CHAPTER 69 #3
“I know that feeling well.” He brushed his thumb across my cheek.
“You and I are the same, Lilia.” A gentle kiss to my scar and then to my lips.
“I know the demons of your past still plague you. I know you see Angelo sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night.” His brows came together in a tight frown.
“But he will never hurt you again, Little Moth. I will bleed out every one of your demons until you feel safe.”
God, was it possible to desire the man any more than I already did? “I don’t see them when I’m with you. I think they’re afraid of you.”
“As they should be.” A darkness shadowed his eyes with the threat.
“It’s when I’m not with you that scares me, though.
” The forbidden words tickled my tongue, begging to be cut loose.
I dared myself to say it. To put the curse out into the universe and risk everything that had brought me happiness these last few weeks.
“I love you. And I don’t think I can stop loving you.
” I leaned forward to kiss him, but hesitated, uncertain if I’d confessed too much.
A firm hand gripped my nape, preventing my retreat.
“I will never reject you, or turn you away.” Lips pressed to mine, he held my face so delicately in his hands, as if I were something too precious to grasp tightly.
“I have lived a lifetime in death–a cold existence in an endless void. Never feeling. Never knowing the warmth of touch. Every unfulfilling breath a suffocating reminder of how hollow I’d become.
It wasn’t until you came along and cast the first ray of light that I felt a pulse of life.
A pull that I couldn’t resist.” He thumbed the seam of my pressed lips.
“Don’t ever hesitate to touch me, Lilia.
You’re the only one who can. It was you who dragged my heart from this insensate slumber.
And it’s you for whom it beats now.” Sighing, he stroked his hand down my hair, brows pulled tight.
“It’s a fucking wreckage, though. Scarred and caged by ravaged bones. But it belongs only to you.”
Passion burned across my lips with his kiss, and he unbuttoned my shirt, slowly peeling it down my arms to my elbows, where he gathered the fabric around my wrists at my back, holding me captive.
“You’re mine, Lilia.” Eyes on mine, he bent toward me, flicking his tongue over my stiffened nipples. “And I am yours.”
When he finally released his hold, I threaded my fingers through his hair, drawing a tight grip in my palm. “Mine,” I whispered.
Strong arms wrapped around me, pulling me against him.
What began as a lazy thrust quickly heightened with fervor.
Powerful hips drove into me as he fucked me hard.
Mercilessly. I dug my fingers into the deep grooves of his muscles, letting him plow into me like he was searching for God in every moan that escaped me.
He fucked me so deeply, fresh tears sprang to my eyes.
The intensity of the man lashed out at me like a bolt of hot lightning, electrifying the air around us. I was breathless and panting. Deliciously defiled.
My body tautened, and what sounded like a cross between a sob and relief shook from my throat. Both of us slick with sweat, he held me tighter, those deep, guttural sounds in his throat telling me he was desperate to climax.
I threw my head back on a flash of light and cried out, shattering in his arms.
His climax followed, sending jets of warm fluids up inside of me, and boneless, I rested my scarred cheek against his scarred shoulder, the malicious marks where both of us had been branded monsters.
He shuddered around me, his arms shaking at my back.
When I dared to lift my head, his eyes held the glint of promise beyond that euphoric exhaustion, as he stared up at me with heaving breaths.
I stroked a hand across his dampened forehead, studying the adoration I refused to see before. The veneration of a powerful man. One the monsters in my head feared the most. It was in that moment, I believed him when he said he belonged to me. Like a vast ocean claimed by a single grain of sand.
My dark sea. The mystifying depths that both captivated and terrified me.
For so long, I struggled to accept and give love.
I’d become jaded. Stingy. Untrusting. And because I so rarely relinquished a piece of myself to others, it hurt worse when it was stolen away–the times when the world reached its greedy hand into my life and tore away the pieces of what I loved most. I’d come to learn that at the heart of life was suffering, and pain was an inevitable consequence of love.
A slow gnawing ache that began the moment we dared to admit what it was.
The shadow behind every adoring glance. The anguish that punctuated those fleeting moments of peace.
Love was also a sickness. An incurable disease.
The kind that crawled inside the muscles and bones, and persisted long after death.
As much as I wanted to bury the love of my mother, to harden myself so I wouldn’t have to face the crippling truth, I couldn’t.
Burrowed deep into the roots, it blossomed from the wounds of my broken heart, tearing through the stitches that burned with memories of those who’d tried to hurt me.
Sometimes, the pain was too much to bear.
But sometimes it felt good, because it meant that I was capable of feeling something .
I glanced up at the plaque on the wall–the one I’d noticed my first day working in the lab.
Mortui vivos docent.
The dead teach the living.
I hadn’t come to Dracadia with any notion of falling in love with my professor, or Death, as some had referred to him.
Perhaps that was the nature of the world, to take so cruelly, then swoop in and blindside us when we least expected it.
There was an implicit truth in the dead teaching the living, though.
It was my mother, my refusal to accept her death, to accept what the world had taken from me, that had brought me to Dracadia in the first place.
And it was there that I’d faced death head-on.
So smitten, I fell in love with him–his abrasive heart and blood-stained hands.
The dangerous and erudite professor, with fiery eyes and cold steel flesh.
We hid away in shadows, stealing kisses under midnight stars.
He taught me passion and courage, and to seize what I wanted by the teeth.
And in return, I taught him to feel again.