Chapter Four #3
I slam her into the wall again, and she scratches my forearm open from elbow to wrist. I barely feel it through the heat. My blood runs down my arm and drips onto the stone.
“Witch,” I say, low.
“Monster,” she says back, and is that pride I see?
I drop to my knees.
The stone is warm under me, almost feverish, and I don’t think about it.
I think about the torn leather hanging off her hips, the skin underneath, the way her stomach contracts when my breath hits it.
I shove the ruined fabric aside with both hands, grip her thighs hard enough to feel muscle tense under my palms, and put my mouth on her.
Because she doesn’t get to run and then pretend I don’t exist.
She doesn’t get to slip through my fingers and sleep soundly while I’m left with her scent rotting through my skull. This isn’t want. This is extraction—pulling her out of me the only way I know how, and if I have to go through her to do it, she should’ve run faster.
My tongue drags through her, slow, and she tastes like a fucking nightmare. I press deeper, harder, fingers digging crescents into her thighs while her back arches off the wall and her whole body bows toward my mouth like I’m the thing she was running to this entire time.
Her hand fists in my hair. Pulls. Hard enough that my scalp screams and my eyes water and I want more of it.
I want her to rip it out by the roots. I want her to hurt me the way I hurt her.
I want the scales balanced in blood and bruises and the sounds she’s making now, ragged and furious and climbing.
“I hate you.” She pants above me, her hips rolling against my mouth, her fingers twisting tighter. “I hate you, I hate you, I…”
I suck hard and her words dissolve into a sound that isn’t language anymore.
Good. Shut up. Stop talking. Stop making me—
Her thighs shake against my hands. I feel the moment she gets close, feel it in the desperation of her grip, her breathing fracturing, and I pull back just enough to press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, teeth grazing skin, tasting the salt of her sweat. She makes a sound that could gut a man.
“Say my name,” I growl. “Say it and I’ll finish what I started.”
“Fuck you.”
I bite down. She jerks.
“Legend.” It comes out strangled, furious, soaked in everything she doesn’t want. Fucking me. “Legend, you fucking—”
I give her what she wants because it’s the only way to shut her up.
My mouth crashes down on her, starving, lips sealing around her clit. No bullshit or words. I drag my tongue through her wet slit, tasting her arousal. Her thighs clamp around my head, her hips jerking up to meet my mouth, and I growl against her, the vibration making her whole body shudder.
She comes with a broken scream, her back arching off the stone, her fingers twisting in my hair hard enough to rip strands free.
My name tears out of her—Legend—raw and ragged.
The pressure behind my sternum explodes, a white-hot surge that blinds me for a second.
My vision swims with gold, with heat, with the taste of her still thick on my tongue.
I don’t stop. Can’t. My mouth works her through it, lips and teeth and tongue relentless, drinking down every shudder, every gasp, every desperate sound she makes.
The cavern swallows the noise, amplifies it, sends it back at us in waves—her voice, my name, the wet, filthy sounds of my mouth on her, the ragged edge of her breathing.
Her thighs tremble, her body going boneless as the last of the orgasm rips through her. I pull back just enough to look up at her, my chin wet with her, my lips swollen, my vision still rimmed in gold. Her eyes are dark, dilated, her lips parted, her breath coming in sharp, uneven gasps.
My lip twitches.
Because I ain’t done.
A growl, deep and possessive, too vast for a human throat, vibrating through my ribs from the place I haven’t fucking visited yet. I chalk it up to rage. To adrenaline. To the fact that I haven’t slept properly in weeks and my body’s eating itself alive.
I come back up her body and she bites my shoulder this time, breaking skin, and the pain is so clean and bright it makes me laugh. A dark, breathless sound that tastes like blood.
I kiss her with my blood still on her lips and hers still on my tongue. The combination does something to me that I’ll never explain to another living soul and never intend to try.
Pinning her wrists above her head with one hand, my other grips her hip, hauling her up. She wraps her legs around me, heels digging into the backs of my thighs, pulling me closer with a violence that matches my own. The warm stone behind her back. My weight pressing her into it.
