He lifted his hand again and wrapped his fingers around the new length between his thighs, circling it experimentally, and his hips jerked forward at once as though his body had acted entirely on its own.
What was this sensation?
If Erevos’s eyes were capable of widening, they would have done so now.
“Lyssena,” he breathed, startled enough by the sudden surge of pleasure that he pulled his hand away as quickly as he had touched himself, the heat lingering even after contact was broken.
His songbird had changed color.
She no longer merely had the eyes of a green apple. Now her face had taken on the deep, flushed red of one as well, her cheeks and nose burning bright as one hand flew up to cover her mouth, her body going utterly still.
Erevos studied her reaction carefully. Was this a human gesture? Had Lyssena covered her mouth so he would not put his new cock inside it?
Oh.If the simple pressure of his hand had felt likethat—if it had drawn such a response from his body so quickly—then what would her lips feel like, soft and warm, closing around him instead?
His gaze dropped back down to himself, to the rigid length standing proud and unyielding between his legs, hard as his head, pulsing with life and heat.
“I don’t know much about it,” Lyssena said, though her voice came out smaller than before, softened and partially swallowed behind her palm, and as she slowly lowered her hand, the tip of her finger caught on her lower lip, tugging it down just a little before it went up again.
That single, absent gesture claimed Erevos’s attention completely.
For a long moment, he could not hold onto her words at all, could not remember what she had said or why, because his thoughts had narrowed to the curve of her mouth, the slight press of her fingertip against her lip, and the sudden, unfamiliar awareness of his own body responding to the smallest movement of hers.
And then she crawled closer.
Her knees brushed against his left thigh as she moved, the contact light, yet it sent a pulse through him, as though her touch had traced a hidden seam beneath his skin and set something loose inside him.
“Before my engagement,” Lyssena continued, “my mother taught me how to please a man.”
The wordengagementstruck Erevos.
That human male—the one who had dared to believe she might belong to him, the one who had frightened her,wantedher—rose in his mind in a flash of cold, and for a moment, Erevos felt the familiar, corrosive pull of rage coil tight in his chest, sharp enough that the spikes along his spine twitched in response, ready to bloom again.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Lyssena murmured.
Her hand settled on his thigh first, and then her other hand closed around him.
Erevos’s thoughts vanished.
Her grip was gentle, her fingers sliding along his length in slow motions that sent sensation spiraling through him inwaves, every pass of her hand leaving behind heat and pressure and something dangerously close to ache, so overwhelming in its novelty that his muscles flexed on their own.
“Lyssena—” he groaned, the sound torn from him before he could shape it, before he could stop it.
He had never felt anything like this in all of his existence.
The only comparison his mind could grasp was the moment she had tasted the bread he had made for her, the way something warm and unsteady had bloomed inside him then, too, as though her pleasure had reached into him and changed him from within.
He watched her hand move, transfixed by the way her fingers circled him, by the contrast between her soft skin and the rigid heat of his body. He lifted his gaze to her face and found her watching him just as closely, her eyes framed by her lashes.
Her scent returned all at once.
It flooded the air between them, thick and sweet and intoxicating, far stronger than before, curling around him until it felt as though it had weight, as though he could sink into it and be lost entirely, and Erevos realized that he wanted exactly that. He wanted to drown in her sweetness, in her hands, in whatever this new, uncharted thing between them was becoming.
Lyssena’s breathing slowed, each inhale deeper than the last, and Erevos could hear the quiet pull of oxygen into her fragile, human lungs, the soft release as she let it out again. And the awareness of it filled him with a fondness he did not yet know how to name.
He adored that.
He adored that his songbird breathed the air he shaped for her, that her chest rose and fell because he allowed the atmosphere of his realm to cradle her, that she wore garments spun from his shadows against her skin, that her hands heldhis cock without fear, without hesitation, and that she no longer looked at him as something to flee from.
