Chapter 67 Darkened Knight of The Vexamen Prison
Sapphire
There is no key to open the cage door.
“Here!” Dellilian is now inside the cage, holding the keys in her mouth. Her tail wags happily.
“Thanks, sweet girl.”
A five-pound, oversize skeleton key is dropped in my hand. And Dellilian ebbs away in a gust of smoke.
I unlock the door with a wobbly hand. It drops from my bloody, frozen fingers twice, but there is no voice on the other side. No one acknowledging my arrival. No one piercing the veil of this silent dungeon to let me know they see me.
I fight the need to curl into a ball against the hypothermic symptoms slowing my movements.
As the door cracks, I lift a torch from the wall to guide me inside the pit beyond the bars.
It’s bigger than I thought. The shadows eat up the light of my torch as I can hardly see two inches in front of my own face.
And it’s too quiet. Not the absence of sound, but a muffling of a haunted, residual noise, like gasps of pain inside a velvet coffin.
“Niklaus…” I whisper.
After everything we’ve been through, I have yet to be this terrified. Will he remember me after God knows what’s been done to him? Has he been harboring a sea of hatred for me since I vanished?
My hand quivers in the damp, icy air as I extend my arm to catch even the slightest glimpse of a man. Of Niklaus.
An exhale.
I freeze.
“Niklaus.” My throat swells from holding back a mountain of remorse. “It’s…me.”
Though I can’t see anything in front of me, I can sense a person a few steps away. I can feel a set of eyes on me.
Holding my breath, I take two large steps forward and lengthen my arm all the way out.
The shuddering flame illuminates a man standing upright, chained to a large pole. Arms bound behind his back. A metal cuff over his mouth, attached to the iron collar around his neck. Black hair swept away from his face in a bun on the back of his head.
My legs falter. It’s the eyes.
Everything about him has changed.
But not those silky, sapphire blue eyes.
The beard. How time has added creases and lines to his forehead and around his eyes. The protruding, hardened muscles of a stone masonry, roped with veins and flexing tendons. Sculpted from years of punishment and combat. The raised ink decorating his ribs and chest.
“Oh my god,” I weep.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Niklaus, ten years older than the man I knew, just stares at me. The scrutiny. The mixed implosion of emotions makes me feel like a mouse that has unwittingly stumbled into the cage of a lion.
“I—I—oh, Niklaus…”
I come to my senses after seconds of breathing through the shock and regret keeling me over. He’s chained to a pole. How long as he been here? How long has been tortured and abused? He is covered in welts, bruises, blisters, and the most jagged, gutting scars I have ever seen.
I fumble forward with nerves ebbing and flowing like live wires crossing through each limb. My chest touches his chest. I’m so close, feeling the brush of his breath against mine as I loop my arms around his body to snap the key into the lock and turn it, hearing the click of cogs being unlatched.
Once the clunky lock topples to the ground, I unwind the chains in a hurry. His eyes bore into me without daring to look away.
The last of the chains clatter to the ground at our feet. And he steps off the post without a moment of hesitation. Metal cuff still attached to his mouth, though he doesn’t seem to notice. He advances on me. That glare unreadable. Steady and cold.
I hold my hands up in surrender. Tears swell over my bottom lashes as I look up at him helplessly.
“I am sorry. I am so sorry.” I can’t breathe. The loss of never seeing the man I left behind again blasts my senses. He’s no longer here.
I left him here all alone.
My sobs rattle me to my core.
After a quiet pause, Niklaus lunges for me, hands clutching my collarbone—a centimeter away from wrapping around my throat. And he pins me to the bars so suddenly I shriek, crying out at the sudden burst of aggression that is more than warranted and so well-deserved.
“Kill me!” I sob violently, still holding my hands up to show I will not fight back. “I—I can never forgive myself. I thought I made it back—but it’s been—it’s been, oh God, it’s been ten years!”
He hesitates to grip the life out of me with that crazed, homicidal look in his eyes.
“I deserve to fucking die for this, Niklaus! I’m so sorry!”
