Chapter Nineteen #2
“Allow me,” he murmurs, gentle fingers reaching up to replace her own. She lets him—her hands falling uselessly to her side as he delicately pulls pin after pin from her hair. They disappear the moment they’ve been freed. “Magic is a tricky thing. Sometimes it’s stubborn.”
“Are you sure it’s not just your magic?”
His fingers pause, catching her eyes in the mirror. “Are you accusing me of stubbornness, Anna? Because I can assure you, it pales in comparison to yours.”
His tone is flat, but there’s the tiniest curve resting at the corner of his mouth that assures her he’s more amused than annoyed. “I suppose we’re both stubborn in our own way,” she concedes.
Khiran breathes a laugh, going back to removing the pins. “Hold out your hand.” He must have reached most of the magicked ones, because he starts placing them in her open palm. “Are you ready for me to remove the rest of it?”
The rest of it. The glamour he’s placed over her skin.
She reacts before she can remember to hide it, a wince so obvious she sees it in her reflection the moment he does.
“Anna—”
“Yes,” she blurts, eager to prevent whatever words sit on his tongue. She doesn’t want to hear them. “Yes, it’s fine. Just do it.”
She expects the magic to leave the same way he placed it, his palms skimming over her skin and a smooth, gentle warmth, but there’s no such warning.
It fades with the same untheatrical ease as the pins.
A single blink is all it takes before she’s faced with the pale patches of skin that have cursed her for centuries.
She moves to turn away from her reflection.
Khiran doesn’t let her.
His hands are on her shoulders, pinning her in place. Anna screws her eyes shut and feels him sigh into her hair. “How will you ever see yourself if you never look?”
He’s a wall at her back—unyielding—but the way his arm crosses over her chest, hand fanning over her collar, feels nothing like a cage. Even though it should. Even though it is.
His words are a warm breath against her flushed skin, lips so close to her ear as they whisper. “Look, Anna.”
She whimpers, shaking her head.
“Yes,” he murmurs, a gentle command. His lips skim over the sensitive skin below her ear—prompting goosebumps in his wake. “Open your eyes.”
She does. She opens her eyes. She looks.
Her hair is a wavy mess, the blotched skin on her arms and chest made more prominent by the flush he’s inspired.
Her first instinct is to turn away, to close her eyes and refuse to open them until long after he’s gone, but the sight of his long, tapered fingers cradled, possessively, around her collar makes her pause.
There is a fire building, igniting her blood and burning her resolve.
Over her shoulder, he meets her reflection’s gaze—the storm in his eyes dark and dangerous in ways that arouse anticipation instead of fear.
The hand at her throat drifts, finger hooking on the strap of her dress. A pause, a chance to run the way she has run for centuries. It shouldn’t be easier this way. Having him at her back, bearing witness to her shame as he exposes her, shouldn’t be easier than facing her reflection alone.
But it is.
Heavens, it is, because there is no disgust curdling his gaze. No mocking sneer. He has always seen her skin with a kindness she could never harbor herself. She swallows the fear, dips her chin in the tiniest of nods.
He slides one strap down, then the other.
The weight of the dress hangs, just covering her breasts.
His fingers slide, achingly gentle, over the largest of marks resting over her heart.
“There are galaxies painted across your skin,” he murmurs.
“Nebulas and universes mapped out like artwork, designed solely for one to get lost in.”
A single, burning kiss to her bare shoulder, so soft she could have imagined it, if not for the proof in their reflection. “Anna … You are exquisite.”
Her breath hitches, lips parted around words she can’t find. There’s a familiar heat dancing across her skin before settling low in her belly. There’s something open in his expression; a deep and desperate longing darkening his eyes and illuminated by the naked truth of the mirror’s reflection.
She turns to face him and it’s gone—wiped clean with a neutrality that begs her to believe it was never anything else. But she saw it. Even if it was only visible for the barest hint of a moment, it was there.
“You love me,” she breathes.
His gaze snaps to hers, piercing in intensity. She feels it so keenly she is little more than a butterfly on a pin. Then he grins—so crooked and charming it might have been distracting were she anyone else “My, the centuries have made you bold.”
