Chapter 24
NOVA
Wes’s nostrils flared, his pupils wide as he scanned the length of me. “Are you okay?”
I blinked rapidly, disoriented for two long seconds as I was enveloped by his familiar woodsy scent and intensity. I should’ve been frightened by his anger, his manhandling, but I wasn’t. If anything, something inside me relaxed.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said finally. “I’m fine,” I repeated, as if reinforcing the statement to myself. I’d survived Roman Graves, at least for tonight.
Wes was visibly calming himself, his chest rising and falling. “Why the fuck would you do that to me?”
I choked on a shocked laugh. “To you? What the hell did it have to do with you?”
Wes didn’t move an inch, still encasing me with his tall, muscled frame. “You promised me you would be careful. You—”
“I saw you,” I blurted, cutting him off. “With the woman you were looking for.”
A crease formed in Wes’s forehead. He had the nerve to look confused.
“You had your mission, right? And I had mine. I needed to get into the VIP section to find my friend before she gets knocked up by an oil oligarch.”
“Did you find her?” he asked.
I glared past him at the opposite wall. “No.”
Wes reached for my face, his gentle touch a sharp contrast to his barely-contained wrath.
He gently tilted my chin up to look at him.
“The woman I was speaking to was my ex’s friend.
I hadn’t seen her in many years, and—” His eyes melted into something wounded, haunted.
“I didn’t expect to see her here. It was like seeing a ghost.”
My previous fire slowly extinguished. None of my assumptions stood in the face of Wes’s obvious anguish. I remembered the way he’d hung his head, and the woman had placed a hand on his shoulder. I exhaled.
“Did anyone hurt you?” he asked, a different variation of his initial question, as if fulfilling a compulsive need for absolute certainty.
“No,” I said. “No one touched me.”
I didn’t need to say that last part, but I did.
Wes exhaled slowly with a nod. “I promised you I would explain my past, and I will. This week. Okay?”
I said the word before my mind even had time to catch up. “Okay.”
I was confused, overwhelmed, and more fucking aroused than I’d ever been in my life, all at once. What had happened in that bedroom with Roman was still ripe in my body, an urgent need in desperate search of relief.
Wes stared at my lips. His hand skated down to my throat. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His thumb brushed over my pulse, and I shuddered.
I studied every inch of his face—the tense muscles of his jaw, the hazel tones of his irises. My body tingled, my nerves aching for touch.
“Then don’t,” I whispered, almost a plea.
“I can’t stop,” he said. His forehead brushed against mine. “I’ve been trying since the day we met, and I can’t fucking stop.”
I didn’t have time to process his words, their desperation, because the distance between our lips closed at the exact moment our invisible cord finally snapped.
Wes’s lips crashed into mine. Our kiss was urgent and raw, lips moving as if to devour. The steady pulse between my thighs became a roaring demand. When his thigh moved between my legs and brushed against the aching bundle of nerves, my breathy moan was desperate.
Wes held me tighter at the sound, all of him going rigid. “Goddammit, Nova,” he growled, an inch from my lips. “If you grind against my leg one more time, I swear to God.”
My cheeks warmed, but I was too turned on to feel any shame. “What are you swearing to him?” I asked, my voice unrecognizable to my own ears. I was high, untethered, unable to curb the darkness I’d buried for too long. “That you’ll make me come?”
Wes laughed darkly. “You fucking wish.”
In one swift movement, Wes had lifted me into his arms. My arms looped his head, feeling the silkiness of his buzzed dark hair.
He leaned into my touch with a small shudder.
His lips met my neck, and I went utterly still, pulsing with pleasure as he sucked and nibbled at the sensitive flesh.
Another soft noise escaped me, and Wes bit down.
The shock of pain sent intense waves of pleasure through every inch of me.
My core fucking hurt. It pressed against Wes’s waist, where something big and hard pulsed beneath me as he held me against the wall.
“Please,” I begged.
Wes stopped his trail of kisses across my collarbone, as if he was trying to taste every inch of me.
“Oh, how I knew I’d be obsessed with the sound of your begging,” he said, his low, raspy voice skating across my flesh.
“I am not—”
Wes gripped my face. “What did I say about lying to me, Nova?”
