I freeze beneath her, the sound of her words echoing through my mind. I was so lost in the power thrumming inside of me and the utter infatuation I felt with her surrender to me that I lost sight of what my venom is doing to her. What itmakesher want.
“Darling,” I mutter as I draw back just enough to see her face, my lips still damp with her blood, my breath uneven where it tangles between us.
I prepare myself to pull forth any shred of control I can muster to tell her we can’t move forward while she’s under this influence, but the words stall in my throat.
I blink twice and pull back to glance between both of her eyes.
Her pupils aren’t blown and there’s no haze to her focus–that is usually what makes someone look drunk with our venom.
I felt the vastness of her power, but I still expected a bite like mine, drawn this close to the heart, to at least leave her body trembling beneath the weight ofeuphoria. To influence her decision even slightly, but there’s nothing.
She’s not responding to the chemical rush, or the addictive haze of venom coiling through her veins. She’s not being guided or manipulated.
She’s freely choosing this and voicing her own desires.
My breath shudders out as I sit up straighter, brushing her hair back from her chest with reverent care, and I press my forehead to hers.
“My bite didn’t influence you at all,” I murmur, voice barely audible.
She lets out a single chuckle, as if I’m being ridiculous.
“I feel a heat within me,” she admits as her lips curve slightly. “But that belongs entirely to my body responding to my own desires for you that have been building since the day we met. Not your bite.”
I exhale through a trembling breath and let my fingers skim her cheek, trailing down to the curve of her throat where the punctures are already beginning to close. “Do you know what that means?”
She tilts her head just enough to challenge me, fluttering her lashes intentionally slowly. “That you aren’t as powerful as you built yourself up to seem in your explanation?”
I huff a breath that is half-laugh, half-surrender. She has me so wrapped around herfinger.
“You have no idea how badly I want to wrap your hair around my hand and fill your mouth until you can’t sass me,” I whisper darkly, enjoying the way her eyes widen and her heart skips a beat.
I file that away for later, focusing back on the more important revelation she needs to understand. “You’re not just resisting me, Wren. You’re immune to me, which means you should be immune toallvampires.”
I wait for the implications to hit her, but she merely shrugs, admitting, “That’s a relief.”
I expected finding out such an important fact to derail her previous desires, but she still traces lazy circles against my shoulder with the pad of her thumb. She still straddles me with flushed cheeks, parted lips, and a look in her eyes that says she is so very focused on the thing she wants.
Me.
It wrecks me.
“Say what you want,” I whisper, not because I doubt her, but because I need the echo. I need to feel her certainty ringing true above my own desires.
Her eyes don’t falter as I study them like I’m searching for cracks, for signs of indecision, but they hold.
“I want to feel you, Riven,” she says, and her voice doesn’t tremble. “I don’t know what I need or what to expect. Only that my body demands you satisfy this ache.”
Her admission steadies something in me even as it unravels everything else.
The part of me that wants to worship her aches, the part of me that wants to ruin her trembles, and somewhere in between those truths is the part of me that knows this moment must be cherished.
“I told you before, darling,” I whisper, “I know exactly what you need.”
Her fingers are steady, deliberate, and when they slide beneath the fabric of my shirt, my breath stutters. Not because I’m surprised by her initiation, but because I’ve never been undressed like this.
Not by the hands of someone else. Not by someone whose gaze says, I see you and I want you anyway.
She draws the shirt upward, slow and unhurried, her knuckles grazing my ribs, my chest, and then my throat. The sensation is maddening in its soft intimacy.
