Страница 90 из 114
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Raihn met my kiss with so much fervor that I found myself questioning which of us had moved first. His arms folded around me, pulling me flush against him, and the two of us stumbled until my back hit the wall. His mouth sought mine like he wanted to learn every part of me—claiming my lips, top and then bottom, his tongue warm and soft and demanding and giving.
A groan rose from deep in his throat—it shuddered through my entire body. I was pi
The hand that slid down my side kept going, flattening around my hip, then my backside, and then suddenly my legs were lifted, parted around his hips, and the hard press of him between my thighs made my breath hitch.
Fuck. I needed more than this, this time. Needed less between us. I needed it so badly I didn’t even care that it meant exposing myself to him, too.
His kiss slowed, deepened, shifting from frantic to tender.
I pressed my hand between us, down his abdomen, down to the stiff length of him pressing at his pants.
Another groan. His lips smiled against mine.
“Careful, princess.”
I kissed him—kissed that smile—because the idea of not doing so seemed sacrilegious.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to fuck you for the first time in an alleyway three feet from a pile of entrails.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Even if, embarrassingly, a part of me wanted him so much that I would have done it here, just to bury myself in a different primal pleasure. First blood, then sex. Maybe I was more vampire than I thought, after all.
But then his free hand cradled my cheek. His next kiss was different—gentle. It reminded me of the way he had kissed my throat in the cave. Like he cherished me.
My chest tightened. There was nothing vampiric about that. Nothing carnal and cold.
“Oraya, look at me.”
I opened my eyes. Our noses touched. The moonlight illuminated every little scar on his skin. His pupils were slightly slitted against it, the ring around them almost violet beneath the coldness of the light.
“Give me one honest thing,” he murmured.
One honest thing.
The most terrible honest thing of all was that with Raihn, it was all honest—it always had been. He saw too much of me. Understood every complexity and senseless duality. I was honest even when I didn’t mean to be. He did not fear my darkness, nor pity my compassion.
And the truth was, the idea of dying without knowing him completely was torturous.
How could I say any of this? Did he want that kind of honesty? Was I even capable of wrenching it from my bleeding soul without unraveling all my stitches?
“We’ll probably die tomorrow,” I said. “Show me something worth living for.”
A momentary pause, as if something about this response had hurt. Then a faint curl to his lips.
“Pressure.” He kissed me again—this time not a demand, but a promise. “I think I’m up to it, though. We’ll fly. We need to beat the dawn.”
Raihn stole kisses from me as we flew, as we made it into the Moon Palace just in time for the sun to crest the horizon. They were sweet and tender, punctuated with little grazes of his teeth that promised the harder edge to our morning. By the time we returned to the apartment, my heart was beating fast behind my ribs, my breath rapid. I felt oddly dizzy—every sense dulled by the intensity of my want and sharp with anticipation of what it might be like to fulfill it. I hadn’t even been able to admit to myself how many times, and in what great detail, I had imagined what it might be like to taste Raihn, to touch him, to feel him inside of me.
But reality, of course, was different than fantasies. More treacherous, and more exhilarating.
The door closed. I leaned against the wall, watching Raihn as he bolted it. Even the flex of the muscles of his forearm was beautiful, each tendon working like a string in an orchestra, elegant and graceful.
It was almost embarrassing, how stu
He finished locking the door and turned to me. For a long moment, he said nothing. I wondered if he was thinking everything that I was. Imagining what we might do with our final night with each other.
Final.
Mother, how I had avoided thinking about that word. Everything that had happened over these last few days had chased it from my mind. But the truth was unavoidable.
The last trial was tomorrow night.
Raihn and I were both finalists.
It was very, very rare that more than one contestant survived the Kejari.
Raihn was the first to break our suspended stillness. He approached me, fingertips ru
“What’s that face for, princess?”
I could not lie to him.
So instead I said, “Kiss me.”
And—Nyaxia fucking bless him—he did.
I could melt under this kiss. I wanted to wind myself around him the way ivy claims stone. I opened my lips to him, encircled my arms around his neck. His fingers clenched around my hair, pulling just a bit.
His hand paused there, thumb rubbing my hair, kiss slowing, and I wondered if he was thinking about it, too—thinking about the night of the feast, and my hair around his fingers.
