You have fangs
“Keep them closed.”
“They are closed.”
“Eden.” His breath warms my ear from somewhere behind me, his broad hands steering my shoulders. “You are peeking.”
“I have a blindfold on. How could I be peeking?”
“Because I know you,” he rumbles against the curve of my neck. His thumb slowly traces over the silk wrapped around my eyes, pressing gently against the bridge of my nose. “And I can feel your eyelashes fluttering against the fabric.”
The meadow hums under my bare feet, soft and warm where the sun has been shining all morning.
“Where are you taking me?” I whisper.
His hands slide from my shoulders down to my waist, his long fingers pulling me tighter against his chest as he guides my steps. “We’re almost there.”
I can hear the soft, gentle lapping of water, and Sage’s heartbeat practically beating through his ribs.
“Ready?” he asks as he works the knot loose. The blindfold slips off, and my breath catches.
“Oh my God, Sage. This looks like something out of a fairy tale.”
There’s a bath sitting in the middle of our meadow.
A pale porcelain tub, smooth as the inside of a pearl, wrapped in flowering vines.
Steam curls off the water and blossoms float along the surface, carrying the scent of crushed petals and rain.
Large, gilded mirrors lean against the ancient trees surrounding the clearing, catching the morning light and throwing it back across the rippling water.
“You said,” he starts, rubbing the back of his neck, his wings giving an anxious flutter. “Last night. You said you wanted to bathe in the glazeberries. You likely do not remember.”
He reaches into a hollow tree nook and pulls out a wide wooden bowl piled high with plump, violet fruit. “I thought… I could feed them to you while you soaked in the bath.”
I look from the steaming water to the giant, beautiful creature standing before me. “You grew me a bathtub, just because of one drunk sentence?”
“I would grow you a lake for a sober one,” he says, dropping to his knees in front of me. His hands slide up to the hem of my nightgown, his eyes searching mine. “Do you want to get in the water, mí’aevúna?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
His claws are already retracted, the soft pads of his fingertips gathering the cotton at my thighs.
He lifts the nightgown over my head and the morning air kisses my skin before his gaze replaces it, moving over me slowly.
The vines wrapped around his biceps tighten.
He lifts me and lowers my body into the water.
Heat swallows me to the collarbone, unknotting things I didn’t even know were knotted.
Tiny blooms swirl against my skin. Sage rests his forearms along the rim.
“Before you eat these, you should know they make you rather… uninhibited,” he whispers while plucking a glazeberry from the bowl and holding it to my lips.
“And what I want to do to you today requires a yes you’ll remember giving. ”
My lips part, and I hold out my tongue. He watches me with darkening eyes, but he doesn’t place the berry on my tongue. “I’ve wanted to seal the bond since the night I woke up, Sage. Nothing has changed. You have my permission, uninhibited or not. The answer is always yes.”
“Then let me improve the delivery.”
He places the glazeberry on his own tongue, and his hand slides around the back of my neck, the other tilting my chin up to meet him.
He leans down, sealing his lips over mine.
The berry passes between us on the first curl of his tongue.
Something sharp punctures the fruit, and it bursts.
Rain, cucumbers, sugar, and fizzy peaches flood my mouth, coating my tongue in the rich dark juice.
He groans against my mouth, tasting the sweetness with me, dragging his tongue against mine to lap up every drop before I can catch my breath. His claws unsheathe, pressing ever so lightly into the nape of my neck.
“Vresh,” he breathes, pulling back an inch. His lips are glistening with juice. “I am going to feed you every single one of these like this.”
A syrupy warmth spreads from my chest, sinking into my limbs, and making my head feel delightfully light. “Promise?”
“Mm.” He plucks another berry from the bowl, entirely too pleased with himself, and a slow smile spreads across his—
Fangs.
He has two elegantly sharp fangs, indenting his lower lip right where his smile curves. I have mapped every inch of that mouth for hours, and Sage does not have fangs.
That’s what popped the glazeberry. That’s what I felt against my tongue. My whole body flushes hot at the understanding.
“Sage…” My breath hitches as I reach out, my wet fingertips hovering over his mouth. “You have fangs.”
His tongue immediately moves behind his lips, counting his own teeth. His eyes go wide. “... I have fangs.”
“Since when?”
He gingerly touches one with the pad of his thumb. Wonder spreads over his features. “They’re his.”
