Page 37 of Claimed

Perhaps because forcing truth from her will prove every terror she once believed about me. Because whatever called her to me in the dark did not feel like strategy. It felt older. Viciously compelling. A demand from my blood to have her beside me, beneath me, around me, in my mouth.

I remember calling her. Needing her.

After that, there are fragments.

Her throat under my mouth. Her beautiful cunt clenching and spasming around mine.

Blood. Power.

Then waking restored while she looked at me as if I had become both miracle and executioner.

The Vault doors unseal behind me but I do not turn immediately.

Her scent reaches me first. Clean from a shower, sharp at the edges, warm beneath. Human and… not. Hidden and familiar. The mark at my throat pulses once, hard enough to send a blade of heat down my chest.

I close my eyes for half a second.

Control is a choice. Tonight, apparently, it is also a negotiation conducted with teeth.

‘You summoned me,’ Eira says from the doorway. ‘Again. Should I be concerned this is becoming your new hobby?’

I turn. And every disciplined thought in my head goes very still.

She dresses like a woman who refuses to be ornamental. Black leather trousers grip her legs. A structured black bustier shapes her waist and lifts her breasts in a manner my blood has no business appreciating after the last several hours. A flared leather panel falls from the side and back, draping behind her like a war banner designed by a sinner with exquisite taste.

Weapons are strapped to her thighs with impressive competence, visible and hidden, each movement efficient enough to be intimate, the Mercy Pin already tucked somewhere I will enjoy discovering later.

I mourn the fact that the draped leather hides her delicious ass. Then relish that no one else gets to look at it.

Both reactions are beneath me. Both are true.

‘You’re staring,’ she says, voice too casual.

‘I am observing magnificence.’

She snorts and tightens a strap. ‘Sure.’

The mark pulses again and my jaw locks.

Her gaze flicks to my throat, then my face. The sharpness in her softens by a fraction, and that does something to me I have no language for. Irritation, heat and a dangerous little fracture somewhere under the breastbone.

‘You okay?’ she asks.

‘Perfectly.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You doubt me?’

‘I watched you drink a bottle of wine like it had personally offended you, after waking up from magical blood-sex amnesia on a stone slab.’ Her brows lift. ‘So yes. A little.’

I should not smile. Yet I do. ‘It was a mediocre vintage.’

‘It was probably worth more than my last safehouse.’

‘Then your last safehouse was overpriced.’

Her mouth twitches before she can stop it. A victory. Small. Absurdly pleasing.