Then he latches onto the clit itself, and sucks like there’s no tomorrow. I clutch at his horn, incoherent groans and cries tumbling from my throat. My eyes squeeze shut as I moan and thrash about under his attentions. Rhazev drinks the deluge of my juices like he’s never been so thirsty in his entire infernal life.
He lifts his face, dripping wet, from between my thighs and watches with amusement as I shake and twist from the aftershocks of his ministrations.
Then he crawls fully into bed and spoons me, pulling me close to his body. I nestle up close, sighing in contentment. Maybe tomorrow will bring more tragedy my way, but for now, this is paradise.
18
RHAZEK
The corridor beyond the chamber smells of iron, old smoke, and Corin’s theatrical disgust.
“I’m not hearing a godsdamned thing,” he calls through the door, his voice muffled by the thick wood and the dignity he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to preserve since the moment Sable decided my lap was a strategic position rather than an inappropriate one. “For the record, I am several feet away. Spiritually. Emotionally. Morally.”
Sable’s forehead is still resting against my shoulder, her breath warm where it slips through the ruined opening of my shirt. Her fingers are tangled in the torn fabric at my ribs, and every time she inhales, the bond answers as though her lungs are inside my chest too. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally enough that I can feel the soft expansion of her body as a pressure in my own, as though she has become another chamber of my heart.
I have known many forms of possession. I have endured bindings, blood oaths, name chains, slaughter pacts, conquest rites, and the old volcanic vows that do not break unless one party is reduced to ash and the ash is salted. This is not anyof those. This is worse. This is gentler. This is Sable lodged in every savage mechanism of me, making the ruin feel inhabited, making the monstrous architecture of my soul turn toward her light as if it has been waiting centuries to learn the shape of sunrise.
And beneath that light, something black moves.
At first, I think it is merely the aftertaste of Maltherion’s power, some psychic soot clinging to the inner walls of me after his attempted intrusion. My core is not a place most beings can perceive without going mad or dying impolitely, but I know its temperature, its color, its music. It should burn deep crimson at the center, edged in gold where Sable’s anchor has altered the old infernal flame. It should feel like pressure contained in obsidian, like magma beneath a mountain that has not decided whether to sleep or kill a city.
Instead, when I look inward, I see flecks.
Not ash. Ash is honest. Ash has the decency to be dead.
These specks writhe.
They cling to the seams where Sable and I merged the bond, crawling like ink through hairline cracks. Tiny, vicious fragments of Maltherion’s essence, each one too small to be a full consciousness and too malignant to be harmless. They snap toward any pulse of tenderness that passes between Sable and me, recoiling when my fire notices them, then flattening themselves thin as stains.
My arms tighten around her before I can stop them.
Sable lifts her head. Her cheeks are still flushed, her mouth swollen from mine, her eyes bright with that dangerous post-battle softness that always makes me want to kneel and devour an empire on her behalf.
“What?” she asks.
Nothing in me wants to answer. Every instinct I possess roars in a language older than mercy: keep her close, keep her warm,keep her under your hands where no blade, god, law, or ancient parasite can touch her. But the flecks shift again, and one crawls along the bond toward the place where her energy braids through mine.
I release her as though my touch has become a weapon.
She blinks when I slide her from my lap and stand, not abruptly enough to throw her, but fast enough that the air between us turns cold. The absence of her weight is immediate and obscene. The chair creaks behind me. My skin chills where she had been pressed against me. The bond, that newly fused miracle, pulls tight in protest.
“Rhazek?” Her voice drops, no longer teasing, no longer amused. “What are you doing?”
I step back.
It is one pace. One cursed, necessary pace.
The bond thins like a flame deprived of air.
From the other side of the door, Corin goes silent.
Of course he notices. Corin notices everything inconvenient. He can miss a thrown dagger if the thrower is pretty enough, but a fluctuation in contract magic? Suddenly the man develops the focus of a saint facing execution.
“Why did it dip?” he demands through the door.
Sable’s gaze flicks to the entrance, then back to me. “What dipped?”
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly.