I swallowed. When I realized Wes did not see his question as rhetorical, I opened my mouth. “Not to…”
His hard gaze softened. “Good girl.”
Everything inside me relaxed. My mind melted, and my body flooded with pleasure. Inside those two words was an entire world—a world I never thought could belong to me, a world I’d denied and feared and hated since I first realized I was different.
Those two words were the final nail in the coffin. It was an open and shut case.
I was a freak.
Wes frowned at the lone tear that escaped my eye and captured the droplet with a kiss.
But I wasn’t the only freak.
My hips ground against his, feeling the bulge in his black pants, the evidence of his lust that mirrored my own.
Wes’s jaw clenched. “It’s a shame you’re such a pretty crier. It makes me want to do very bad things to you.”
I kissed him again, needing to taste him the same as he’d tasted me.
I wanted more, more, more—I never wanted any of this to stop.
I never wanted to come back down. Wes tugged on my bottom lip with his teeth.
His tongue slowly explored my mouth, teasing mine before pulling back.
Nothing about us felt confusing anymore.
It only felt right.
Warmth flooded my body. His fingers brushed a sensitive, hard nipple, and I gasped.
“You have no fucking idea how sexy you looked in my rope,” Wes hissed, still circling the nipple as I bucked against him. “But nothing compares to the way you looked at me when you were hypnotized.”
He cursed, his eyes getting a faraway look about them as if he were lost in the memory. “God, Nova.” He chuckled, darkness churning in his irises as he nodded. “Yeah, that summarizes it, actually. You were looking up at me like I was your God.”
Everything inside of me stilled. The sacrilege was unfathomable to an older part of me, a part that had grown up in church pews attending marathon services that lasted hours, sometimes days.
And yet, the idea that my desire could be sacred, my lust holy—it was intriguing, powerfully sensual. I wanted to be consumed by my devotion. I wanted to be able to kiss divinity, to taste it, to have it pour inside me and remake me in its image.
“Just like that, Nova,” Wes praised. “It was just like that.” A tremor rolled through him.
When his lips curved, I felt as though I was absolved. Atoned. Pure—not for being desireless—but for being desired. Desired as I was, darkness and light.
I waited, watching his lips. I was pliable in his strong hold. I waited for Wes to tell me what to do and how to do it.
“Perfect.”
A scream pierced through our explosive moment. The blood-curdling sound of it made my blood run cold.
I slid down Wes’s body back to the floor. After another scream, Wes pinned me with a severe look.
“You are not to move out of arm’s length of me, do you understand?”
This sounded like domming, the thing Wes swore he would never do again. But given the feral look in his eyes and his reaction to the auction, Wes seemed past the point of caring about his self-imposed moratorium.
I nodded. Wes intertwined his fingers with mine, and we followed the sound of feminine terror. Luckily, it was not coming from the VIP section.
The commotion led us and a few other curious guests into a room where a small crowd huddled around a nude woman on a sacrificial altar.
Jayne, Archer, and a harem of cloaked and masked beasts and demons lorded over a woman strapped to the wooden table.
Jayne tied a cloth gag around her mouth, muffling her screams.
I recognized her as the woman who’d been flirting with Archer and asking to scene with him at the soirée.
“Are they roleplaying a human sacrifice?” I hissed to Wes.
Wes tracked everyone’s movements, holding me against his chest.
There was an open duffel bag at the woman’s feet, and Archer pulled what appeared to be a pizza cutter from it.
The woman screamed and writhed. “No, no, no.” The word was barely decipherable through the gag.
Archer trailed a metal spike attached to his finger up the woman’s leg as she wrestled with her restraints. I saw a low spark of electricity where the metal met skin. But when Archer stood next to her head, he wielded the pizza cutter like a weapon, theatrically looking out over the crowd.
“What’s a Midsummer party without a sacrifice to the gods?” he asked.
The demons and beasts cheered.
I twisted to look up at Wes, waiting for him to make sense of what was happening with growing alarm.
“They’re using a violet wand and a body contact cable,” Wes whispered. “It’s making Archer’s body the conductor of electricity, as well as any metal tools he’s holding. He could touch her with his bare finger and shock her, but the metal is more intense.”
“To another year of abundance, good fortune, and even better sex. To another year of beautiful, willing victims…” He trailed the metal finger down the woman’s arm as she stared up at him, pleading with wide, teary eyes. “To another year of The Circle!”
