36. Chapter Thirty-Four #2
He leaned close enough to make my knees buckle. “That’s funny, considering that you do both. Perhaps you don’t like looking into mirrors.”
I opened my mouth to lash out but stopped short. His breath brushed my cheek and suddenly I couldn’t speak.
He only chuckled. “You know…a mortal cannot hide desire from a god. Certainly not one she’s bonded to.” His lips hovered just above mine, the faintest ghost of contact. The Weave blazed like fire in my veins. “I can smell it every time your pulse stumbles.”
Oh, how mortifying. He tilted his head, a lock of his golden hair falling over his right eye.
“Wicked little Seer,” he whispered, lips brushing my temple. “Admit it to me. You’re jealous of a goddess’s touch.”
The words found something fragile in me and broke it. Heat rushed my face. Fury tangled with something I dared not name. “You haven’t denied it. Your connection with her.” I forced the words out, bitter as ash on the tongue.
He leaned back just enough for his gaze to search my face, like he was etching every flicker of fire into memory. He didn’t laugh this time. Instead, his voice came low, steady. “And if I don’t?”
I stopped breathing.
His hand slammed against the wall beside my head, caging me in yet again. His lips were a hair’s breadth from mine. “What burns in you isn’t about her, Little Seer. It’s about me.”
My voice came raw. “Another non-answer.”
His eyes darkened, burning with something feral. “Then allow me to give you one.”
I opened my mouth to retort, but the words were lost as his lips grazed mine—not a kiss, not yet, just the barest brush that left embers in its wake.
He lingered, tormenting me with closeness.
The room was in stasis. I was unaware of everything aside from his breath against mine. His next words made my knees weaken.
“Let me show you what you tempt me to do…that even a Goddess of War cannot.”
The bond pulsed wild and furious between us, and my breath came ragged.
Every ounce of my restraint threatened to shatter.
One hand lifted to my mouth. His thumb ghosted over my lower lip with deliberate slowness.
His eyes were hooded with an emotion I’d never seen in him, and gods, how my thighs ached.
“I’ve been thinking all day,” he murmured, voice dangerous. “About finishing what I started last night, and how bad of an idea it might be.”
His thumb pressed harder, dragging just enough to make me dizzy. My pulse danced through my veins. “Unfortunately for both of us, I tend to like bad ideas. So, you have one chance to stop me, and this is it. If you don’t…”
I didn’t. I really should have. But the scent of forest frosted pine and leather surrounded me until I was drowning in it.
How easily he was able to remove my logical senses.
It was all he needed, an iota of my hesitation.
He could read me like one of my favorite tomes, and I was weak.
I wanted to know what he tasted like more than I wanted the satisfaction of winning whatever game we were playing… and he knew it.
With a wicked curve of his mouth, he closed the gap.
His lips crashed against mine—slow at first, claiming, testing, burning.
The world folded in on itself. No castle, no War Goddess, no cursed Fates.
Only him. Only the impossible press of his mouth, the sharp drag of his teeth on my lip, and the low growl reverberating in his chest as if he’d been starving for this.
For me.
My knees gave out, the ground gone. But before I could fall, he caught me.
His hands gripped my thighs, lifting me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. A sound broke from my throat, shock and wonder tangled together.
He swallowed it with another kiss, harder, deeper, as if daring me to breathe without him.
Desire flooded through me, fire in my veins. It undid every vow, every wall I’d never let crumble before this.
For a heartbeat, his groans fractured into something raw and unguarded. Like he knew it too; that this wasn’t just hunger. That it was mine, and his, and the Old Gods be damned for it. Then it was gone, buried under the relentless pursuit of want, as though he’d never let it slip.
He pressed me harder against the wall, and the sounds he made—low, guttural—were nothing like the smooth, mocking tones he wielded so easily.
For a breath, it was untamed, desperate—animalistic need.
Then his teeth grazed my lip, pulling me back into fire and dominance, reminding me who he was: a god who took what he wanted.
And I wanted more…so much more. I deepened the kiss, shoving my hands into his thick golden locks soliciting another delicious growl from his chest.
He broke away, breath ragged. The faintest ghost of a smile was there, but his glowing eyes betrayed him. No pupils anymore. Just endless glowing depths. It was the look of a god who had lost his grip, even if only for a heartbeat.
His forehead met mine.
“Now you know,” he rasped, restraint gone. “What even a god cannot keep caged.”
Before I could gather air, he turned and carried me the short distance to the bed like I weighed nothing at all. He lay me down, not with tenderness, but with the command of a divine. He tugged the blankets over me as if I were a reckless child he’d finally corralled.
I should have screamed, should have cursed him.
But then I saw it—his chest heaving. Green runes wrapped in a golden hue, pulsing bright beneath his skin.
The bond burned between us, betraying the truth.
He was barely holding his godhood in check.
My eyes blurred, and I couldn’t find my voice, not with him looking at me like… that.
He chuckled—low, wicked, shaking his head. “If I’d realized that’s what it would take to shut your defiant mouth, Little Seer,” he breathed, leaning close enough for his grin to press against my lips. “I’d have done it long ago.”
The mist swallowed him before I could speak again. His dark chuckle echoed through the chamber. One blink, and he was gone, like he’d never been there at all.
I lay there shaking. A multitude of emotions wreaked havoc through my body, reminding me of the first time I had drawn blood.
And now I’d tasted wantonness.
The forbidden thing. The untouchable. Sacred, dangerous, drilled into me since childhood as inviolate—and he had shattered it as if rules were but cobwebs in his path.
But wasn't that what he always was? Tairngire, who never bowed, never bent, never played the way the Old Gods demanded. A thunderstorm in the shape of a man, untamed and unrelenting.
And now he had made himself infinitely more dangerous.
Not for what he could do to me—I already knew that—but for what I’d felt when his mouth claimed mine.
But he still held secrets, things I knew he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me.
Things I needed to know to keep myself safe.
I knew all this, and I still let him unravel me, invited it last night.
My Fate was sealed when my own body betrayed itself to him.
I pressed my palms to my face as if I could erase the memory. But it burned into me—the tension from last night, tonight’s kiss, that taste of pine and sin. A thing I was never meant to feel, a thing I knew would completely unravel me if I let it.
My thighs clenched beneath the sheets, and I wished I hadn’t noticed the slickness there. I’d read about it in quiet shame tucked away in the deepest tomes, those passages of desire and what it meant when a body prepared for the act.
Had he known? Could he smell it, like he claimed?
I buried my face in the pillows, groaning. I wasn’t supposed to feel this. Not ever. And yet here I was—undone and trembling in the storm he just created.
Wanting more.
My pulse roared in my ears. I hated him for this. For making me feel like my own body was a stranger, for shattering the rules I’d clung to all my life, and most of all, for leaving me aching and misting away to gods knew where.
Damn it all to Karthmor.