It’s not a denial and they both know it. She steps closer—feels the heat of his chest brush her own as her eyes search his. “How long?”
His smile falters at the corners. “That’s enough, now. Cease this.”
“Why?”
“You are looking for something that must not exist.” “Khiran—”
“Has the world not taught you, yet?” he snaps, lip curled. “We don’t get to keep the things we want.”
Her breath leaves her, an ache blooming over her chest. When she finally finds her voice, it’s a soft echo from the past. “Am I someone to be kept?”
His gaze is sharp. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
She steps toward him, warmth humming beneath her skin and heart fluttering against her ribs.
Her hands reach between them, tracing the lapels of his suit and feeling the heavy rise and fall of his chest beneath the fine fabric.
“Maybe not keep, then.” She swallows thickly, dredging up every last bit of courage so she can meet his eyes. “But to have?”
Have to hold. Have for now—here—in the darkness of her flat and the sound of a city that never sleeps seeping between the brick.
“Anna …” Her name leaves him like a strangled plea.
Her body flushes, she can feel it down to the tips of her curled toes, but the desire outweighs the embarrassment. Anna tilts her chin up. An invitation. “Because I want that, too,” she breathes. “I want you.”
His hand traces her temple. “Such a troublesome creature,” he murmurs, but there’s affection lacing every syllable.
He leans down, their noses touching and his lips so close Anna can feel them whisper against her own.
“This wasn’t meant to happen.” His fingertips thread into her hair, her jaw cradled in his palms and his eyes burning with such an intensity that she’s drowning in it.
“You weren’t meant to possess me so completely. You haunt me, Anna.”
Haunt. Such a peculiar word for someone who can’t die, but she understands.
There isn’t a day she wakes up that she doesn’t wonder where he is; not a night where she doesn’t look forward to seeing if the morning will bring him.
And she knows, with the same certainty that the sun will rise, that kissing him will only fuel that fire instead of dousing it.
But fear is for mortals, and she’s already faced flames once before and emerged from the ashes unscathed. Reborn.
Kissing him is like that.
Soft, gentle pressure as she closes the space between them; a single match burning in the dark. That split second delay before its flame catches the kindling.
He surges against her, his lips desperate and bruising as her fingers tangle in the soft dark hair at the back of his neck.
One of his hands settles on her hip, drawing her closer to his chest even as his steps take her back, back, back until it feels a little bit like they’re dancing all over again.
Then her shoulders meet plaster, and his body becomes a wall she doesn’t want to escape.
He is wildfire, burning away the oxygen faster than she can take a breath. Her fingers scramble to undo the buttons of his collar, but the way his lips drag against her pulse makes her hands tremble.
“Anna,” he murmurs between kisses along her jaw.
“You will be the death of me.” Anna feels a tug of cloth, hears the sound of glass beads raining and scattering along the floorboards as her dress pools lower on her chest—the straps constricting her shoulders gone.
His teeth drag against her collar, hands clenching in the fabric of her dress in the small of her waist.
“You can’t die,” she reminds him, but the words are more breath than voice.
The buttons of his shirt join the beads scattered on the floor.
Beneath her naked palms, his skin feels cool compared to the fever warming her blood.
She’s desperate for more touch, more friction.
Boldly, she hooks a knee over his hip and tastes the groan that spills from his lips.
“Yet you’ll have me begging for it,” he pants, shrugging out of his shirt. He grins against her lips. “What do the French call it again?”
She smiles at the joke and pulls him closer. The feel of skin on skin, the fingers tracing the laced hem of her silk chemise, pulls his name from her lips like a prayer before she answers. “La petite mort.”
The little death.
Only, she thinks they may have it wrong, because as her legs lift and wrap around his hips, as she feels him pressed firmly between her thighs, Anna thinks she’s never felt so alive.
She wishes her stockings were off, wishes she had thought to wiggle out of her dress and chemise instead of having it bunched around her waist, but his kisses are drugging and she can’t bring herself to untangle her fingers from his hair.
