“No more.”
Taunting fate sent an icy thrill through my chest, stopping my heart for just a moment. I was asking for trouble. Luring danger with a sharp hook. Danger with bright blue eyes and dark hair and a mouth that hovered just beyond mine, gently parted and waiting.
Thaan would probably murder me slowly. But he might have been planning that already. Planning to roast my body on a spit over a fire. To break every limb and throw me out at the sea, leaving me to drown. He’d warned his drones not to touch the two hive heirs he’d found in any way other than pull them under. I could still see him, the rage in his eyes as I’d surfaced after breathing for her. He’d wanted to kill me then. What would he do to me if he found me here now, lying beside her in a bed, contemplating how agonizingly perfect the shape of her mouth was?
I must have gone crazy. I’d spent every minute of the last ten years keeping in line. This siren had a penchant for sending me lapses in sanity. She’d done it to me then, dispatching me to the mountains, and she did itto me now. Even as the need for survival sang a cautionary tune in my head, another much louder voice thundered,I don’t care.
“Moon and fucking stars,” I muttered. “Just one kiss. Don’t move.”
Just a kiss. Just one single, small flash of my lips against hers. I wouldn’t pull her close. Wouldn’t explore the scent of her neck or the taste of her skin. Would barely even touch her.
She raised her brows. “Don’t move?”
But my mouth had already sealed softly over hers.
And immediately, I was lost.
My hands snaked under her hair and past her neck, forearms capturing the back of her head, anchoring her beside me. She tasted like cool water across my palate. Refreshing. Invigorating. Charged with an electricity I couldn’t capture. All pure intention snapped out of my reach, stranding me in the center of her, a labyrinth of smooth skin and glossy hair, of dips and valleys and curves.
Every fiber in my body went taut. Every muscle, every bone, every thought floating in my head. The opposite seemed to happen to her. She dissolved in my arms. Melted like pliant clay, sinking into my grooves. Her hands twined in my hair, the knot I’d set at the beginning of the night coming loose.
She pressed herself against me, loosing all secrets under the thin cotton of her dress. I’d warned her not to move, but she had, and I could feel every inch of her, every sharp edge and every luscious convex.
I was a dead man.
But I suppose if there were ever a reason to die, it would be the one twisted into me now. The one that aimed razored words when scared. Theone that shattered every plan I’d ever made, shattered them to pieces like glass thrown at a wall, a sharp pair of eternal blue hues the only weapon she’d needed to cripple my thoughts and wipe me bare.
Her mouth was hungry and smooth and soft. Demanding. She unclasped my cloak, letting it fall to grip the collar of my shirt, pulling me over herself. I hitched her knees against my hips, too aware of her injuries from only an hour ago. But she groaned with deep-rooted impatience, bunching the collar of my shirt into her fist as I deepened my taste of her, hiking it up my back and over my head.
Just a kiss,my head cautioned.Just. A. Kiss.
But she delved her hands across my shoulders and down my bare chest, searching my skin with the brand of starvation an underground prisoner might harbor for the light of day. I stacked my weight over my knees and elbows rather than on her, but Theia help me, she claimed every inch between us, arching her spine and thrusting into me, every roll of her hips a hypnotic spell that left me more dazed.
I left her mouth to traverse the underside of her jaw, feeling my way across her throat. I don’t know when my hand crept up her thigh, gripping, squeezing as it traveled, teasing her dress up. Baring her hip, her stomach, one side of her ribs. I left her neck; my kisses trailed my hand instead. But I stopped next to her navel, stroking a thumb across the pale, shining notch in her skin left by the King’s blade. Already faded as though it had happened weeks ago.
A searing fire crackled in my head. Wrath stole through the room, staining the walls a vicious red. And under that, a sharp, shocking douse of shame
She paused, watching me under half-closed eyelids, drunken with exhaustion. “Pheolix.”
But her voice wasn’t as loud as the one in my head. It had finally tamed me, finally shouted over the trance. My gaze shifted to hers.
And I felt myself pull away.
“Oh,” was all she said, watching me. “All right.” Her cheeks tinted, and she tried to sit herself up, to back out of my grasp. I latched on, clasping her thighs underneath me. Locking her into place.
“Tell me you’re not tired.”
Her chin lowered, expression firming, the ghost of a fight suddenly shining back at me. “I’m not tired.”
My thumb glided just over that mark on her stomach. At the scar that would fade before it ever cemented its place. “Tell me I won’t hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
For the love of all the stars beyond Perpetuum. It was hard to think with those eyes aimed at me. “Tell me if I leave tomorrow, you won’t regret tonight.”
Selena blinked. She tried again to sit up, to back away, and this time I let her. “Why should you leave?” she nearly spat. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“The agreement was nothing would happen to you or your sister. And it did. On my watch.”
