Page 98 of Property of Scar

I press my mouth to the inside of her knee first because I want her to understand how much ground I intend to cover, and I feel her thigh muscle jump at the contact. I drag my lips upward along the inside of her thigh, and her breath is already changing, shorter, less controlled, and I haven’t even arrived where I am aiming for yet. The skin here is impossibly soft, thin enough that I can feel the warmth of her blood moving beneath it, feel the pulse of her alive against my lips, and the hunger shifts in me. Not the cold, indiscriminate thing it usually is, not the mechanical pull toward sustenance, but something entirely new, something that is tangled up with wanting her specifically, only her, in a way I have no previous framework for.

I press an open-mouthed kiss to the crease where her thigh meets her hip, and she makes a sound bitten off at the source, swallowed before it can escape. Then I let my teeth graze the inside of her thigh, a warning or a question, and she goes very still, the way she does when she is quickly making a decision.

“Do it,” she says, low and certain, and that is all the answer I need.

My fangs drop, a hiss escaping me as I hesitate. But her fingers smooth through my hair as I glance up at her, her eyes locking with mine, giving me all the clarity I need.

God, yes.

My head arches back, and I sink my teeth in. Not deep, not to take, just enough to breach the skin, just enough to feel the heat of her blood rise to meet me. The sound she makes is something between a gasp and a moan that she makes no effort to contain, her fingers driving into my hair and gripping hard. The bite itself is sharp and clean, and I feel her thigh tremble under my hands as the pain and pleasure hit simultaneously, and I know… I know how that feels for a dhampir. The way the vampire blood in her responds to a bite, the way it is wired to, not with fear but with something that rides the same nerve endings as everything else I’ve been doing to her tonight.

Then her blood reaches my tongue, and every coherent thought I possess stops.

It hits like nothing I have tasted in five centuries of feeding—copper, heat, and something underneath it that is neither fully human nor fully vampire but something richer than both. It’s the double-natured complexity of what she is arriving on my tongue all at once, wild, warm, and devastating. It moves through me like the first breath after nearly drowning or sunlight through a crack in a wall that has been dark for decades.

My eyes close involuntarily. My grip on Cali’s hips tightens to the edge of too much, and I feel the hunger rear up, vast, ancient, and suddenly, ravenously awake. I clamp down on it with everything I have, because I am not taking from her, I am not turning this into something it isn’t, and I hold that line through sheer force of five centuries of discipline even as every instinct I possess is screaming at me that this, that her, is the finest thing my blood has ever known.

Pulling back with a growl, I drag my tongue slowly up the thin trail of blood running down her inner thigh, following it back to the source, and the sound that comes out of me against her skin is not something I have made before. Low, wrecked, and entirely involuntary, the sound of something ancient encountering something it did not know it had been waiting for.

She feels it vibrate against her skin, and her whole body shudders in response.

“Scar.” Just my name, nothing else, in a voice I have never heard from her before, stripped of every layer she normally keeps between herself and the world.

I seal my tongue gently over the small wound, closing it, and lift my head to look at her. Her eyes are half closed, her chest rising and falling in uneven pulls, her fingers still knotted in my hair, and she is looking at me with an expression I have never seen before, something that holds desire, surprise, and the unmistakable look of encountering something that wasn’t part of the plan.

I glance up at her from where I am, because I want to see her face for this.

Her jaw is tight. She is visibly exercising restraint.

“Breathe,” I tell her.

“I am breathing!”

Then I slide my tongue down to her clit, and anything she was about to say slips from her lips instantly with a moan.

I work slowly at first, reading every shift in her breathing, every involuntary movement of her hips, every tightening of her fingers in my hair, until I have a thorough and working understanding of exactly what she needs. Her blood is still warm on my tongue, threading through everything. It makes the hunger and the wanting entirely indistinguishable, two things collapsed into one single, overwhelming drive that has only one name, and that name is Calypso. Then I apply that knowledge with focused precision, centuries of patience narrowing to this moment. My tongue moves in slow, deliberate strokes, and I keep the pressure steady until the sound she makes against her wrist tells me to change the angle, and I do, and the next sound she makes is louder than she clearly intended it to be.

She is trying very hard to stay quiet. I feel it, her legs bracketing tighter, her hand pressed to her mouth like she’s attempting to keep control, and something in me latches onto that hard.

Not a chance.

I seal my mouth around the most sensitive part of her and apply exactly the right pressure in exactly the right rhythm, and just like that, she stops trying.

The sound she makes lands in my chest and resonates outward into every dark and quiet place in me that has been silent for too long.

I want more of it.

I slide one hand up the inside of her thigh and press two fingers slowly inside her, feeling her contract around them, and she gasps above me, sharp and unguarded, her hips tilting up to meet the movement. I work them in a slow, curling rhythm, deliberate, thorough, my tongue maintaining its pace against her. At the same time, my fingers find the place that makes her thighs shake and stay there, merciless, because I want every sound she has been keeping carefully behind closed doors and professional distance. I work for them one by one until she is pulling against the grip my other hand still has on her wrists, and the sounds are coming freely now, the version of her that nobody else gets to hear.

She is shaking, her hips rolling toward me in a rhythm she is no longer controlling, chasing every movement of my mouth and fingers. I can feel the edge she is standing on in the way her thighs have clamped around me and her breathing has fragmented into something that barely qualifies as breathing at all. I hold her there, not cruelly, not even deliberately. I hold her there because I want this to matter when it breaks. I want it to be the kind of thing she carries, and then I curl my fingers, increase the pressure of my mouth, and take her over it.

“Scar!” My name leaves her in one syllable, stripped of everything, no edge, no armor, just the sound of her wanting, receiving, and coming fully undone. It moves through me like a current that finds every dark and unused place in me and lights it briefly on fire.

She comes apart beneath my hands, and I work her through every second of it, keeping the rhythm until she is pulling at my hair to draw me up, oversensitive, wrecked, and still somehow managing to look at me with an expression that contains both devastation and something dangerously close to wonder.

When she finally breaks the surface, dragging in a hard breath, her free hand planted against her chest like she’s checking that her heart is still where she left it, I lift my head and look at her with an expression I know for a fact she’s going to hate.

She opens her eyes and confirms it immediately. “Don’t.”