Page 51 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

I draw him closer with my thighs. His cock presses heavily against me. My body answers before thought can catch up. I am wet already, aching with a want that has survived fear, anger, separation, and every ugly thing between us. When his fingers slide between my legs, he does it slowly, parting me with care, tracing the slick heat of my pussy until my hips lift. I move into his hand and let him feel the yes in my body.

His control is different now. It is devotion with its teeth held back, strength kneeling where choice tells it to kneel. Helowers his mouth to my breast and draws my nipple between his lips. His fingers keep working my clit, slow circles that turn my breathing uneven, then molten. I grip his shoulders and feel the power under his skin, the vampire in him listening to me instead of hunger.

When I reach between us and close my hand around his cock, his whole body tightens. A deep groan tears from his throat, controlled before it turns ragged. The sound goes through me, dark and intimate, and my thighs tighten around him. I guide him to me myself, setting the head of him against my pussy. The bond stirs in my ribs, not demanding, not dragging, only present. Waiting.

I choose before he moves. I tilt my hips and take him in, inch by inch, feeling the stretch, the fullness, the strange tenderness of being entered by someone who could overwhelm me and refuses to. He shakes above me. I feel it through his arms, through the press of his chest, through the bond that has stopped feeling like a chain and started feeling like something I decided. My pussy closes around him, and I move slow at first. My hands on his back, my thighs firm around his hips, my body setting the rhythm. We move together in unison.

Every thrust meets me where I ask for it, deeper when I pull him in, slower when my nails press lightly at his spine. The room fills with the sounds we stop trying to contain: my moans rising with every deeper stroke, his groans pressed into my neck, the bed shifting beneath us in a rhythm neither of us wants to escape. The pleasure builds in layers, heat and pressure and something beyond the body, something old waking beneath my skin. Silver-gold light threads along my wrists. It curls over his shoulders, then spreads across the sheets in delicate branching lines. The air fills with a low vibration.

Sebastian sees it. His eyes flare, not with fear, but wonder. The light answers him, then me, circling us both in a wideninghalo. Tiny marks bloom above the bed, symbols I've not seen and somehow recognize, turning slowly as if the room has become a night sky written in living fire. The bond is not taking me. It is waiting for my hand. So I give it.

I stop fighting the warmth inside my chest. I let it rush through me, open and unmistakable. The glow pours brighter, slipping under my skin, under his, joining where our bodies meet. He thrusts deeper, and the rhythm breaks into something urgent, not frantic, not careless, but honest. His cock fills me again and again, and my pussy grips him tighter with every stroke, dragging both of us toward the same bright edge.

The climax takes us together. My moan breaks high and breathless as pleasure floods through me, and his groan follows, deep and shaken, his control finally undone at the exact moment mine disappears too. My body locks around him, pleasure flashing through me in waves that make the light burst outward. Sebastian comes with me, his face buried against my throat, his body shaking as the glow lifts from us in a ring, blooming over the ceiling in a crown of silver and gold. For one breath, the bond is visible everywhere, wrapped around the bed, the walls, our joined bodies, and I know it has heard me. Not commanded me. Heard me. Accept it.

When the light settles, he lowers himself carefully, still inside me, still trembling, and gathers me close with one open hand at my back. My room is quiet again, but something beautiful remains under the quiet, alive between us, no longer waiting outside the door. We lie side by side, locking each other in place.

"I don't have it all fixed," he says into my hair. "The politics. What comes next. None of it's settled."

I tip my face up to his. "Later, Sebastian. I just want to be with the man who finally brought me home instead of caging me."

"Then we build it," he says. "Our future."

"Yes," I agree, and I feel myself smile against the soreness in my lip. "And we'll write the rest as we go."

Inside, for the first time in longer than I can hold, I am exactly where I chose to be. I’ll choose this every day to be with him.

32

SEBASTIAN

One week after rescuing Jasmine, we arrive at the council chamber. It hasn't changed, but I have. So has she, she's spent a week of answering questions from me to make sure she wants this.

Gregory waits at the head of the obsidian table, flanked by the patriarchs and matriarchs who, a day ago, would have voted to erase the woman at my side. Now they only watch her, the way the very old watch anything new. Wary. Unable to look away.

Cyrus kneels at the center of everyone. He isn't restrained for spectacle. Gid stands at his left, Elias at his right, and the council's enforcers ring the chamber. His coat is gone. His House ring is gone. Almost three hundred years of authority have been stripped from him in a single night, and he wears the absence like a wound he refuses to name.

"You brought a human into council," he says. Even now, his voice carries. "You've turned us into prey."

"You turned us into liars," I answer. "I'd rather be the first than the second."

I have the genealogies, the recordings Elias drew out of the network, the proof that Cyrus ordered Mickey Carter killed. Ihold back from laying it at his feet myself. But this is not my sentence to deliver.

Gregory rises. "Cyrus Dain. The clans have seen the proof. You are removed as patriarch of House Dain at this hour. You are severed from the information network. You will be held in council custody until your death is ordered."

"On whose word?" Cyrus spits. "His?"

"On the council's," Gregory says. "Your coup is finished. The Houses that followed you have withdrawn. They saw what you were willing to do to keep your secret. Including the life of a man who served us."

Millie steps forward, "For the record—House Dain's seat passes to its surviving line under review. Cyrus retains no claim, no vote, no access. The murder of Mickey Carter is entered as council-acknowledged fact. Not rumor."

I look at Jasmine. She stays beside me, but something in her settles—her father's name vindicated, the truth out. Reaching for her would make the moment easier to carry, but I won't narrate for her, or make this my victory.

Gregory inclines his head toward her. "Your father was a liaison between our world and yours. He was loyal, and he was failed. The council acknowledges it."

Jasmine nods once. Not because the word is enough, but because this room has said her father's name without turning him into a problem.

"Thank you," she says. Her voice is quiet, but it carries. "He deserved that."