Page 22 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“Point,” I said, because I needed something ordinary to say.

“You already collected it.” Her hips shifted once under mine, precise as a correction. “This is the unfinished operation.”

My hand moved off her wrist, down the inside of her arm, to the strip of bare skin where the sleeve ended. She made a small torn sound on the inhale that went straight through me.

“Tell me to stop.”

“No.”

“Lika. Say what you want.”

Her eyes held mine. “I want your mouth on me. I want your hand where I’ve been thinking about it since the war table. And I want you to stop pretending this isn’t deliberate.”

That was clear enough. I obeyed.

I kissed her. She kissed me hard and got a fist in the front of my shirt, pulling me closer like she’d been waiting the whole burn to do it.

I dropped my weight into her and she took it, one leg hooking behind mine. The sound she made when I dragged my hand under her shirt and closed it over her breast was not quiet.

Her nipple tightened under my thumb. Her back lifted off the mat. My fangs descended fully, pain bright in my jaw from holding them off her skin. She saw them when I lifted my head.

“That’s him,” she said.

“You should be more alarmed.”

“I’ve read the threat assessment. It was disappointingly bloodless.” She caught my lower lip carefully between her teeth. “Correct the record.”

“Venom.”

“Good. Use it.”

I put my mouth to her throat and let one fang scrape, not bite. The mild venom in my saliva heated the line I licked afterward; her whole body jerked, hips pressing hard into the erection I had stopped pretending not to have.

“Rylos.”

“Present.”

“Your hand. Lower.”

I slid it beneath the waistband of the training grays. She was already wet, and the sound she made when I touched her changed. She opened her legs without hesitation. My fingers found her and her head went back against the mat. For one second she had nothing to say.

I watched her face and listened to her breath, changed pressure when her pulse changed, and found the rhythm she tried not to ask for.

“You count everything,” she said, words coming thin.

“I count you.”

“Then count faster.”

I laughed once, low and ruined, and gave her what she ordered. Two fingers inside, thumb working where she needed it, my mouth on hers when the first sound escaped.

She gripped my horns, tentatively at first, then hard enough to draw my head back. The pull went through my spine into every place I was holding back.

“Yes. There. Don’t change it.”

I didn’t. Her legs tightened around my hips; her body bore down on my hand; the pulse under my mouth turned frantic. She came hard and openly, my name breaking across the training bay, her nails scoring the back of my neck while I held her through every contraction.

She came down breathing against my mouth, eyes dark and satisfied. Then her hand slid between us and closed over me through my trousers.