When his hips flex, grinding against her, she gives up on the thought entirely.
There is no knowing how long she has wanted this—wanted him.
Loving him came to her the way snow melts into creeks, then rivers, then oceans.
Time has engraved him into her heart the way the rivers have carved canyons and glaciers have cut fjords.
And as his hands push past the folds of her chemise and curl against her, Anna knows each caress is only going to make her love for him grow deeper.
Khiran gives a shuddering sigh against her parted mouth as she cants her hips against his hand. “You’re so—”
“Don’t say it,” she says, but the way his fingers move against her slick flesh robs the order of any commanding edge, so she adds, “I’m well aware of what I am.”
He grins against the line of her jaw, his breath a hot whisper in her ear. “I doubt that, but you’ll learn. If it takes me centuries, I’ll spend each and every one showing you how devastatingly beautiful you are.”
She doesn’t know how to respond—can’t hold the words long enough to put them into order—not with the way his thumb is circling against her.
Her fingers tighten in his hair, spine arching and the back of her head meeting the plaster.
She can’t tell if the shadows dancing on the ceiling are real or just her. “Khiran—”
“Shh,” he murmurs against her neck, laying a gentle kiss against her pulse. “I know.”
But he doesn’t, because even though he’s plucking at all the right strings, it isn’t what she wants. She wants to watch his face change, feel his breath hitch. She wants to know what it feels like to make a god tremble. “You,” she gasps, bringing her mouth to his. “I want it with you.”
Maybe it’s the shadows, but Anna has never seen his eyes so dark—bright waters on a star-studded night.
If she looks long enough, she thinks she can find entire universes in his gaze.
He doesn’t ask if she’s sure, doesn’t try to dissuade her.
Anna appreciates that he trusts her to know what she wants; that time has taught him her ways as surely as it has taught her his.
There is no fumbling of buttons, not for him.
The fabric of his trousers, the cold metal of his belt buckle, melts away like water, and leaves her pressed against nothing but his warm, bare skin.
More magic. Funny how she had never thought of the ways it could be applied here.
She almost asks him to take the dress too, but the way his hand fists at the fabric at her hips as he presses against her stokes a desire she didn’t know she had.
Then he’s sliding against her, into her, and her lips part around a quiet gasp.
With the position she’s in, partially dressed and pressed against the wall, it shouldn’t be slow—shouldn’t be romantic—but it is.
Anna can feel his body flexing against her with every thrust; can feel the self-control straining his back and shoulders beneath her palms. Her nails bite into his skin, and he groans against her mouth, soft praises spilling from his lips between panting breaths. Her ears catch some, but not all.
“Wanted you for so long … I can’t remember what it feels like without you under my skin … how will I ever go on without wanting more of you?”
There’s a pressure building, a coil tightening, that has her keening as he rocks against her, but his eyes ground her.
Hold her steady. There’s a tremble in her limbs, an ache begging for release, but she can feel his hand clenching at her hip, hear the desperation in his every moaning breath, and knows they’re climbing together.
Then his other hand slides between their bodies, his head dropping to her shoulder as his fingers stroke her. He chokes on a whisper. “Anna.”
She comes apart with a cry, every nerve singing and every thought spread everywhere and nowhere all at once.
It is only his lips, gentle and pliant against her own gasping mouth, that pulls the pieces of her back together.
The brief feeling of emptiness as he slides out, made right only by the caress of his hands along the planes of her back as he carries her to the bed.
The dress is gone before she meets the sheets.
She stares up at him, his soft dark curls tumbling over his shoulder and his eyes so dark they reach new shades of blue.
He is so hopelessly beautiful, she should have realized how doomed she was the moment she saw him the way he saw himself.
Her hand traces the outline of his face, sighing when he turns to kiss the inside of her wrist.
“Stay,” she says. An order, a wish. She’s still so tangled with the stars that she’s not sure when she’ll come down, but she knows she wants him to be there when she does. “Don’t go.”
He sighs, resting his forehead against her own. Their noses brush. “Tonight,” he answers. A promise and a warning.
Tonight, because always isn’t an option.