“We are not done discussing this, Never,” he said, his too proper voice a mask for the upheaval he was trying to keep bottled up inside.
I wheeled on him. “Yeah, we are.”
“I shared my power with you. Do you not understand what that means?”
Oh, I knew. Nerebis was kind enough to spell it out for me. Hook and I were bound to each other. If I somehow managed to die, so would he. Which was terrifying when I first heard it, until Hook informed me I was immortal. Just like him.
Or so we both assumed.
I’d tested the theory by slicing my hand open, and sure enough, the wound had healed itself as I watched. It was cool as shit, not gonna lie, but it in no way guaranteed I would live through anything. It just meant I had better odds.
“Are you afraid you’ll die if I cross into the Alius?” I asked, loosing more venom with the question than I meant to.
He recoiled. “This has nothing to do withmysurvival.”
I knew that. I could feel it. But the longer this argument went on, the more he let slip through the link, and the fucker was breaking my heart.
“What happens if I stay? Everything destabilizes, the worlds fall apart, and eventually you and I won’t be together, anyway.” I reached up to pinch the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “We would be putting the universe at risk just to be together.” Saying it out loud made me realize how badly I wanted that. Not the universe stuff, obviously, but Hook.
I’d spent a good chunk of my adult life looking out for my brother. I’d taken time to myself and dated here and there, but I never let myself get serious with anyone I dated because Matty was my priority. It was all about keeping him safe and fed with a roof over his head.
Hook was different. I’d fallen for him, head over goddamned heels. He held my heart in the palm of his broody hands, and what I wanted more than anything was to share the rest of my life with him, however long that might be.
A deep, inhuman rumble filled the space between us, and when I opened my eyes, the amber rings around his irises flared to life. A need so primal it made my breath catch poured into me, lighting me on fire from the inside out.
Oh, shit.I’d gone down that longing little rabbit hole when our connection was wide open on my end.
He surged forward, pulling me into a crushing kiss that sent my heart galloping through my chest. His hands were rough as they tore at my clothes, but his desperation for me spiraled around my need for him, driving it to heights I’d never felt before.
I’d heard people say they would die if they couldn’t have something, and now I finally understood what they were talking about. I tore his shirt open. He yanked my jeans down. One second we were in the middle of the room, and the next he hadme pinned against the wall with my legs wrapped around his waist.
A mewl slipped out of me when he rocked his hips, dragging his hard cock along my center. I was already aching for him.
For once, he didn’t tease. Without a word, he settled his length at my entrance, then slammed home with a possessive growl. A storm of goosebumps raced along my skin from the abrupt combination of pleasure and pain. And when his teeth sank into my shoulder as he held me pinned—impaled—against the deeply stained wooden boards at my back, I couldn’t even scream.
All I could do was curl into the sensation and pray to the stars that I would find my breath again at some point. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I could die just like this, with this delicious man, pirate, god—whatever the hell he was—driving into me again and again, slow enough that I felt every inch of him stretching me, and hard enough that his thrusts and his fingers digging into my skin would have left bruises on my delicate human flesh.
With the battered emotions and relentless heat swirling between us, I could have ridden that brutal wave all the way to the end. It wouldn’t have taken long. Hook knew exactly how to thrust and roll his hips to hit every sensitive spot inside me. And I loved it when he played rough, because I got to see a side of him that he usually kept caged up. Wild and full of passion.
But I needed to be in control this time.
Gripping him tightly with my legs and arms, I flashed us to the bed and put all my strength into rolling him onto his back.
He let me do it. I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking I was stronger than him. He’d had countless lifetimes to train and hone his body and magic, while I was still stumbling around, trying to figure out how to access even a fraction of the strange new power he’d given me.
Straddling him, with his cock still buried deep inside me, I grabbed his wrists and pinned them to the bed. Where I expected a cocky little smirk, I was met with an intensity that made me feel like a goddess.
I could feel so much coming from him—passion, need, worry, hope—but what really got to me was that singular focus on me. Like I was all that mattered to him in all the worlds.
Rather than wither under the weight of his stare, I held it, keeping my eyes locked on his as I rolled my hips, grinding down on him in a way that made my inner walls clench. The friction, the emotion, the connection—together they created a moment in time that would be seared into my memory no matter how long I lived.
I moved slowly, reveling in all of it, letting the pleasure build. The more it did, the more his eyes glowed, and the more emotion poured through our connection until I was drowning in him in the best possible way.
“Oh,” I gasped. The pressure and pleasure were almost too much. “Oh, fuck.”
Sweat rolled down my back. My legs trembled. And he watched me through all of it, pressing his hips up into me as I ground down on him, feeling him in every inch of my being.
Another wicked wave of pleasure washed over me, and my eyelids fluttered shut.
