Chapter 5 #2
I was already close, the tension coiling tight and low in my gut.
His other hand came up to cup my breast, his thumb rasping over my nipple.
The dual assault was too much. Pleasure crested, a sharp, shocking wave that broke through me.
I came with a silent, shuddering gasp, my pussy clenching around the water, around his clever fingers.
My body shook against his, the tremors seeming to go on and on, muted by the liquid warmth surrounding us.
He held me through it, his arms solid, his breath steadying against my skin.
As the last pulses faded, he slowly withdrew his hand.
I felt empty, sensitive, utterly spent. He didn’t let me float away.
He turned me again to face him, his eyes dark pools in the candlelight.
Water sluiced down the hard planes of his chest. Without a word, he hooked his hands under my thighs and lifted me.
I wrapped my legs around his waist on instinct, the movement causing the water to lap at our shoulders.
I felt the thick head of his cock nudge against my entrance, hot and insistent even through the water.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice rough.
I forced my eyes open, meeting his gaze.
There was no patience left in it, only a hunger that mirrored my own.
He sank into me in one slow, devastating thrust. The water offered no resistance, only a strange, yielding weightlessness that made the fullness more profound.
I cried out, the sound echoing off the stone.
He was deep, so deep, stretching me perfectly.
He stayed there, buried to the hilt, letting me adjust, his forehead pressed to mine.
Our breaths mingled, sharp and ragged. “You take me so well,” he gritted out.
Then he began to move. His thrusts were long and deep, a relentless rhythm that the water both cushioned and amplified.
Each drive pushed a gasp from my lungs. My back met the smooth stone edge of the pool, giving him leverage.
He braced his hands on the ledge on either side of my hips, his body caging me in, and fucked me in earnest. The slap of water, the slick sound of our joining, his low grunts in my ear—it was a filthy, perfect symphony.
My nails dug into the hard muscle of his shoulders.
Pleasure was building again, a tighter, brighter coil this time, fed by the sheer force of his claiming.
“Tell me you feel this,” he demanded, his pace punishing. “Tell me you feel how real I am.”
“I feel it,” I sobbed, the words ripped from me. “God, Virgil, I feel you.”
His mouth crashed down on mine, a searing, possessive kiss that stole what little breath I had left.
His tongue mimicked the thrust of his cock, and I was lost, completely overwhelmed.
The tension snapped. My second climax tore through me, violent and blinding.
My inner muscles clamped down on his shaft, milking him, and I screamed into his mouth.
The convulsions of my pussy triggered his own release.
With a roar that seemed to shake the very stones, he drove into me one final, brutal time and came.
I felt the hot pulse of his seed inside me, a shocking intimacy that the warm water couldn’t disguise.
He shuddered against me, his big body trembling with the force of it.
Slowly, the world seeped back in. The drip of water.
The dying crackle of the braziers. The heavy, spent weight of our bodies in the pool.
He was still inside me, his forehead resting on my shoulder, his breath hot and fast against my damp skin.
He was real. Undeniably, irrevocably real.
And in that moment, tangled with him in the dark water, I wasn’t afraid of what that meant. I was conquered by it.
He withdrew from me slowly, the slide of his cock a tender echo of the violence that had just passed.
My legs felt like water, my entire body a limp, sated weight.
Virgil’s arms came around me, holding me up, his chest solid against my back.
“Easy,” he murmured, his voice a rough scrape against my ear.
He guided me through the water, one arm hooked under my knees, the other supporting my back.
He lifted me, cradling me against his chest as he waded to the steps.
The air was cool, raising goosebumps on my wet skin the moment we left the pool’s embrace.
He didn’t set me down. He carried me to a wide, cushioned bench set against the tiled wall, where a large, folded towel waited.
Only then did he lower my feet to the floor, keeping a steadying hand on my elbow as my knees threatened to buckle.
He reached for the towel. It was thick, plush, and impossibly warm, as if it had been resting near a fire.
He shook it open and wrapped it around my shoulders, then drew it closed over my front, his hands smoothing the fabric over my arms. His own body dripped onto the mosaic floor, water sheening the hard planes of his chest and stomach.
“Sit,” he said, his tone not a command but a gentle suggestion.
I sank onto the bench, the towel a rough, welcome anchor.
He took another towel for himself, dragging it over his hair and down his torso with a few efficient strokes.
He didn’t sit beside me immediately. He stood there, a statue carved from shadow and steam, watching me as I tucked the towel tighter around myself.
My hair was a wet tangle. I gathered a corner of the towel and began to blot it, the simple motion helping to ground me back in my own body.
The high, singing pleasure was fading, leaving behind a deep, humming ache and a profound sense of exposure.
I felt scraped raw, seen in a way I never had been.
My gaze drifted, avoiding the intensity of his, and landed on the far wall.
A portrait hung there. I hadn’t noticed it before.
The frame was dark, polished wood, simple and severe.
The painting inside it stopped my breath.
It was Virgil. But not the Virgil of blurred reflections or my own hazy memory.
This was him, rendered with shocking, intimate clarity.
The artist—if there had been an artist—had captured the exact line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the subtle, cruel curve of his lower lip.
The eyes were the most devastating. They held that same unnerving focus, the same depth of quiet intensity I had just seen as he watched me fall apart in his arms. The brushstrokes looked fresh, the pigments vibrant, as if the paint were still wet.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I knew.
With a dizzying, terrifying certainty, I knew.
My pleasure had done this. The raw, unfiltered surrender of my body, the cries he’d pulled from my throat, the way I’d clenched around him—it had defined him.
Made him more real, more solid, more here.
I had painted him with my own release. The thought was a cold shock, piercing the warm afterglow.
It was power, a kind I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure I wanted.
And beneath the fear, something darker, hotter, bloomed: possession.
Mine. The face on that canvas was the face of the man who had just fucked me senseless, and I had put it there.
I turned my head, slowly, to look at the living man beside me.
He had sat down on the bench, leaving a careful space between us.
He was watching me, not the painting. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes held that same resonant quiet I saw in the portrait.
He offered no explanation. No “do you see?” or “this is what you do.” He simply waited, acknowledging my silent discovery.
“It’s you,” I whispered, the words sounding stupid and inadequate.
“It is,” he agreed, his voice low. “It’s… clearer.”
The towel scratched against my skin. I clutched it tighter. “Because of me.”
He didn’t deny it. He just held my gaze, letting the terrifying truth hang between us.
He was allowing himself to be shaped by my surrender.
My fear, my desire, my pleasure—they were the tools chiseling him out of the shadows of this house.
I wanted to say it. The words burned on my tongue.
You are mine. But they stuck in my throat, choked by the sheer magnitude of what that claim would mean.
To claim him was to accept responsibility for him, for this reality.
It was to tie my own fragile existence to the haunted, hungry stones of Black Hollow.
He reached out then. Not to grab, but to gently pry one of my hands from its death grip on the towel.
He turned my palm up and laid his own over it.
His skin was still damp, warmer than it should have been.
His fingers closed, not tightly, but with a firm certainty.
“I am here, Anna,” he said, as if that were the only answer that mattered.
And looking from the sharp, vivid lines of his painted face to the living, breathing man whose hand held mine, I knew it was the only one I could handle.
For now. The fear was still there, a cold knot in my stomach.
But it was tangled now with something fiercer, something that felt dangerously like ownership.
I didn’t pull my hand away. I let him hold it, my damp skin against his, in the silent, steam-veiled light of the chamber we had both, in our own ways, made real.