Page 96 of Shadowed

"I could open this lock in twelve seconds at age eight." The fencing voice. The crack underneath. The dark humour of a woman making jokes while knotted to a king inside a cocoon of shadow-wings. "You're behind."

I take the lock from her hand. I try the first tumbler. It does not give.

She laughs. The motion does something to both of us—the knot shifting inside her, the vibration of the laugh traveling through her body into mine, and we both make sounds that are not laughter.

"Keep practising," she says. Into my throat. Her mouth warm. "I'm not going anywhere."

Ninety-one percent. Ninety-two.

I hold the lock. I hold her. My wings hold both of us.

The knot pulses. She shifts against me. Her hips move—not away, into. A slow grind that makes the knot press differently and my cock twitch inside her and she sounds hungry. Not satisfied. Not done.

"Again," she says.

43

LILITH

Again.

The knot is still seated when I start moving. Not away—into. A slow grind of my hips that makes the shadow-dense pressure shift inside me and his hands grip my thighs and every shadow in the room tightens.

I should not be able to want this. I have just come twice. My body should be wrung out, emptied, the kind of satisfied that lets a woman sleep for twelve hours and not think about the male beneath her. But I'm not that woman. I'm the woman who came back with full knowledge and a practice lock and three conditions and a need that refuses to sleep.

The knot releases. The withdrawal—slow, thick, his cock sliding out of me, shadow-dark and slick—makes me gasp. My body clenches on nothing. The absence is obscene. Not pain. A structural loss, the feeling of a lock without its key.

"Turn over," I tell him.

He doesn't move. His hands on my hips. His lightless eyes looking up at me—assessing whether to obey the woman on top of him.

"That wasn't a request."

He turns over. My choice. My pace. The shadows on the walls flutter—anticipation, the dark equivalent of a held breath.

I push him onto his back and straddle his thighs and take his cock in my hand. Shadow-dark. Velvety. The prehensile cock curling against my palm, the tip tracing my wrist, my forearm—it moves on its own, remembering my grip the way a key remembers its lock. My fingers tighten and the tip wraps my thumb. Reading me. I've held it across four nights and learned the weight and heat and the way it moves when I tighten my fingers.

His breath catches. Small. The sound of a seven-hundred-year-old king losing composure because a rookeries thief is gripping his cock with the same hand she uses to pick locks.

His wings are still spread behind him. Vast, black, the membrane pooling across the sheets like spilled ink. I push his shoulders down and the wings flatten beneath us and I can feel the membrane under my knees—thin, cool, alive. The bone-struts shifting under my weight.

I position myself. Lower. Take the head of him inside me and hold there—just the tip, the shadow-dark stretch of the first inch, my body opening around him while he lies beneath me with his hands flat on the mattress because I told him to turn over and he did.

"Lilith." My name in his mouth. The command register stripped to nothing—just sound, just the two syllables of me said by a male who is inside me and not in control.

I sink down. All the way. One smooth descent that sheaths him to the base and his cock curls inside me—prehensile, searching, the tip finding the spot on the front wall and pressing. My vision blurs. I brace my hands on his chest. His hearts pound beneath my palms. Two of them, off-rhythm, the staggered drumbeat of a body that is not human and does not pretend to be.

I move.

My pace. My rhythm. The slow grind I learned on Night Three when he let me take the lead and I found out what my body wanted when it was not being told what to want. I roll my hips forward and his cock drags against the front wall—then curls, adjusting its own angle, tilting the tip to stroke the place that makes my thighs seize. No instruction from him. The cock does this on its own. A second intelligence inside me, reading my body the way I read tumblers.

My mouth opens. No sound. Then sound—a moan that comes from somewhere lower than my throat, somewhere in the belly where the heat sits.

His shadows. Christ, his shadows. They don't wait for permission this time—they read my body like a lock, the subtle tells of skin and breath and the way my thighs flex when I'm close. Tendrils wrap my waist. One slides up my spine, cool, the living dark tracing my vertebrae. Two find my breasts and tighten—circling, pressing, the maddening precision of shadow-touch on nipples that are already hard enough to ache.

"There," I breathe. Grinding down. His cock seated so deep the base presses against my clit and the prehensile tip strokes inside me—a slow, deliberate drag—and the shadow tendrils on my breasts tighten and I'm going to come again. Already. My body has no pride left. It took my pride and pawned it somewhere between the first orgasm and the knot.

His hands move. He grabs my hips—not controlling, anchoring. His fingers dig into the meat of my thighs and the restraint in his grip is a living thing, he is holding back because I told him this was my pace and he is keeping that promise with his fingers bruising my skin.