Chapter Fifteen
ROXY
His mouth finds mine again before I can think, before I can brace for it, and the kiss steals what little air I have left.
It’s rougher this time, urgent, his lips pressing into mine like he’s trying to make a point he doesn’t trust himself to say out loud.
My hands clutch at his shirt on instinct, fingers curling into the cotton at his chest while heat floods through me, sharp and dizzying, my body responding faster than my mind ever could.
I make a sound against his lips, something soft and breathless, and his hand slides up to my jaw, tilting my face just enough that the kiss deepens, turns hungry, consuming.
For a heartbeat, there is nothing else, not the locked room, not the blood, not the monsters, just the way he kisses like restraint is a lie he’s been telling himself for years.
One second, his mouth is crushing mine, all hunger and promise and barely leashed violence, and the next he’s pulling back so hard it steals the air from my lungs. His hands fall away like he’s been burned, not by me, but by whatever thought slams into him without mercy.
The room chills instantly, the warmth ripped out so fast it feels like whiplash. His jaw locks, breath coming hard, eyes going distant in a way that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with something older and crueler than either of us.
“Raze?” I step toward him, reaching without thinking. “What—”
“Don’t!” The word is a growl, raw and sharp, and it stops me cold. He turns away, dragging a hand through his hair like he’s trying to tear the thought out by force. “You can’t… fuck! You can’t look at me like that. You can’t kiss me like that!”
“Like w-what?” My voice cracks despite myself. “Like I’m here?”
He laughs once, harsh and empty. “Like you’re staying.”
“So that’s your excuse to keep your distance?
” I close the gap between us with steps that feel deliberate and reckless in equal measure, my chin lifting in the way I know makes his jaw tighten.
“You kissed me like you were starving, and now you want to pretend it was some kind of strategic miscalculation?”
The frost on the window cracks audibly. “It’s pointless!”
“Then why did you come to see me?” The question lands with the weight of everything that has been building since the moment he told me his name. “Why are you here, at two in the morning, pacing like a caged animal?”
He turns, and the look on his face strips away every layer of ice he has built around himself, and it’s sufficient to make my breath catch.
The distance collapses without conscious choice, his hands finding my waist with enough force to lift me back a step, and then his mouth is on mine again, and this time there is nothing gentle about it.
The kiss tears through me like a current, tasting of frost and the desperate need that comes from three centuries of believing contentment was something that happened to other people.
My hands fist against his shirt, pulling him closer even as something screams that this is the edge of a cliff.
My teeth find his lower lip, and I bite hard enough to draw a growl from his chest.
Then he wrenches himself away, and the look that crosses his face is close enough to horror to make my chest ache.
“This can’t happen, Roxy.” The words grind out between breaths too fast for someone who usually controls every molecule of air around him. “You’re human. The witch’s laws are absolute. Being with you is futile.” His chest heaves with heavy breaths.
I watch him retreat for exactly three seconds.
Then the stubbornness that has kept me alive in this place makes my decision for me. I cross the space between us and press my palm flat against his chest, right over his sternum where the ice is thickest, and hold.
The reaction is immediate and devastating.
The frost fractures beneath my hand, cracks splitting outward as heat bleeds through my skin into him, and I watch the crystalline armor dissolve in waves spreading from where my fingers press against scales and skin.
His breath catches, sharp and almost painful, his pupils blowing wide as his eyes lock onto mine with something bordering on frantic.
Beneath my palm, his heartbeat slams against his ribs like something trying to break free, and the cold, the pervasive, bone-deep cold that has radiated off him since the moment I met him, simply stops.
Warmth floods through the contact, tentative at first, then rushing forward like a dam breaking, everything it was holding back pouring through in a single staggering wave.
“There you are,” I whisper.
Something in him gives, and his hands come up and hold mine there, pressing my palm harder against his chest as if the contact is the only thing keeping him tethered.
Then his mouth finds mine again, and this kiss is different, deeper, hungrier.
