She obeyed. That was all she needed. She arched her back, toes curled as her world shattered around her. A climax crashed over her like a wave of exquisite pleasure. She writhed and convulsed against the shadows. Her tight pussy contracting around them as she trembled against the shockwaves.
But the shadows didn’t stop. Not until she turned her head to watch Felix, her breath rapid along with her heart. And at the end of the tether, she felt him. As needy as she was. As ravenous as she was. Their breaths timed up, hearts syncing in beat as she felt a wave of his pleasure running down the bond. His eyes opened and locked on hers as he fell off the edge, his cum spurting and leaking out of him like a glorious volcano. All the while, not once did he take his mismatched eyes off her.
If this was supposed to be forbidden, then why did it feel so right?
Twenty-Seven
Felix
In the non-weirdest way possible,Felix loved to watch Avery sleep. The slow rise and fall of her chest, the slight part of her lips. He was utterly bewitched. It was the only time he had to really look at her, without the voice in his head telling him he should look away. That looking too long would mean wanting things he couldn’t have. He looked anyway.
Each night, Felix memorized the clusters of freckles splattered over her skin like paint on a canvas. Some would find them imperfections, but he loved that out of all the people in the world, only one person looked exactly like Avery. That she had freckles that only she had. And now he knew the taste of her. But it wasn’t enough. He still didn’t know what her lips tasted like. They had kissed once already, yes, but he didn’t pay attention the first time, and now he wished he had.
Leaving her to sleep, Felix swiped her phone and stepped out of her dorm into the hallway in his human form, wearing the Caerwyn uniform. Only a few stragglers remained in the halls when he passed, most too focused on their own business to give him more than a glance, including Callum, doing his usual duty of standing by the bottom of the stairs. It took everything in himnot to slam Callum’s head against the stone stairs for what he did.
Callum didn’t deserve Avery. But Felix wasn’t sure if he did either.
Even now, she was only upstairs, but there was an incessant pull that led him right back to her every time. At first, it was annoying. Now? He would be empty without it. What a cruel thing life is. To give a taste of heaven and then rip it away. When it came to it, he didn’t know if he would let it go.
He shook his head. She was distracting him,again.And she wasn’t even here. He had spent long enough working on the riddles, and there was still the blaring question that Ciro had left him with the other night. Shifters kept going missing, and every road led to Caerwyn. And with the way Eleri had looked at him at the dining table could have been coincidental. When his gut told him something, he listened to it.
Felix traced the path back to the council tower where Avery had taken him for dinner, and using his shadow cloak, he slipped past the guards unnoticed. The main hall was grand, with towering spiral staircases and vaulted ceilings. Paintings of previous councilors lined the walls, their eyes following him as he clung to the edges where the flickering candlelight didn’t reach and climbed the staircase.
He would start in the suite where they had dinner. That seemed the most logical first step. Hopefully, Avery’s mother wasn’t there, but more than likely, she hid her secrets like a goddamn dragon hoarding gold. Which was a harmful stereotype to his dragon buddies, but to his credit, he had seen them literally hoarding gold in the caves below their den. There were some instincts nature could never break.
Halfway up, small gusts of dust blew in like tumbleweeds, blocking his path. He could have stepped over them easily, butinstead, Felix stopped in his tracks. They weren’t just any specks of dust. They were goddamn dust bunnies.
Crouching, he gave one of them a pat on the head before they hopped toward him, making circles around his legs excitedly before running off. Change of plans. He was going to follow the little creatures. Was following a dust bunny a bad idea? Probably. But they had been helpful before, so he trusted his gut screaming at him to follow it. It had kept him alive this long. Curiosity wouldn’t kill him this time, bitches.
The creatures led him down the stairs and then down another spiral staircase that led deep into the underbelly of the council tower. The space became so small that Felix had to duck his head to avoid the basalt walls carved out of the very earth itself. Moss hung from the cracks, the air becoming thicker the lower they descended. Nothing made a sound, not even his heavy footfalls.
At the bottom, a large arched door ended the path. When he walked closer, he noticed an engraving of Cerituen defeating his god, Arawn. The goddess was sending her two dogs onto Arawn while holding a spear over him as he begged for his life. Felix was no artistebut the door didn’t look as ancient as it made itself out to be. Its color was too uniform to be weathered naturally. But what the fuck did he know? He was just a cat in a witch’s world. Nothing worked like it should have.
Ignoring it, he went to open the door. But before he touched it, the dust bunnies squeaked at him with an alarm he hadn’t thought they were capable of.
The fuck?
Felix’s hand jolted back, and lo and behold, a faint shimmer of a barrier was up in front of the door.
A ward.
He had gone through many in his time; witches had a habit of warding their apartments against shifters, but he alwaysgot through them. There was only one barrier he couldn’t get through back in London. And he absolutely didn’t let it get to his ego that a shimmery wall stopped him. This one was the same, blood rippling through water.
Purely out of spite, he sent his magic into the ward. Usually, he felt some sort of resistance. Some sort of pushback against him. He would need to strain to pull it apart, limbs shaking like a shitting dog.
But this one was far too easy. It split almost instantly for him, creating a doorway just wide enough for him to grab the handle, open the door, and step through before it snapped back behind him.
Ego restored. He was the best.
Still, the little inkling in the back of his mind knew that something in him had changed. His magic had changed. His goddamn heart had changed for the little witch he had left sleeping in the dorm.
Inside, the space opened up to a carved cave, the black walls swallowing the light. Even with his superior eyesight, the room was like a void. As far as he could tell, there was no one here, but that didn’t stop his senses coming alive as if there were. Grabbing Avery’s phone from his pocket, he turned on the flashlight and followed the wall until he came to a shelf-like structure carved into the very basalt.
Looking closer, he realized they were animal statues.
Hundreds and hundreds of animal statues.
The room tilted.
