Chapter 26 #2
Aurora dipped her finger into one of the pots, unsure at first what to paint or where. But the longer she listened to the heartbeat, the more certain she became. As if moving of their own accord, her fingers met Theron’s cheekbones.
“Reactions?” she asked, her head feeling as if it was already floating.
“I suspect this one will be like an aphrodisiac,” he replied calmly, painting another line down her arm, then her leg.
A familiar throbbing began at her core as he repeated his simple lines on her other arm and leg.
Aurora shook her head, trying to think past it, to focus on her own task.
Scales. She was moved to draw scales. Sweeping across his cheekbones, running across his broad shoulders, racing down the corded muscle of his arms, and atop his thick thighs.
“Turn around,” she said.
He complied, pulling his hair aside for her. She painted him down the full length of his spine. It was only once she’d painted the last that she felt the compulsion to paint fade away as insubstantial as mist.
“Now you,” Theron said, his voice gruff.
Aurora complied, shivering as he painted long, broad strokes down her spine and the backs of her legs. When he was done, he set the paint aside and stood, offering her his hand.
“Come.”
He led her to the start of the labyrinth. Together, they stepped through, heeding the relentless call of the heart of Aureum. When all light was lost, Aurora looked up at Theron and gasped. The paint glowed like starlight in the night sky.
“Theron…”
“I know,” he said, grinning. He looked down at his arm. “Scales?”
“It just felt right.” She shrugged.
Fitting then, that he’d painted her with sleek lines that called to mind the unicorn.
They made their way deeper and deeper, and yet this time, the cold didn’t bother her.
The paint seemed to seep into her bones, warming her from the inside out…
among other things. As they reached the end, both she and Theron were panting.
“Aurora,” he ground out.
“Mmm?” she replied, trying not to moan.
“We circle the heart. We wait until the heartbeat quiets to a low thrum.”
Merciful Triad, it would take a miracle not to pounce on him before then. With her keen eyesight, she could see his erection bobbing with his every step. If he had stopped for even a moment, she might have pushed him against the wall and put her tongue on it.
“Then we enact the story. You run. I chase.”
“I have to be honest, I don’t think I’m going to be trying very hard to outrun you in my current state,” she said between clenched teeth.
He hissed out a strained chuckle.
“Oh, you’ll run. You’ll run as fast as your feet can carry you. Because right now, I feel more like a beast than a man. If you don’t wear me down before I catch you, I’ll fuck you so hard no amount of healing will allow you to walk straight for at least a week.”
“Oh…”
Aurora swallowed. That still didn’t sound so bad.
But when they walked over the threshold of the underground chamber and her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the predatory glint in his eyes.
The scales glinted gold against his deep brown skin, taking on a strange surreality.
In that moment, he looked like a dragon of myth given a man’s form.
A shiver ran down her spine. Overwhelming desire and primal fear battled for supremacy inside her.
He tipped his chin, urging her to make her way to the stones ringing the monolith.
She still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around this impossible place.
The heartbeat drowned out all other sounds, its pulse overpowering her own.
But another strange compulsion hit her then, as it had the first time she had come here.
The stone circle called to her. She could almost swear the closer she got to it, the more something inside her demanded she touch it, just as her artefact had.
Unable to stop herself, Aurora reached out, her fingers scraping across its rough surface.
She wasn’t so much tugged as dragged under.
Down and down and down. When she opened her eyes to the vision, she knew it was not the future she glimpsed, but a time long forgotten.
She stood just outside the stone circle, moonlight overhead, except she was not herself.
Her skin was not her own, her bones too big, her steps too graceful.
The man beckoning her forward was both a stranger and yet…
not. His hair was a luminous gold, his eyes as dark as midnight, his skin tanned.
Horns spiraled up and away from where they sat atop his skull, and claws tipped the fingers of his outstretched hand.
She reached forward, the skin of her arm like the bark of a sapling, her nails black and curved like talons.
Aurora blinked, and another man stood in front of her, this time with a beast’s ears atop his head and a single proud horn parting the thick, cerulean waves of his hair.
Her own arm was strong and thick and covered in chestnut fur.
Again and again, the person before her changed and she with them.