He tilts his head. Each muscle ripples like a coiled beast is trying to tear through his skin to kill me itself. It’s as if he’s been taunted before with the hope that I’ve come back. Like he’s in complete denial that it’s actually me standing here in front of him.
“But—you have to know it wasn’t on purpose. I swear to God, Niklaus, I would have never left you behind of my own will!”
A flicker of confusion sweeps across his stoic, callous expression.
His hands are fortified steel around me, rough like sandpaper against my chest. They twitch and tighten, and he observes me like an animal trying to decide how much of a threat I am.
Seeing him again heightens every feeling I’ve tried to bury since the moments I began to fall for him in that asylum.
It’s an unstoppable force fusing my soul to his.
I am no longer capable of feeling hatred for him.
No longer adept at denying the way my heart jumps and writhes in my chest, frantic to feel his body press against mine.
I pant against the metal bar plastered over his handsome lips.
If I am going to die here, there isn’t a chance in hell I’ll depart this world without telling him my heart is his. After all he’s been through, the truth will not be held from him. No matter if he rejects it or not.
“I love you.” I’ve carried these words like a knife tucked under my ribs. “I am sorry! I love you, and I’ve fought my way back to you. I will always fight my way back to you. I love you, Niklaus!”
Each purge of tears is hollowing out my chest with an insatiable yearning that is being horrifically bludgeoned by guilt.
The word love strikes him like a bolt of lightning to his chest. He balks back, releasing my upper body, stunned and speechless. His lashes flutter, short, tight bursts of blinking.
Tears form over his eyes like molten glass.
“I fell for you in that asylum,” I whisper in an injured, fragmented voice.
Niklaus is dreadfully cautious and probing my body language for any signs of deception. He has had ten years of living with the enemy. Ten years of rejecting hope that I would come back for him. Ten years of getting used to constant lies and betrayal.
“I loved you when you held me that night after Meridei put us through that treatment.”
The bits of faded memory dilate his pupils. His breathing is loud and leaden, huffing through his nose as if he has been running up a mountain, as if he is working hard not to cry. That gorgeous stare flares wide, like he’s witnessing a ghost no one else can see.
With vigilant steps forward, he occupies the air I breathe once more. Staring down at me to gauge my reaction. And unexpectedly, his forehead pushes against mine, and he closes his eyes.
I whimper at the sudden, inviting contact.
“I’ve come back to you,” I whisper sweetly.
Niklaus’s grunt is muffled against the metal cuff, and in a stern frenzy, he anchors his hips into mine, caging me against his body. The impulsive need to be as close to me as possible thrums a hot shiver of desire low in my belly.
I melt into the hard lines of him. My hands act on their own impulses by exploring every scar, every burn, ever beating he has endured since I’ve been gone.
And he doesn’t seem to mind at all, in fact, my delicate touch spurs him on.
He nudges his nose into my hair, inhaling my scent like he has been waiting years to capture that aroma again.
“Oh,” I purr as he jerks my waist against him even harder. That rough, primal touch triggers a static pulse between my legs. And I squirm in his arms as the ache to have more of him develops thick and sweltering in my veins.
His hands tear into my undergarment black slip until his knuckles turn white.
“You can have me,” I pant against his face. “My love, you can have me however you want me.”
My words are storm clouds over a dry wilderness. He lifts his gaze, and something in him, if only a small portion—heals. Though a mild hesitation still hovers close by.
I act quickly, guiding his fingers between my legs and dipping his fingers beneath my panties, giving him the shove he needs to feel how wet I am for him.
Niklaus growls, the noise reverberating deep in his chest. I buckle forward at the sound, something inside of me purring and at his mercy.
His last thought of caution and restraint clearly snaps as he racks me against the bars, curling his fingers inside me.
The act is less methodical and more feral, acting purely on carnal instinct.
Sliding his two fingers in and out has me gasping, then grappling at his flexed muscles along his upper back. And he dips his face into my neck, continuing to breathe in my scent like a wild beast.
