Page 40 of Something Worth Keeping
“The restraint serves dual purposes.” Julian barely managed to form the thought necessary for speech. “It prevents me from interfering with your process while also providing deep pressure stimulation that enhances arousal.”
Cillian looked up, his eyes gleaming. “Keep talking. I love hearing your brain work while I take you apart.”
He pulled Julian’s boxer briefs down, and Julian was completely bare. Shadows immediately wrapped around his cock, cool and curious, making him gasp.
“They want to touch you here, too,” Cillian observed. “They will learn what makes you feel good.”
“They can touch – oh, fuck.” Julian’s carefully maintained vocabulary shattered as Cillian’s mouth closed around him, hot and wet and absolutely overwhelming. The contrast between the cool shadows and Cillian’s heat was devastating.
Cillian worked him with single-minded focus, his shadows caressing every other part of Julian’s body while his mouth reduced Julian to incoherent gasps. When a shadow brushed against his entrance - not penetrating, just acknowledging - Julian nearly came apart.
“Not there yet,” Cillian murmured, pulling back slightly. “But eventually. When you’re ready, I’m going to fill you with shadows while I’m inside you, and make you feel claimed everywhere at once.”
“That’s…” Julian couldn’t finish the thought. His brain was short-circuiting, too much sensation all at once.
“That’s what?” Cillian’s tongue traced a slight ridge along Julian’s length.
“Highly effective dirty talk.”
Cillian laughed, the vibration traveling through Julian’s entire body. “Only you would critique the technique while I’m sucking your cock.”
“I’m complimenting the technique. There’s a distinction.”
“Julian.” Cillian’s voice dropped to pure gravel. “Stop thinking and just feel.”
Then his mouth returned, and Julian stopped thinking entirely.
Chapter Fourteen
Julian’s breathing evened out fifteen minutes after climaxing, his body loose and sated in Cillian’s arms. The shadows withdrew to give him space, pooling protectively rather than restraining. Cillian memorized every detail of his sleeping mate’s face.
His beacon. His everything. In the whole of his existence, Cillian had never seen anything as breathtaking as watching pleasure overwhelm Julian’s relentless analytical mind.
The shadows pulsed with satisfaction, as he remembered it. They replayed Julian’s gasps, the arch of his spine, how precise vocabulary dissolved into broken sounds, sending those responses rippling through every part of their existence. They’d catalogued every response and mapped his pleasure like archivists documenting precious artifacts - which could beconsidered an appropriate response to a man whose profession involved preservation and accuracy.
Cillian settled Julian more comfortably against his chest, feeling their heartbeats sync through the strengthening mate bond. Julian had offered his throat, his body, his trust. He had looked at Cillian’s void-spawned form - the horror that made hardened criminals piss their pants - and called himjustified.
Not beautiful. Julian never used imprecise language. He’d said Cillianmade sense,and in the quiet aftermath with his mate in his arms, Cillian understood.
His pleasure is a gift.He had come apart so beautifully that even now, the memory made hunger coil through Cillian’s chest. Not his usual hunger for corrupted souls, but something rawer.
Want. Need. Mine.
Cillian pressed his face into Julian’s hair, breathing in that bright, clear resonance that burned with absolute truth. His shadows had touched Julian everywhere - wrapped around his cock, traced his ribs, learned he shivered at certain pressures. They’d held him down and felt him struggle, not from fear, but from an overwhelming need to participate.
“The restraint serves dual purposes,” Julian had gasped while analyzing his own arousal. “Perfect” felt such an inadequate term for that stunning realization.
Cillian had made Julianstop thinking. He had reduced that brilliant mind to pure sensation. Pride wasn’t a reaction Cillian was familiar with - he did his job just like others of his kind. But now it filled him until his shadows rippled with it.
They were greedy and wanted more. Cillian could feel their urge to mapevery sound Julian could make, to learn exactly how much pleasure a human body could withstand before shattering. Those thoughts were as real to him as his own, because they were his own.
But Julian needed rest, and Cillian could wait. He hadn’t known what the urge to join with another being felt like till he’d met Julian, so he could wait a few hours longer to feel it again.
Desire. The concept still felt strange. Cillian had consumed corruption since the dawn of civilization. Countless predators had fallen at his fingers as he fed from the growing rot of their souls. But he’d neverwantedanything beyond the hunt.
Then Julian walked into an alley, and everything changed.
Cillian’s shadows expanded through the building, monitoring Thorn in the tactical room, Silas and Rook in theirquarters, checking the perimeter sensors that registered nothing unusual. All safe, although Cillian knew that was always a transient state.
