“I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
The air hums around us, charged with magic and need.
Somewhere deep inside me, that other heartbeat quickens—thirsting, echoing mine. For a terrible, beautiful moment, I feel it join us.
Then I feel power surge through him, throughus, lighting every nerve, every vein. The world narrows to heat, breath and blood.
The first sting of the blade is so sharp, so sudden that I cry out, my back bowing off the bed. A thin line of fire blooms across the swell of my breast, blood welling up in its wake, dark and glistening.
Lucien’s tongue follows immediately, hot and wet to lap at the wound.
Pain melts into something else, something sweeter, more intoxicating, as his potent saliva seals the cut. My fingers twist into the sheets, my thighs squeezing together, but there’s no relief.
He doesn’t stop.
The dagger moves again, this time along the underside of my breast, then lower, skimming over the trembling plane of my stomach.
I’m panting now, my skin slick with sweat, my body alive with the promise of more. Each nick of the blade sends a jolt through me. My nerves sings and my pussy throbs.
He cuts me just above my hipbone, shallow but stinging, and before I can even gasp, his mouth is there, sucking, his fangs grazing the wound.
Pleasure and pain twist together and coils a knot of need tighter inside me.
“Lucien—gods—” My voice breaks as his hand slides between my thighs, his fingers finding me soaked, my clit swollen and throbbing. He doesn’t touch me where I need him most, though.
Instead, his fingers dip lower, gathering the wetness that drips from my entrance, then brings it up to my lips.
“Taste yourself,” he orders with a voice rough with hunger. I obey, my tongue darting out to lap at his fingers, and the musky flavor of my arousal explodes across my senses.
His cock jerks against my thigh, pre-cum leaking from the tip, and I moan around his fingers, desperate for more.
The dagger returns, this time dragging up the inside of my thigh. I spread my legs even wider without thinking, offering my most vulnerable self to him.
The blade presses against the delicate skin of my inner thigh, then—slice.
A sharp, bright pain, followed by the hot rush of blood. “Oh, fuck!”
Lucien groans, his fangs bared as he swoops, his mouth sealing over the wound. His tongue works the cut, lapping up every drop as his free hand grips my thigh hard enough to bruise.
I stifle a moan as a new, alien heat gathers within me. I’m too scared to tell him, too terrified to mention that the sigil on my spine is pulsing, a deep, insistent throb. It’s building now, stalking my heightened emotions.
I’m learning it unwillingly, know that it comes awake when I’m roused or aroused.
I don’t…can’tmention it to Lucien because I don’t want this to end. Don’t want this depravity I’ve craved more than my own breath to cease.
So I focus on the way his fangs scrape my skin, the way his breath hitches when he pulls back, his lips smeared with my blood.
“You’re dripping,” he growls, his hand sliding up to palm my pussy. Decadent, squelching sounds fill the room as his fingers slip inside me, one, two, then three, stretching me, curling just right to make my hips buck off the bed. “So fucking wet for me.”
His thumb presses against my clit, rubbing in tight, relentless circles, and I scream, my back arching, my nails raking down his arms.
Then his mouth is on me.
Not where I expect—on my pussy to drink down what he’s earned.
Instead his lips seal over the pulse point at the base of my throat, his fangsteasing, teasing, teasingonce again.
I angle my head, frantic for this next sublime agony. “Do it. Please, Lucien, my love…do it!”
