Page 46 of Kazimir

“Look at me,” he said.

“I am,” I answered, and it was the truth.

He started to move. Slow at first because I needed it; the stretch was a living creature now, purring and baring its teeth. He pulled out until the wide head almost slipped free and then pushed back in with a roll of his hips that dragged along every place I could be sensitive. My body took him differently each time—as if learning him, customizing him, drawing a map in wet heat. I clutched his shoulders, nails for a moment, then fingers. He didn’t flinch, only thrust harder, like he wanted reminders.

“Beautiful,” he said between thrusts. “You are… impossibly beautiful. You feel like you were made to take me.”

I was not offended by the possession in his voice. I wore it like I’d been born to it. “I was,” I panted, meeting him. “More. Don’t stop. There—like that—God, yes.”

The bed complained softly under us, a rhythm of wood and breath, of skin slipping and catching. He adjusted his angle and hit a place inside me that made my toes curl and my throat tighten. Pleasure arrowed up my spine; I arched to chase it; he followed, unerring. The sound of him filled the room—his breath stuttering, the faint grind of teeth when I clenched around him. He reached down and hooked my knee higher over his hip, opening me impossibly wider, and the drag of him got deeper, a delicious bruise pressed against something that begged to be pressed.

I was not quiet. I didn’t know how to be, not with him putting me back inside my own skin like this, not with my whole body singing in a language that had been beaten out of me and now re-learned with every thrust. Words tumbled out. Praise and filth. “Perfect.” “More.” “Yours.” “Please.” Prayers to a god I didn’t know how to believe in and to the monster I did.

He bent and took my mouth, swallowing my cry as he drove in hard enough to make the headboard knock the wall once. The slick, obscene stretch of me around him drew a raw sound out of him that fed me straight back to the edge. He broke the kiss only to mouth along my jaw, down to the spot he’d studied earlier at my throat. My pulse pounded there like it wanted his name stamped over it.

He slowed. Not his restraint—his intent. His hand slid under my back, lifting me into him until we were welded together, chest to chest, heart to heart. He rested his lips where the beat hammered.

“My mate,” he said, so low I barely caught it. “I will love you as long as I am allowed to walk this earth. I will guard you with what remains of my soul. I will choose you, in blood and in shadow, every dawn that tries to take me. Do you hear me?”

Everything in me answered before my mouth could. I nodded, frantic. “Yes. I hear you.”

“Then I take you,” he whispered, and his fangs slid against my skin.

The pierce wasn’t a stab. It was a double-awakening—sharp and sweet, twin hot kisses that broke the surface and sank into heat. Pain flared quick and bright, and then turned, instantly, into a bloom of something that wasn’t quite pleasure and wasn’t quite hunger. It was both and more, a dizzying rush that stole the feeling from my fingers and set it on fire somewhere low in my belly.

He drank slow, reverent pulls that I felt everywhere. There was a thread from my throat straight to the place where our bodies met, and every swallow tugged it taut. I clenched around him without meaning to; he hissed against my neck and drove into me again, deeper, and my world folded.

The scars on my back woke like struck flint. Not pain—spark. Heat shimmered under the skin there, a thousand pinpricks of electricity racing along the phantom lines where feathers should have attached. The sensation spread outward in invisible wings and then snapped back inward, no place to go yet, all of it channeled into the pitch and roll of my body taking him.

I came the way a tether snaps. There was no build left, only a violent, exquisite detonation. My cries turned into something wordless; my clenched body tried to pull him farther inside as if there were any farther to go. The bite sweetened and burned and lifted me so high I lost the outline of my edges. Everything brightened. I felt too big for my skin and too perfectly contained.

He didn’t stop moving. He fucked me through it, careful and relentless, murmuring things against my neck that might have been endearments or might have been curses in a language older than shame. Vision flashed white; the room went far away; I held on to his shoulders like driftwood and let the undertow take me.

When the wave finally eased, it didn’t let me go so much as set me down gentler. I was still trembling around him, every little aftershock milking him, every breath a prayer that he would never leave my body again. He pulled his fangs free at last, slow, and lapped at the punctures until the sting faded, and my heart could stand the beat of itself.

I didn’t know if the night outside moved or if the world paused to watch us. I knew only this bed, this man, this breath syncing to mine while the echoes of us went on and on under my skin.

The silence after his teeth left me rang like a bell. We lay there—threaded together, mouth to pulse, breath to breath—and the words I’d never been taught unfurled in me with the authority of something carved on stone long before I was born.

I didn’t plan to speak. The vow rose anyway, burning the soft inside of my mouth until I let it out like steam from a sealed room. My palms slid up his chest to cradle his face, to make sure he was the only one who could hear.

“Before heaven and void, I choose you. I bind my light to your shadow. Where you walk, I walk. Where you bleed, I bleed. You are mine, as I am yours.”

Something answered. Not the house. Not the night. Us. It snapped into place with a bright sting that felt like a star pressed to my sternum. The warmth rolled outward in concentric waves—through breastbone and ribs, down my belly to where we were still locked, back along my spine to those old wounds. His eyes blew dark and wild at the first line; his hips jolted at the last.

“Kazimir,” I breathed, as if I were both warning and invitation.

He broke. The control he ruled a city with abandoned him as his body found the same cliff and leaped. He drove into me hard, once, twice, a sound leaving him that would have made men kneel, and then I felt him. The thick, pulsing flood, the hot surrender of him spilling deep, claimed and claiming. The knowledge that I did this to him—my vow, my body—pushed me over again like a hand on my back. I clenched around him, milking every last shudder from his spine, my own orgasm cresting and breaking in a ragged chorus I could not have orchestrated if I tried.

I would have been content to drown there, but my body had other plans.

It started as a tightening at the base of my skull, a bright, rotten-sweet pressure that reminded me of migraines and thunderheads. It shot down my spine in a lash of electricity and pooled, hot and uncontainable, under the skin between my shoulders where the scars lived. My back arched off the bed without my permission; my thighs locked down around his hips; a sound tore out of me that I didn’t recognize as mine.

“Devon.” His hands flew to my upper arms, fingers firm, not restraining, bracing. “Devon, look at me.”

I couldn’t. I leaped from the bed and landed on my knees on the floor. My eyes slammed shut as another spasm seized me, more violent than the first. Every muscle in my back clenched like a fist. The skin over the scars went molten. It was too much heat for flesh, too much light for bone. The pressure demanded an exit.

It found one.