It’s the kind that peels back every pretense and leaves nothing between us except the truth of how badly we both want this.
His hands slide down my arms, fingers trailing heat that makes my skin prickle, and when they find the hem of my shirt, they pause, a question posed through touch.
I pull it over my head myself without breaking eye contact, because if he is going to see me, all of me, then he does it without flinching.
The sound that leaves his throat when his gaze drops is low, rough, and saturated with want built over longer than either of us has been willing to admit.
His hands spread across my waist with a reverence that contradicts the brutality waiting behind it, and the contrast between tenderness and the hunger in his eyes makes my pulse hammer hard enough to hear.
He lifts me, hands gripping my thighs hard enough to leave marks blooming purple by morning, and I wrap my legs around his waist without hesitation, nails raking down his back through fabric and muscle until he hisses against my mouth and his hips press forward with enough pressure to arch my spine involuntarily.
His lips drag along my throat, teeth scraping the pulse point with enough force to make my entire body shudder.
“You want to know what happens when a dragon stops holding back?” His breath ghosts across my collarbone, hot enough to burn.
“Show me.” The words come out steady despite the trembling in my thighs, and I dig my nails in harder, dragging them down his spine until he snarls.
The sound is answer enough.
He carries me to the bed and follows me down in one fluid motion that covers my body with his weight, grounding and overwhelming at once.
His mouth turns bruising against my throat, one hand fisting in my hair to tilt my head back and bare my neck completely, and the claiming starts at the junction where my neck meets my shoulder, his teeth sinking in with enough force to make pain and pleasure detonate simultaneously.
Ice traces the edges of the wound as it forms, not enough to freeze but enough to sting, a cold seal pressed into skin that is already burning, and the sensation spreads outward in shivering waves until my entire body is trembling beneath him with something that has nothing to do with fear.
He pulls back from the bite slowly, mouth dragging a wet, deliberate trail down from the wound toward my collarbone, tongue pressing flat against my pulse before teeth scrape across it hard enough to make my hips jerk upward without permission.
His free hand works the clasp of my bra with an impatience that borders on violent, the fabric parting and sliding away before I have finished processing the loss of it, and then his mouth moves lower, open and warm against the curve of my breast. The sound that escapes me is sharp enough to make him pause for a fraction of a second before he continues, taking his time in a way that contradicts every other urgency pouring off him in waves.
His tongue traces the underside of one breast in a slow, deliberate stroke, and when his teeth close around the peak, the bite is hard enough to send a jolt straight down through my center, white-hot and instantaneous.
My fingers rake into his hair and pull hard to make him growl against my skin, the vibration of it traveling through my ribcage and settling somewhere low and molten, and his response is to bite down again, harder, until my back bows off the mattress.
My thighs press closed around his hip in an involuntary clench that makes the friction between us sharp and immediate.
He shifts, his hands sliding beneath my hips to strip the rest of my clothes away with a roughness that leaves no room for gentleness or hesitation, fabric peeling off skin that is already damp and flushed.
Then his shirt is gone, and his jeans following with less care, and when the full length of his bare chest presses against mine, the contact hits like a live current.
Warmth bleeds through every point where skin meets skin, radiating outward from him in a way it never has before, and the contrast between that heat and the cold still clinging to his hands where they grip my hips makes my breath stutter in my chest.
I reach up and drag my nails down his sternum, hard enough to leave red lines that well and darken beneath my fingertips, and the way his jaw locks, the way the muscle in his cheek twitches with the effort of keeping his breathing even, tells me exactly how thin the thread he is holding himself by has become.
“Easy… or I won’t be, Firecracker,” he warns.
Ice threads along the scratches I leave, frost tracing the paths my nails carve through his skin, and instead of pulling my hands away, I lean up and press my mouth against the marks, feeling the frost dissolve beneath my lips as the warmth between us chases it back.
“I’m not scared of you,” I fire back.