Anyone holding a drink raised their glass.
The girl shook her head, screaming into her gag. Jayne stroked her hair once before stepping away, eyes warm and unaffected by the woman’s pleas.
“After ascension comes descension. We must face death before we are reborn. These are the initiation rites of our ancestors,” Jayne said, her silky voice holding us in a trance.
“Let us travel to the chthonic together, the underworld, so that we may bring back wisdom and fertile soil ripe for seeding. The Circle, the ouroboros, death and birth and death and birth…”
Rhythmic percussion and chanting—possibly Latin—played through hidden speakers. Jayne found my eyes. She smiled.
Wes’s grip on my waist tightened. I held my breath, the intensity making it hard to discern theater from reality.
Archer brought the pizza cutter down to the woman’s skin. He slid it slowly across her neck as she screamed like he was literally cutting off her head.
My heart beat wildly. The room was silent aside from the buzz of the metal and the strange music. And soon, the screaming girl went just as deathly quiet.
She went utterly still, her eyes glassy and faraway. There was only a faint pink line on her neck from the dull blade.
Archer lifted the pizza cutter into the air like a valiant knight.
The room cheered. One of the demons grabbed a nearby woman and plunged his fingers inside her cunt, as if overcome with lust. Her eyes rolled back with a moan.
Another took out his cock and slammed it inside a willing mouth, hand gripping hair roughly.
The rest of the room quickly devolved into the same animalistic frenzy, as if Archer and Jayne truly had unleashed some potent, supernatural force upon them.
Archer seemed to have powered off his electric implement, as his touch no longer shocked the woman. He slid two fingers in and out of the woman’s mouth before slowly dragging them to her clit, bringing her back out of her shock with slow circles. Jayne joined him, playing with the girl’s tits.
Almost gouging out Wes’s eye with the tip of my wings, I spun around to face him. “Oops, sorry, keep forgetting about those,” I said as he dodged. “What the fuck was that?” I hissed.
“They were using such an intense voltage, implement, and delicate body part, she could’ve genuinely believed they were slitting her throat. Which triggered a complete ego death.”
My mouth dropped open. “That’s… horrifying.”
“It’s edge play, that’s for certain,” Wes said, glancing over my shoulder at Archer and Jayne. “Kink with a high-risk profile, in this case, psychologically. I just hope they did their due diligence during negotiations and are going to take care of her properly the rest of the night.”
I looked back at the girl, and Wes once again dodged my wings.
“You’ve lost your wing privileges,” he muttered.
I caught the exact moment she orgasmed, Jayne’s lips around one of her breasts as Archer brought her over the edge with his fingers. Her body shook as a guttural cry tore through her.
Wes held me still as he removed my wings.
“I was once told to never let a man clip my wings,” I said, turning back toward him with small smile.
“I didn’t clip them. I stole them. You are now a fairy far easier to trap,” he drawled, setting them on the floor so he could touch me with both hands again.
It was alarming that the fear from Archer and Jayne’s violent display had done nothing to curb my appetites. Watching someone else shake with a powerful orgasm was like torture, a reminder of my own thirst.
A thirst I wasn’t sure had ever been fully quenched, not once in my life.
All around us, wealthy attendees and plus ones were devouring each other. Appendages and toys were entering holes, mouths sucking, tongues exploring, hips thrusting.
Wes and I stood in the center of the carnal storm, smiling like we were sharing some private joke none of them would ever understand.
Wes glanced around at the tangled bodies with a vague, bored expression. It was nothing like how he looked at me. “At a certain point, it’s all just flesh, ain’t it?”
My smile widened. I savored each slip of his slight southern twang. “Does flesh not interest you, Wes?”
His eyes returned to mine, their heat curling my toes. He leaned in close, hovering just a few inches from my waiting lips.
“Oh, baby,” he said. “It interests me.” His grin mirrored mine as he pulled back slightly. “But what interests me more is beauty. Beauty that will never die—beauty that grows stronger and wiser with age. Beauty gained from experience and love and grief and resilience.”
Bodily sounds and low music and slaps and moans faded to oblivion. Only Wes’s voice remained.
“I don’t merely desire your body, Nova. I need your soul.”