Clara
Shmoo is waiting on the courtyard wall when Aldric carries me through the gate, and the sight of that judgmental gray loaf nearly makes me cry.
“Hi, baby,” I croak. “Mommy got kidnapped.”
He hops down, trots alongside Aldric’s boots, and yowls up at us the entire way across the courtyard—a long, scolding aria that needs no translation. You left. You were gone past dinner. There were no snacks. I have filed a complaint.
“Yes, we’re aware,” Aldric tells him. “You may bill us.”
Aldric brings me into the great hall, and I brace myself for a crime scene.
Three trout sat unattended on the table for hours while the only witness was a cat with three hundred years of documented fish larceny.
But when Aldric sets me down, the trout are still there.
All three. Untouched. Shmoo looks up at them with the strained dignity of a monk who has been fasting against his will.
“You didn’t eat them.” I stare at him. “You had unsupervised fish for hours, and you didn’t eat them.”
Shmoo licks a paw like the accusation is beneath him.
“He waited,” Aldric says quietly. “He knew something was wrong.”
My throat tightens up for the twentieth time tonight, and it’s not even midnight. I crouch and press my face into Shmoo’s gray fur, and he permits it, purring like an idling Porsche, which from him is basically a tearful airport reunion.
“You get the biggest one,” I whisper into his neck. “Don’t tell your dad.”
“I heard that,” Aldric mutters.
I roll my eyes. “You have one ear. Statistically, you shouldn’t have.”
“The important part of it still works,” he fires back.
In the kitchen, Aldric strikes a match for the stove because old habits die harder than undead warlords. As he heats up dinner, the room fills with a divine smell, and my stomach roars loud enough that Aldric turns from the stove with one eyebrow raised.
“When did you last eat?”
“Breakfast.” I sigh dramatically. “A hundred years ago.”
He doesn’t say anything, even though I can tell he wants to. But he does move faster.
I don’t bother with the great hall and the table he set there. I eat standing at the kitchen counter, right out of the pan. I demolish it like a raccoon in a dumpster. Aldric leans against the counter and watches me with an odd expression.
“Slow down,” he says. “It will not flee.”
“You don’t know that.” I point my fork at him. “Unlikely but not impossible. I’ve learned I always need to expect the unexpected.”
Aldric reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb ghosting over my cheekbone, below the split lip, careful of everything.
“Not anymore,” he says.
I swallow the last potato past the lump in my throat. “Okay. New topic before I cry into the pan. I need a bath. I have blood on my chin.”
“Already anticipated.”
Upstairs, he lights candles and starts filling the tub, thanks to our brand-new water heater.
I smirk at the expression on his face. “It seems that you’re getting used to modern amenities.”
“I will confess, it is efficient.” He tests the water with his hand, adjusts the tap.
Then he glances at me sideways, and his voice drops.
“Though I would still heat every bucket. Carry every one up those stairs. If the machine failed tomorrow, you would never once bathe in cold water. I want you to understand that.”
“That’s why I love you,” I say, and mean it with my whole heart. “Not the castle. Not the dragon hoard. The buckets.”
I sink into the water and make a sound that’s honestly indecent.
Heat wraps around every ache Marco and his men caused—my wrenched shoulders, my bruised arms, the places where their fingers dug in.
Aldric kneels beside the tub with the good soap and the pitcher, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and starts washing my hair without needing to be asked.
He pours warm water over my scalp, then works up a lather with those enormous, careful hands, and I go boneless against the copper.
“Your shoulder,” I murmur, eyes closed. “The bullet. Does it hurt?”
“It complains. I ignore it. We have an arrangement, my wounds and I.” His fingers move down to my neck, kneading out the knots. “Yours concern me more.”
“Mine are temporary. That’s my whole brand. Temporary damage, permanent sarcasm.”
He washes the dried blood from my chin with a cloth, so gently I barely feel it, his jaw tight the entire time.
Then my shoulders. My arms, lifting each one from the water like it’s made of glass.
He soaps down my spine, and I lean forward over my knees and let him.
The last of the cellar drains out of me and swirls away with the bathwater.
When I lean back, I splash him. Not on purpose. Mostly not on purpose.
His shirt goes translucent across the chest, and the blue glow blazes through the wet fabric.
The linen clings to every ridge of muscle and every line of ink, and I forget what I was going to say.
I forget most words. The fabric is plastered to his sternum, to the shadowed valley of parted ribs, and the light pulses there, faster now, because he’s caught me looking.
“Clara.” The man manages to put a warning and invitation in the same two syllables.
“Your shirt’s wet,” I say intelligently.
Aldric raises an eyebrow. “You wet it.”
“Well.” Heat that has nothing to do with the water heater suffuses me, chasing out the last of today’s coldness.
