Page 56 of Shadowed

The slick is—Christ. I can smell it from three feet away. Sweet, ripe, furious. The scent of a woman in heat who has been fighting it for three days and has run out of fight.

"I'm in heat again."

"I know."

"I hate that you know."

I step back. She walks in.

The room is dark—my chambers, shadow-soaked, the only light from the window where the court's deep purple sky casts faint illumination across the stone. She stands in the middle of it and she does not look at the bed. She looks at me.

"The thing with the —" She stops. Starts again, in the flattest voice she owns. The fencing voice. The one she uses when she's selling stolen goods and the price is final and the fence can take it or leave it. "Your cock. Where it moves on its own. The angle it found last time. I want that again."

My composure holds for three seconds.

My shadows do not hold at all. They flood toward her so fast the room goes dark—every shadow in my chambers surging toward the scent and the voice and the flat practical demand that she wants my cock to find the angle that made her scream.

She doesn't flinch. She stands in the flood of darkness and the shadows wrap around her ankles and climb her thighs and she lets them. Her hands unclench.

"And the thing at my throat. The shadow. The one that —"

"Tightens."

"Yes."

My cock is rigid against my thigh. The prehensile curl has been pulling toward her for three days—dormancy and discipline keeping me in my chambers, waiting, knowing she had to come to me or not come at all.

Willing choice. She knocked. She walked in. She told me what she wants in her fencing voice and my self-control is a thin line and she just stepped over it.

"Come here."

"Don't tell me what to —"

I don't finish hearing the sentence. She crosses the distance between us in three steps and her hands find my horns—gripping the charcoal spirals, one in each fist, pulling my head down—and she kisses me.

First kiss.

Not during the claiming. Not heat-blind, not knotted, not pinned to the floor. Standing upright in my chambers with her hands on my horns and her mouth on mine. Hard and angry and not gentle at all.

She bites my lower lip. Her teeth sharp, her grip on my horns savage, and the kiss is a fight—her tongue against mine, her body pressing forward, her hands pulling me down to her height. She tastes like fury and slick and the shadow-mineral sweetness that has lived under her scent since the court started changing her blood.

I groan into her mouth. Cannot help it. Three days of discipline and her mouth is on mine and her hands are on my horns and the groan is ripped out of me the way the first one was—rough, uncontrolled, the sound of a male whose body has decided what it wants.

My shadows strip her. Not slowly. The tendrils pull the collar from her throat—the mark flashes dark and shifting in the purple light—and her shirt follows, and her trousers. She's naked against me and I'm still clothed and the disparity makes her growl against my mouth.

Her hands leave my horns. Find my shirt. Pull.

I let her strip me. Her thief's hands—fast, efficient, every button and fastening opened without looking because she pickslocks by feel and clothing is easier than a Chubb. My shirt. My trousers. And then my cock springs free—heavy, shadow-dark, the prehensile curl finding her before I've reached for her—pressing against her belly.

She gasps against my mouth.

"It's already —"

"It's been doing that for three days."

She wraps her hand around it. Her grip is sure—she touched it the first night, she knows the weight of it, the way it curls into her palm—and she strokes once, base to tip. The cock responds with a prehensile tightening that makes pre-release bead at the tip and my hips jerk forward.

I grip her hips. Lift.