out like a starving man.
Dusky rose, peaked from anticipation and the cool of the room, they offered me a test of my restraint that I already knew I would fail—later. Not yet.
I kissed her belly, the hollow of her hip, the curve of her knee, and then her ankle, slow head to toe, because I had promised myself a method and I had not yet touched every inch of her.
I turned her foot in my hand and kissed the arch.
She laughed, startled, the cutest little tremor of amusement, and it shook the last of the aftershocks away.
“Sorry,” she said, breath catching as if she owed me decorum.
“Never apologize to me for joy,” I said, voice ironed smooth. “It is what I am here for.”
I pressed my mouth to the top of her shin, the soft place she probably never thought of, then climbed the line back to her knee.
I spread her again and mouthed at her inner thigh where the skin went delicate and the scent of her flooded richer.
I grazed teeth there and soothed, repeating, leaving no mark but heat.
When I finally found my way back to the center, she was already shaking her head, tiny, helpless.
“Kazimir…”
“Hm?” I said, mouth half on the swollen hood. “You have something to ask me, svetoch?”
“Yes. Don’t stop.”
“As you wish. Come,” I said softly. I’d placed a soft throw onto the floor. “On your stomach.”
I smoothed my palms along the seams of her scars.
“Devon,” I said quietly. “Will you show me?”
She stilled. She turned her head to one side and looked back at me, her hair a bright spill against the throw. “You want to see my wings?” she asked. Not shy. Serious.
“I’d like to very much.” I had ruled cities. I had watched empires bend and fire consume houses and men. But her wings were the very essence of who she was. I wanted her to know how much I loved this part of her.
Her lashes dipped. Her mouth curved in something that was not coy; it was brave. “All right,” she said.
It began under my hands, a low flare like heat lightning. The skin pulled taut, then softened. Soundless, the scars opened—not bloody, not crude. The air flexed, as if two new doors had been added to a room that had always deserved them. And then her wings unfurled.
They came out of her like a remembered language.
Deep purple at the base, the light from my lamp turned honey against them.
Along the primaries, threads of gold chased the barbs and hooked light into narrow rivers.
They were majestically royal. The air moved.
My hair lifted at my temples. The scent shifted, too—that clean note, but richer, cut with something that tasted like cold altitude and the first bite of a ripe fig.
“Goddess,” I breathed, because I felt such reverence at the sight. “Ty moya krasota.” You are my beauty.
She laughed low and startled, the sound half-shy, half-victorious. The wings flexed once, a whisper that ran along my jaw.
I reached, slowly, so she saw every inch of my hand before it found her.
I touched the base where skin met quill and felt it—soft, yes, but alive, not dead keratin like a human scribe’s feather.
Warmth. A tremor chased my fingers. Each fine filament slid beneath my touch with a silky refusal to be reduced to a single word.
She shivered like I had kissed the inside of her mouth.
“On your knees,” I said softly. “Spread them for me.”
She pushed up, a clean, strong motion, and set her knees wide on the throw.
Her back arched as the wings lifted, filling the room with shadow cut by gold veins.
I came up behind her, fitting my thighs to hers, hands bracketing the narrow flare of her waist. For one breath, I merely looked.
The markings at her shoulder blades, the tiny ripples in the smaller covert feathers, the way her spine rose in a low hill from the sleek line of her back—it was too much and not enough.
“Tell me to stop,” I said, because my control had to serve us, not ownership.
She tipped her head, hair falling to one side, her cheek turning so she could look at me over her shoulder. Those aquamarine eyes were already dark. “No,” she said simply. “Don’t you dare.”
I smiled then—I could not help it. My hand slid down and between her thighs. She was wet, slick as a confession. I drew the tender flesh open and stroked her, then lifted my hand to my mouth and tasted her. Something hard in me went soft enough to break.
I spat into my palm and slicked myself, then set the head of my cock at her entrance and pressed—just the first inch, listening to the way her breath hitched, the way the feathers closest to my hand quivered.
Another inch, slow, the grip of her taking me like the first time a starving man allows himself to eat without counting bites.
I eased out, then in again, deeper this time, patience burning white.
“More,” she said, the word stretched like silk. She pushed back onto me, greedy and perfect.
“Yes,” I answered, and gave it to her.
When I was fully seated, the world narrowed to heat and pressure and the desperate privilege of it.
She was so tight around me I had to breathe measured, that old technique drawn from battles where men tried to live.
I set my hand at the apex of her spine, where the wings rose, and stroked down the narrow furrow of feathers there.
She made a strangled sound I wanted to hear again immediately.
“Again,” she gasped.
I obliged, dragging my fingertips in small circles where the skin met the first soft rise of covert feathers.
My other hand slid wet with my spit and her slick to the notch of her ass.
I pressed the tip of one finger there and paused.
Her body clenched around me at the suggestion. I stayed absolutely still.
“Devon.” I did not disguise the question.
“Please,” she said, fierce and certain. “I want…all.”
“All,” I repeated, a vow, and pressed, slow and careful.
She exhaled on it, shoulders relaxing, wings angling wider to accommodate.
The ring of muscle gave, admitting me by half a knuckle, then more.
I stilled to let her breathe through it and stroked the base of her wing again.
The flutter of her feathers brushed my forearm.
Then I began to move.
I drew my hips back and pushed in, my finger following the same rhythm, shallow at first, then deeper, never rough, only deliberate.
The effect unraveled both of us with a speed that would have alarmed me in another life.
She keened, the sound not polite or careful.
It filled the office and soaked the bookshelves and made the glass seem to thrum with sympathetic vibration.
It was a sound I would have devoured a city to hear again.
“Good,” I told her, voice notched low. “Let them hear what is mine to tend.”
She answered with motion—pressing back, taking me deeper, her wings beating once and then settling at a wider span.
Gold brightened at the vanes. Every time I rubbed the base where feather met flesh, she clenched in a way that made my vision edge to white.
I timed the pressure—one long stroke at the wing base as I bottomed out inside her, a gentler sweep when I withdrew, my finger in her ass a counterpoint that robbed us both of air.
“You feel—” I could not find the precise word. “Like a home I built and never walked into.”
She laughed, wrecked and beautiful, the laugh cutting off when I thrust deeper. “Then…live there,” she hissed. “Please.”
I did. I bracketed her hips and drove into that heat with a rhythm I could have kept for an hour except she made sounds that shattered my patience into bright pieces.
Her nails dug into the throw. Her head dropped, then tipped back, exposing the long line of her neck.
The wings trembled and rustled, light catching on golden threads so it looked as if dawn had caught in both hands and refused to let go.
If I had ever doubted the fairness of fate, I doubted it less now. To have survived nearly a thousand years and be permitted this—this softness, this welcome, this living creature arched and open before me like a sunrise captured in flesh—felt like the kind of mercy men sought and did not find.
“Devon,” I said, and did not try to make it mean more than her name.