A whimper worms up my throat. A desperate, selfish,needysound I chomp down on.
Not for you.
You threw him away.
He tucks my hair behind my ear and cradles the side of my face; a tender motion I yearn to lean into.
Fallinto.
A polar contrast to the hard words thrown from his mouth.
“Consider this your first and final warning,” he says, leaning so close his lips skim mine—like dragging an iceberg across my cupid’s bow. “You bare your throat like that again and the entire world will suffer.” My heart skips a beat as he leans back an inch, looking at me with a hardness that dwarfs every other look he’s ever given me. “I can’t be held accountable for what rips out of me if I’m forced to watch you die.”
How do I tell him I wasn’t baring my throat to Cainon’s sword but to the weight of my lethal existence?
My face crumbles.
His stare flays.
“Are we clear?”
I swallow a sob and nod.
A deeper shade of black sweeps over his eyes, making me feel like I’m in the midst of something …else.Like I’m being watched by not just him.
By somethingcataclysmic.
“Say the words,” he rumbles past his canines I’m certain have grown thicker, longer; his chest swelling against me with crushing promises. “I need to hear you tell me that you’re clear as fucking crystal.”
“I got it, Rhordyn.”
He releases a bestial sound that makes me shudder from the tips of my toes all the way to my pebbling nipples, then steps back. I plunge to the sand in a heaving, coughing, throbbing heap, my entire body flushed with a heat that threatens to unravel me.
He rips the talon from the stone and stalks off.
Catching my breath, I watch him through wet, stringy strands of hair as he moves between trees, splashed in rain as he picks up his sword, strapping the sheath across his torso—a rippling tower of menacing might. He snatches something else off the ground, then charges toward me, staring me down like a natural disaster I want to fall into.
“Something you want?”
He’s paused a few feet before me, his sword back where it belongs, his eyes still black like the dark between stars.
He’s breathing … heart beating …
Here.
Alive.
So beautifully alive.
Perhaps this is some sort of dream, but it’s a perfect one. He’s angry, fierce, frightening … but he’s here.
Is there something I want?
Yes.
“No.”
This rumbling sound boils in the back of his throat, and he hoists me up. “I told you not to lie to me if you can’t do it convincingly.” He grips me around the ribs and tugs me forward, my breasts brushing his torso as he slams something into my sheath.