I didn’t want him to let me go then, either. Maybe I realized in that moment that I never would, even if I was too terrified to admit it then.
Maybe I was too terrified to admit it now, too.
My teeth closed around his lip, coaxing a satisfying hiss from his throat. His hands roamed over my body—down my back, cupping my backside, lingering at my upper thighs, like he wanted to memorize the shape of me. His hands were so large that the pressure of his fingertips ventured agonizingly close to the core of my need. Still not close enough.
His lips slowly curled, just as his fingers did, inching ever-slightly higher—deeper.
“Your armor’s too thick.”
What was it about him that made me so bold? I kissed him, then slid my hand down, over his chest, his abdomen, down over his length. Mother, he was big. Even through the layers of his clothing, he responded to my touch as easily as I responded to his. It was the most incredible, powerful thing, feeling him twitch under my hands. Listening to that little shudder in his breath.
“Yours too,” I whispered against his lips.
It should have been frightening to me, to know that he wanted me this fucking much.
It wasn’t. Instead, it made my own desire maddening.
He drew me closer, his hand tightening in my hair, and claimed my mouth in a kiss so sudden and passionate that everything but him withered away. He lowered himself, released my hair in favor of cupping my backside with both hands, and lifted me. I kissed his mouth, his jaw, his throat, as he carried me into his room, and the two of us fell onto the bed. His broad form crawled over mine. I freed my hands so I could work at his jacket. It was a complicated thing, all buttons and straps, and especially difficult to navigate when I was feeling around blindly. After a few seconds, he laughed against my lips.
“Having trouble?”
He pulled away enough to look at me—and Goddess, I mourned his mouth already—but before I could complain, the beauty of him stopped me short. It was now morning, and though the curtains were drawn, the barest hint of sunshine slipped through the fabric and outlined his silhouette in a faint kiss of gold. I’d never realized before just how much red was in his hair, or in his wings, which were still out. I touched them without thinking, prompting a sharp inhale from Raihn. They were softer than I imagined they might be.
He gently pulled my hand away. “We’ll save that for another time.”
“Does it… tickle?”
He chuckled. “In a way.”
If he expected this answer to dissuade me, it very much did not. But disappointedly, with a puff of smoke, his wings were gone. And he leaned down as if to kiss me again, then paused, drinking me in the way I just had him.
His hands went to the button of my armor. “May I?”
I swallowed.
I wanted this—Mother, I wanted it, the slick ache between my legs promised that. Yet something about this made me strangely nervous, my heart fluttering against the inside of my ribs like a captured bird. I didn’t want to feel that way. But the memory of the one and only time I had done this still seized me, a map carved into my body that I couldn’t erase.
“You first,” I whispered.
Raihn sat up. And slowly, button by button, his armor fell open, sheets of battle-worn leather parting to reveal the most stu
I had stopped breathing. He caught my eye and smirked in an infuriating way that told me he knew exactly what I was thinking.
Oh, fuck him.
I rolled off the bed and rose.
“And where, exactly, are you going?” he asked.
“Nowhere.”
I stood with my back to him and worked at the buttons of my jacket. Then the laces of my pants. I let my jacket fall to the ground first, then peeled off my trousers.
Raihn had shut up.
I turned around.
He had gone so still. It was rare that he embodied that stillness—vampire stillness, the kind that made the world go silent. He drank me in, starting at my face and moving down. I could feel that stare as if it was his touch—caressing the scars on my throat, the curve of my clavicle. I could feel it pause at my breasts, peaked with my arousal, covered by the tips of my black hair. It slid down my stomach, traced the angry-pink slashes from the trial. Landed at the apex of my thighs. His nostrils flared and eyes went hard, and I wondered if he could sense it, smell it—how much I needed him.
When his eyes came back to mine, he looked like a man undone. “Come here,” he whispered. Pleaded.
I returned to the bed. And I couldn’t help it—the moment he was in reach, my hands were all over him. I touched him like the light had, tracing every line of muscle, every scar, every trail of hair. His mouth was on mine immediately, his hands on my waist, my breasts, making me gasp with every new expanse of skin.
“Beautiful isn’t enough,” he rasped as he pulled away from my mouth. “Fuck, Oraya, you’re—I—”
He gave up on words. Instead, he lay me down and his lips moved to my throat, soft over my flesh. He lingered at the scar where he had drank from me—and the one beneath it.