I was abducted. Locked in a cellar. A man I love killed for me today.
I am alive, and he is here, and suddenly there’s only one thing I want.
“You should probably take it off. For laundry reasons.”
“Laundry reasons,” he repeats dryly.
I rise up onto my knees in the water and take his collar in both fists.
“Aldric.” I pull him close enough that his breath cools my wet lips. “Take me to bed and fuck me. I need to feel alive tonight, and you’re the only dead man for the job.”
I feel the growl building in his chest between my legs.
He hauls me out of the tub dripping and carries me through the doorway. My wet body is soaking his ruined shirt further while I undo the buttons with clumsy fingers. By the time my back hits the mattress, I’ve got the shirt hanging off one of his shoulders and the room is bathed in blue.
He comes down over me, and I press a palm flat against his chest before he gets any ideas about running this campaign.
“No. Tonight I’m in charge.” I push, and he lets me, rolling onto his back. “I want to ride you. I want to look at it while I do.”
“At…” He follows my gaze to his glowing heart.
“At you,” I say. “All of you.”
I peel the wet shirt the rest of the way off him and fight his pants down his legs while he watches me.
His cock lies hard against his stomach, the ladder of barbells gleaming in the blue light.
I straddle his hips and take him in one hand.
When I line him up, his hands find my waist. They’re trembling.
I sink down.
I’m still not used to the stretch, but I take him in inch by inch anyway, every cold rung of metal.
By the time he’s in as deep as my body allows, we’re both breathing like we climbed the turret.
Beneath me, his heart is going wild. The crystal pulses fast and bright between the parted ribs, throwing blue light up across my breasts, my throat, my face.
“Look at that,” I whisper. “It’s racing.”
“You are sitting on me,” he grits out. “Naked. Alive. Of course it races.”
I start to move. Slow at first, rolling my hips, learning the angle.
Aldric’s head presses back into the pillow, and his fingers flex on my waist. The piercings do their unfair, magnificent work with every rise and fall, and I brace my palms on his stomach and ride him while the light strobes faster beneath my hands.
“Clara,” he hisses. His thumb moves from my hip, finds my slick and swollen clit, and circles, making my rhythm stutter. “There. Take what you need. Take everything.”
“Bossy.” I grind down hard and watch his eye lose focus. “Even on your back. Even—” I moan when he presses against my clit just as his cock nudges my G-spot, “—even with me driving.”
“You love it.”
“I love you. There’s a difference.”
His thumb presses in ever tighter circles, and I’m no longer thinking about differences.
I ride him faster as the ancient bed frame creaks, and the whole room pulses blue in time with his heartbeat, faster and faster.
He’s chanting a mixture of my name and old German, and the coil of pleasure in my belly winds tight, tighter.
And then I look down at the crystallized heart, and I want to…
I want to hold it.
It’s completely insane, but I can’t deny it. My hand slides up his sternum, over scar and ink, to the edge of the parted ribs.
Aldric’s brows come together. “Clara?”
“Can I?” I’m barely breathing. His thumb has stopped. Everything has stopped except the light, hammering against my palm through the gap in the bone. “I want to hold your heart while I come.”
His growl is absolutely feral. It does things to me.
Aldric’s hand comes up and covers mine, and he guides my fingers past the ivory cage, into the cool hollow of his chest, and my fingertips touch the crystal.
The second I do, I feel something awaken inside me—a power I’ll dwell on when I’m not impaled on my revenant.
The crystal is smooth. It’s cold. A blue heart frozen into stone. I close my fingers around it, careful, cradling him in my fist like I’m cradling him with my pussy, and I start moving again. I’m riding him with his heart in my hand, and his thumb finds my clit, and I just… detonate.
“Aldric!”
I come with my fingers wrapped around his actual heart, crying out his name, clenching around him in waves, and I feel the crystal stutter and blaze against my palm as he loses the last threads of his control.
Aldric roars.
His hips slam up, and he pours himself into me in hard, endless pulses.
There’s so much, always so impossibly much, filling me past capacity while I’m still shuddering through my own aftershocks.
It has nowhere to go. It squeezes out around him with every kick of his cock, hot and obscene, sliding down his shaft, over his balls, onto the sheets.
Aldric groans through his orgasm with his hand pressed over mine, keeping my fingers on his heart like he’ll die a second death if I let go.
I collapse onto his chest, my hand still resting inside him, his cum cooling on my thighs, both of us wrecked.
“Clara.” His voice is gravelly. “No one has ever… You touched it.”
“Well.” I press a kiss to the rib beside my own knuckles. “It’s mine now. I checked the deed.”
His laugh rumbles up through me, shaking us both, and beneath my palm his heart beats steadily, keeping time in a castle that is finally, entirely, our home.