But already I’m anxious and ravenous for the sight of her beautiful face, so I lift my head, my eyes searching hers, my fangs still bared because this hunger…this manic need…is nowhere near sated.
“It’s been two and a half centuries, love,” I remind her, my voice a dark promise, “I’m nowhere near done with you. Next time, I’m doing what I should’ve done last time. I’m marking you.”
Elara smiles, her thumb brushing over my lower lip, tracing the sharp point of a fang, fearless when it almost draws blood. “Next time,” she echoes, her voice a challenge, “I will let you.”
I kiss her impertinent mouth as her hands begin to explore me, tentative at first, then bolder, palms skimming old strength, old sin.
When I lift my head, her gaze travels over my shoulder.
Then around the room.
I tense a little when her storm-grey eyes return to me. “You kept me on your walls,” she says before returning her attention to the portraits beyond my shoulder.
“I kept you everywhere,” I admit, discarding my shame. She’s my weakness. From the first. There’s no point denying it. “Walls. Words. The empty side of the bed.” I kiss the corner of her mouth. “There was nowhere you weren’t, my Elara.”
Her laugh is small and broken, her eyes misting a little. “My beautiful madman.”
My lips travel to the corner of one eye, eager to taste her tears. “Yours.” The affirmation is simple. Unequivocal.
Then I hush her with my mouth again, deeper now, suck her tongue into my mouth and the world falls to its barest essentials: heat, blood, the rip of furs and sheets and the give of mattress, the pull of gravity as we move together.
I take my time undressing myself since I didn’t get around to it yet.
And when she lifts her hands to help, I let her feel each fastening like a stubborn century I’ve waited impatiently for her to undo.
She trembles beautifully at every inch of ravaged skin she bares, not from fear this time but from the voltage running between us, and I murmur nonsense against her shoulder until the trembling becomes a rhythm we can both survive.
“Look at me,” I say, when the last barrier slips and the last stitch falls away.
She does.
The portraits watch from the dark, but her gaze holds me in our own private orbit. I brace my forehead to hers, both of us breathing hard. “I’m going to fuck you again now, my love. Harder and longer than before. We will pass the point of savagery but I know you can take it. And when you’re at the point of madness, I’m going to mark you,” I remind her. “So thoroughly that whatever they’ve done to you will not matter. We will vanquish it and laugh as we do. Because…this is ours.Not theirs. Never theirs.”
Her eyes locks on mine. Bold and unafraid in this moment. Then her throat moves in a swallow. “Then let’s take it,” she whispers. “Let’s take it all back.”
I move.
Slow, possessive, reverent at first. Like prayer, and maybe like penance, like I can convince the night itself to grant us a second chance or risk me taking it by force.
She answers me with gasps that turn to pleas, with hands that hitch me closer, with a desperate litany of my name that makes the stars on the ceiling feel newly charted.
The fire gulps air and flares; shadows climb the walls and kiss every painted version of her until the room is a chorus of Elaras. The bed creaks its complaint and I don’t care; I want the house to remember this, to hold the echo in the brick.
When she breaks with a fierce, startled sound that shivers all the way through me, I hold on and follow, drowning with purpose, breath torn from my chest like a confession I should have made centuries ago. We ride it until the world steadies, until the ceiling constellations stop their slow spin.
Silence after. Not cold. The warm kind that happens when two storms finally choose the same sky.
I gather her close, kiss her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. “No more running,” I say, softer than I mean to. “No matter what comes, no more.”
5
BOUND FOR ME
The silken cords bite deeper into her wrists as she tests their hold, the fibers tightening with every desperate tug. The bedposts groan under the strain, but my knots—meticulously tied, unyielding—hold fast.
Her breath comes in sharp, uneven gasps, the cool air of the chamber brushing over her exposed skin, raising gooseflesh in its wake.
Candlelight flickers, paints her in gold and crimson as she lies bound before me—my witch and my ruin—spread wide and trembling. Every shadow that dances across her skin feels like a confession whispered to the dark.