“Can he hear me?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to feed me a berry, Ashán?”
For a moment, there’s nothing but silence in the meadow. Then the left side of him surrenders, skin unraveling into smooth bone from temple to jaw, his soft lavender eye deepening into smoky black. The arm resting on the tub’s rim goes skeletal to the elbow.
His head tilts a fraction, listening to a voice only he can hear, and the blush that crawls up his throat arrives before the words do.
“He says—” Sage pauses and clears his throat. “I am not repeating that.”
“Sage.”
“It was anatomically ambitious, Eden.”
Warmth pools low in my stomach. “Tell me. Please.”
Ashán’s dark eye holds mine, steady and unblinking, while Sage’s mouth wrestles with itself. When he finally speaks, his voice has dropped into the lower register, like the night the Horsemen took me.
“He says…” Ashán’s eye flashes. “He wants to bite into your thigh while you suck the juice from his tongue, so he can feel you swallow him from both ends.”
My thighs press together beneath the water. The image lands exactly where he intended it to, and judging by the way Ashán’s eye tracks the movement, he knows it.
“Yes,” I breathe.
His skeletal fingers reach into the bowl, picking up a single berry. He holds it up between our faces. “He says since he cannot have both today,” Sage rasps, those new fangs catching his lower lip as a dangerous smile spreads, “he will settle for one end at a time.”
He brings the berry to his mouth.
Mesmerized, I track the delicate violet skin against the tip of one newly sprouted fang. A tiny pop echoes over the water, puncturing the flesh just enough to let a single shimmering bead of something gold seep into the heart of the fruit.
“What is that?”
“He says it’s a trace of his essence,” Sage rumbles as he lowers the berry to my lips. “To make sure the sweetness stays in your blood long after the fruit is gone.”
He nudges my mouth with the berry, his finger resting heavily against the center of my chin. “Open for me, ash’kaela.” (Death’s Princess)
I part my lips, and he places it on my tongue. My teeth sink into the fruit, crushing it at once. The glazeberry bursts, and this time, the sweet violet nectar is spiked with liquid heat.
“I don’t feel anything—” Suddenly the world softly catches fire around me.
That’s the only way to explain it. Warmth blooms from my chest in a slow, rolling wave.
Down my arms, my spine, pooling low and heavy in my hips.
Everywhere it touches, my skin wakes up.
The water against my body is suddenly a thousand individual points of contact.
The steam on my shoulders. The porcelain at my back.
His fingertip, still resting against my lip, becomes the center of my universe.
“Please,” I breathe.
Every ache in my body dissolves, replaced by a humming, liquid awareness that has me gripping the tub’s rim with both hands. My head tips backward, and my eyes fall shut.
“Eden? What do you feel?”
The fingertip against my lip drags down the column of my throat, tracing the rapid flutter of my pulse before lingering over my collarbone.
“Everything.” I gasp as another wave of heat ripples under my skin. “It feels like… like my skin remembers everywhere you’ve ever touched me, all at once.”
“It amplifies the bond,” he rasps, his fingers brushing over my breast. “It’s stripping every barrier between us.”
He reaches over the rim for an opalescent bloom floating near the edge. He gathers the velvety petals into his palms and submerges them beneath the surface. With a firm squeeze, the flower softens, and the water around his hands turns into a thick, pink-colored lather.
“That smells soo good,” I murmur. “What is that?”
“A lather-lily.” His soapy hands close over my shoulders, and I can’t stop the small moan that escapes me. “Does that feel good, mí’aevúna?”
Every slide of his palms feels like a stroke of electricity. The silky foam slides over the swell of my breasts.
“Sage…” My hands blindly grasp at the edge of the tub as his thumbs circle my aching nipples through the slick soap.
“I want to seal the bond with you,” he rasps, his fingers tugging on my flesh just hard enough to keep me paying attention. “But the feeling in my gut is not gone, Eden.”
I force my eyes open and look up at his face.
“The one that stopped me on the canvas,” he continues, his hands sliding deeper beneath the surface.
“I have waited for it to leave. I have thought about it every moment since that night, waiting for it to get quieter.” His fingers wrap around my hips and pull me forward.
“I don’t think it ever will. And if I wait for it to, I will wait your whole life away. I refuse to do that.”
“Sage—”