“Do you need to be inside me?” I rasp against his ear, delirious from the feeling of his hard cock grazing my side through his pants.
Niklaus’s groan is gravelly and ferocious. And I immediately help him unbuckle, taking his pulsing shaft in the palm of my hand. His hands seize the bars behind my head, completely at my mercy as I stroke his warm length.
He is a rabid creature, breathing erratically and grimacing down at me.
After another moment of exploring his visceral reactions to me touching him, Niklaus rips off my panties and hoists my legs around his hips. My moan turns into a howl as the head of his cock pushes into my entrance, testing how much of his girth will ease into me.
“I don’t want you to be gentle with me,” I tell him, arching my back to give him a better angle. To open me up for him. “I want to feel everything you need to get out from these last ten years.”
Niklaus hesitates with only his tip being soaked by my arousal.
“Do whatever you want with me,” I offer sensually, undulating another half inch on his cock. “I am all yours. Make love to me as hard as you need, baby.”
I have unleashed a monster, starved and filled to the brim with uncontrollable aggression. The raw, predatory energy seething off him is only making me more wet, more willing, and surrendering all control to him.
He doesn’t ease into me. Niklaus slams me against the bars and sinking into the hilt. In and out, slow but rough, jolting me upright, and causing my breasts to bounce against his collarbone in the process.
My head falls back, and my yelps can be heard from all corners of this underground prison. It will ensure sentinels and guardians break out in search of us. But none of that matters right now. He fucks me with a war on his shoulders and years of torture sinking into his every thought.
“I love you. God, I love you so much, Niklaus!”
I am so sorry. Please forgive me. I will never leave you again.
His ravaging growls and grunts liquify my spine and induce a gnawing, flesh-starved version of myself that grinds against him, matching his violent rhythm, sawing in and out.
It’s minutes or hours of Niklaus taking me to the stone floor, hooking his hands around my ankles, and bending my legs back until the tops of my thighs are parallel to the cold ground.
I am relaxed putty under his weight. A contortionist with my legs behind my head for him to twist and fuck without complaint.
The rocking of his hips and head resting against mine pulses into my clit. And I translate a look he gives me. One that urges me to understand what he needs. ‘Say it again.’
“I love you,” I whisper against the metal plate.
His eyes roll back into his head, and we fall into an incapacitating orgasm together. It burns into my legs and up my spine.
Niklaus bears no concern for coming inside me.
He pulses his pelvis against my throbbing center, filling me up without a second thought.
Slowly, Niklaus releases the backs of my knees, and my legs return to their extended position, numb and trembling.
The tension in the air does not subside after he sits up to look down at me. The backs of his fingers glide along the inside of my thigh. Lost in thought. Unable to break physical contact with me, maybe out of fear that I’ll evaporate into the Nightlung again.
“I can get us out of here,” I say hoarsely.
Cornflower blue irises flash up to my gaze.
“I met my father as a teenager. One of his alters figured out how I can control the time-traveling. I’m still learning, obviously, but I was able to return. Here.”
He is as still as death.
I swallow. “I can bring you home.”
Chest moves up and down in long, noticeable drags.
“You got Sophia and Jack out of here.” My voice cracks. “You kept your promise.”
Niklaus remains rooted to the ground but closes his eyes for three long seconds. Each breath is full of a decade of knowledge he now has that I do not.
“Will you let me keep mine? Can I bring you home?”
The shadows around his gaze are dull with exhaustion.
He bows toward me, running the metal plate across his mouth over my thigh as if leaving a trail of kisses.
And needing no additional time to recover, Niklaus scoops me into his lap and slides his tip along my sensitive clit, then eases himself into me.
This time it’s lazier and without the underlying pent-up anger.
His face nestles between my breasts. My hips roll back and forth, the second orgasm much easier to achieve.
And as Niklaus clutches me to him, roaring as he slams upward one last time to spill his cum again, I hold him close and let my love harden like armor around us, like a sword that cracks the door of the Nightlung open, and I throw it overtop of us.
Thirty years in the future.