Chapter Seventeen Taissa #3
Have wingless pigs flown? She stares down at him, mouth agape, just as the lead photographer calls out a pose suggestion. But it’s like she’s been plunged underwater from the sheer shock of Locke saying sorry.
She can’t hear anything but the muffled rumble of a voice—and something about a neck?
—but then Kion is sitting up underneath her, face strangely gentle, pulling her further up his body—and then he’s kissing her on her neck, his lips roving against her skin, one hand pressed on her back to keep her upright as she shivers, and the other on her waist. He’s sucking and nibbling and causing her to fall, completely, into pieces.
Taissa bites back a whimper, running her hands though his thick hair, her head tipping back in exquisite pleasure…
Oh, Morgana.
Taissa exhales shakily as her blood turns to honey, moving through her veins at a warm, sluggish pace. Every muscle in her body is fighting the urge not to writhe atop him like some wanton creature, but the aching between her legs has grown, and she thinks she might die from the want of it.
When his teeth scrape ever so gently against her skin, a small, husky noise escapes her lips. Kion goes still beneath her as the flashes of the cameras surround them.
When he looks back up at her, he’s flushed—flushed and breathing hard, staring at her with…with some emotion she’s never seen from him before. Not annoyance, not irritation, not even the rare wry expression he makes when they’re both witnessing some bullshittery.
She doesn’t know what this is. But it makes her feel like she’s glowing.
Maybe it’s an impulse. Maybe it’s sheer horniness. Maybe it’s the need to see how far she can take this before they go right back to hating each other, before she remembers all that he’s ruined for her.
In truth, Taissa doesn’t know what possesses her to do what she does next—she only knows that she does it, unprompted by the director.
Taissa well and properly snogs him.
She crushes her lips against his, her nose bumping against his in her haste.
For a horrible moment, he’s frozen beneath her, and she draws back, certain she’s made a terrible mistake. But then his hand is at the back of her head, guiding her right back to him, and he’s kissing her, kissing her back.
Kion Locke is kissing her back.
He’s kissing her like he’s a starving man, kissing her like he’s devouring her.
Taissa wraps her arms loosely around his shoulders, shivering as he deepens the kiss, unable to extricate herself from him, like they’re magnetic, both of them, joined together by opposites.
This kiss is purely Kion—this kiss is rough and hot and stubborn, with coarse edges and a blazing, consuming energy that sends little jolts of pleasure down Taissa’s spine.
She tangles her hands in that wonderfully thick, mussed hair of his, burning for him, burning for his touch, burning—
Burning.
She breaks the kiss with a gasp of pain, a hand flying to her breastbone, where it feels like her skin is bubbling underneath a white-hot flame.
“What is it?” Kion’s eyes are wide and slightly bloodshot. That unfairly plump bottom lip of his looks like it’s been stung by a hornet (she did indeed bite it a few times). But Taissa doesn’t notice any of this now as she gasps, agonized. “Sweetheart, did I hurt you?”
It’s the tattoo; it’s the Bonding glyph. Frantic, Taissa staggers out of bed, hardly seeing Niamh’s concerned face or the photographers’ wary ones as she breathes hard. Cronus—it’s Cronus. He’s…He’s in trouble.
“Taissa?” But the little voice, nothing more than a faint vestige of broken sound inside her head, is not Cronus’s old, gruff one. It’s young and scared and—and it can’t be possible. She smells leather and summer rain.
It’s not possible. She’s too far away.
And they took her away from her, they burned the Bond from her skin.
All except that little piece of tattoo, underneath her new glyph…
“Sansa?” Taissa thinks back, and she feels her little wyvern there with them. Her mischief, her playfulness…her fear.
Taissa’s only vaguely aware of Kion, striding toward her with a stricken look on his face, only vaguely aware of how he takes her by the shoulders, dark eyes wide with panic.
“Taissa. Miss…you…so…scared…don’t…feel…well…”
“Sansa? How is this—What’s happening?” Taissa closes her eyes, and for a moment she sees her, her little Winged, curled up in the Wyverns’ stables. Her golden eyes are drooping; her dark scales look…faded. All around her, the other wyverns are asleep.
No, not asleep.
Ill. Ill.
They have the same pallor as the cockatrices did, the same stone-stillness, barely breathing. Horror cuts through Taissa like a knife as the vision breaks, as Sansa goes silent.
How many times has she imagined she heard her wyvern?
How many times has she felt her, there with her?
Taissa knows she hasn’t imagined it. Not when, suddenly, she feels different.
Like she’s been sleeping with white noise, only to have it suddenly cut off, and for her to wake in something more than silence…
the startling absence of a sound she hadn’t realized she’d grown used to.
All this time, Sansa has been with her—somehow. Faintly.
And now…she’s gone.