Blue eyes, black, brown, gold, grey, green, violet, red, until she was certain she’d seen a thousand different sets of eyes staring at her from a thousand different faces.
Sometimes she stood beckoning him towards the monolith, and sometimes it was another who urged her forward, sometimes even their genders were reversed.
And yet she knew the look in those eyes, had seen it mere moments before, had vowed to chase it across the Tapestry. They were Theron’s.
The vision ended abruptly, and she was once more Aurora, her fated Theron. He knelt before her, his golden eyes swimming with concern. She shook her head, pressing a kiss to his lips in reassurance as the heartbeat drowned out even the sound of her own breaths.
No matter what her fated had looked like, Theron had always found her, always looked at her as though she were the very breath in his lungs, and in every lifetime, the two of them had stood here in the heart of Aureum, heeding its call.
Aurora walked around the circle as she had a thousand times before in a thousand different lifetimes.
She looked over her shoulder as Theron followed, stalking her steps, an erotic thrill shooting down to her very toes.
They ringed the monolith once, twice, three times, the heartbeat growing louder and louder until she could feel it in her bones.
The aphrodisiac pumped through her system, making her ache as never before.
Then between one breath and the next, the heartbeat quieted.
Had she always been panting this hard? Had Theron?
“Aurora,” he ground out, his voice full of threat and promise. She dared look back at him and swallowed. “Run.”
He was right.
She really was going to run.
Instinct screamed at her. Aurora sped off, the ground soft enough to be kind to her feet and hard enough to allow her to gain distance. But she would never outrun him on open ground. She veered for the nearest patch of trees, hoping they would slow him down.
Excitement and terror made her shriek as she heard his heavy footfalls closing in.
Impossibly, she gained speed, nearly flying across the ancient landscape.
She fairly flung herself between the trees, instinctively avoiding roots, stretching out her hand and hooking it on a tree trunk to execute hairpin twists and turns.
Yet no matter her unnatural speed and uncanny ability to navigate the forest as if born under its branches, Theron gained ground on her.
She put off his pursuit as long as she could, but she could feel herself slowing.
Worse, the trees were thinning. She’d just barely made it across the next clearing when a thick band of muscle wrapped around her waist and lifted her high in the air.
Aurora screeched in surprise, wriggling in his grasp, but it was no use.
The dragon had caught her. Theron slowed his steps, his breath ragged, his skin slick with sweat.
He stopped on the edge of the clearing, going to his knees amongst the soft soil and the carpet of wildflowers, just in front of a moss-covered boulder.
“You’re mine now,” he growled, forcing her to her hands and knees, gripping her hips in his hands, his own thighs braced on either side of hers.
His cock pressed against her entrance and stole her breath as he thrust it inside in a single, brutal movement.
He ground it inside her, pressing his length as deep as he could.
She moaned pitifully at the extreme fullness, suddenly grateful he’d prepared her as well as he had.
She wouldn’t have survived his first thrust otherwise.
“Say you’re mine.”
He pulled out, his next thrust even more devastating.
“I’m yours!” she cried.
He forced her legs shut with his thighs and pulled out entirely, only to bury himself to the hilt. Aurora gasped. He felt twice as thick inside her.
“Tell me you love my cock!”
“I l-love it,” she whimpered as his thrusts began speeding up.
Then he shifted the angle of penetration, and Aurora saw stars.
A strangled scream was forced from her lips as her orgasm took her by surprise.
Her walls clamped down on his cock, and yet his thrusts only became more gloriously brutal, wringing wave after wave of pleasure from her as he took his fill.
This is what she’d always wanted—to be conquered.
To know in her bones there was no fighting him, no fleeing.
To revel in his inescapable ferocity. As he neared his own climax, the thrust became impossibly harder, deeper, rougher.
Only when he spilled inside her did he slow the pace of his thrusts.
Breath ragged and core throbbing, Aurora’s wrists buckled, sending her to her elbows, her forehead pressed into a tickling patch of wildflowers. Theron chuckled.
“Oh, my sweet wife. That was just to take the edge off.”
“You…you just…orgasmed. Even you…need to rest,” she retorted between frantic gulps of air.