“Fuck. You.” I say it against her mouth, and it comes out guttural, stripped. “And your fucking witchery.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me, and there she stands. Wild and untamed and completely mine—
“Monster,” she whispers, and her voice has that particular frequency that she only uses with me. It’s somewhere around the hate vibes. “You’re a monster and you don’t even know what you’ve done.”
I push into her.
The first brutal inch of me splits her open, and the sound she makes isn’t a gasp—it’s a choked half-sob, half-scream, as if I reached down her throat and tore it from her body.
Her hips jerk up to meet me even as her wrists twist in my grip, nails carving half-moons into my skin. I can feel the way the rough stone grinds into her flesh with every shift of my weight.
I don’t move. Not yet.
I stay buried to the hilt, my cock throbbing inside her, the heat of her cunt so tight it borders on pain, and I let her feel every inch of me, every ridge, every pulse. Her breath comes in ragged bursts against my mouth, her lips parted, her teeth bared.
What do you want, my little monster…you want me to beg?
Her scent fills the air with every passing second. I swear if you cut me open you’ll find it there, buried in the darkest part of my brain.
I don’t give her time to adjust.
I don’t give her time to think.
I just move.
“Then remember the monster,” I tell her. “Remember what he felt like.”
Slow at first, and the slowness is its own kind of cruelty, dragging every nerve she has through it.
Her jaw set like she’s trying to bolt, like if she can just keep her eyes open and her expression hard she can stay angry, stay wild, stay fucking mine—fuck—anything but what she’s becoming around me.
Her pussy clenches in tight, stuttering pulses, her body already answering what her face refuses to admit. I feel it everywhere, up my spine, through my muscles, every clench pulling me in.
Then faster, because I can’t hold the leash.
Because she makes a sound low in her throat, broken and helpless and furious all at once, and every civilized thing in me just. Goes.
Poof. The rhythm turns rough, deliberate, and the cavern throws it all back at us, the wet slap of skin on skin, her sounds warped and enormous in the dark, and something animal at the base of my skull decides that’s the best thing it’s ever heard.
This is the violence of being lied to. Of hating her.
Of wanting her even if I have to fucking fake it.
The absolute stripped-down want. I frame it as punishment because that’s the only frame that keeps me standing up inside it.
Taking. Using. Shutting her up before she can say another thing that works its way into me and refuses to dissolve.
That is all this is.
I tell myself that while her fingers dig welts into my back and she pulls me in harder and says my name in a way that means something entirely different—the way you say a name when you want to see what it does to the person who owns it.
The vines creep closer. Thorned and dark, curling at the boundary of the space where we’re tangled together, held there. Watching. Waiting for permission. They never quite touch. I don’t fucking care.
I move slower. Deeper. Each thrust deliberate, grinding, and she wraps around me, arms and legs, pulling me in until there’s no space left between us, until I can feel her heartbeat against my chest.
My vision flares gold again. Longer this time.
Complete. And the growl that tears through my chest isn’t mine, too deep, too old, too vast for a human throat.
It moves through the stone, the vines, and the wings beating somewhere in the dark.
Her cry meets it, tangles with it, and for one impossible second—I feel something behind a door flung wide.
Whatever’s on the other side looks back at me with a hunger I can’t name and don’t want to.
Then she says it.
Quiet. Cruel and precise, the way she says everything that’s designed to leave a mark.
“I’ll always win.”
I have nothing. I give nothing. Because I’m afraid I’ll give everything.
My forehead presses to hers. The contact hits me like a blow to the back of the knees. The temperature of her skin. The specific smell of ash and sea salt and blood between us.
Ours.
I wake sitting up.
The bed. Rathe. My hands brace against the mattress and my lungs drag air in a rhythm that isn’t controlled, the sheets beneath my palms damp.
What the fuck was that?
Nothing. Just my own body.
Arabella twitches beside me, her breathing even, her pale hair fanned across the pillow. She doesn’t stir. I stare at the shape of her in the dark and feel…absolutely nothing.
I look down at my hands and pause. Black streaks stain my fingers, through the creases.
What. The. Fuck?