Page 31 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Mm. I can taste how much.” A second finger joins the first, and his tongue returns to my clit, working in tandem with his hand, and my thighs start to shake against his ears. “Your body has been arguing with your mouth since the night you screamed at me from a bathtub. I am inclined to believe the body. It is a far more honest witness.”

“Objection,” I manage.

“Overruled.” He seals his lips around my clit and sucks, fingers curling, and the coil in my belly winds so tight I can’t breathe. “You called me your captor not an hour ago. Look at you now, riding my face in my own bed. Who is the prisoner, Clara?”

I push out words between panting breaths. “You—you arrogant, ridiculous, backwards—Aldric!”

Without warning, I come apart with his name in my mouth, shouting it like an accusation, my back bowing off the bed while he works me through it, relentless, wringing every last shudder out of me until I’m boneless and gasping and swatting weakly at his head.

“Enough—enough, I surrender, white flag⁠—”

He presses one final, unhurried kiss to the inside of my thigh and lifts his head. His mouth is wet. His smirk is criminal. The blue shard blazes in a way that’s almost smug.

“Note,” he says, hoarse and unbearably pleased with himself, “that it was my name you screamed, not God’s.”

I stare at the vaulted ceiling, my chest heaving, my dignity somewhere on the floor with my jeans.

“Note,” I pant, “that I’m still mad at you.”

“Duly recorded.” He turns his head and bites, gently, the thigh he just kissed. “Stay mad. It suits you. Now…” His fingers flex, still inside me, and my breath hitches all over again. “Shall we discuss how many more times you can hate me before supper?”

19

ALDRIC

I’m making eggs for Clara’s breakfast. Folded, not stirred, just like how Greta taught me when it became obvious I would soon have no one left to prepare my breakfasts. Or any other meals.

I crack the fourth egg one-handed and think about Clara’s mouth on my throat last night.

I made her come four times before the candles guttered. I laid her out across my bed like the spoils of a war I intend to keep fighting, fed her supper in the wreckage of the bedding, and afterward, when she reached for me with a sleepy smile, I put my mouth between her thighs a final time and drank her last climax of the night down like communion wine.

Twice, she offered to pleasure me, reaching for my belt, her voice sweet and seductive. Your turn. Let me.

I declined. I ached the entire evening, my cock leaking against the inside of my pants, hard enough to hammer fence posts, and still I declined. A man who spills in his pants like an untried squire does not get to receive. Not yet. Not until the ledger between us is balanced and my humiliation paid for in full, one of her orgasms at a time.

The whisk stops in my hand.

She went for my shirt buttons again last night, managing to get one loose before I stopped her. I know she’s seen the glow through the linen—she can hardly miss it, the blue light bleeding through the fabric of my clothes. But a vague glow is not the same as an unobstructed view of the entire wreckage of my torso.

There is no flesh over my heart. There is a ruin of parted ribs, and inside that ivory cage sits the thing the souldust made of my heart. Cold, blue, pulsing crystal.

Would she still shiver for me after seeing it? Would she reach for me at all?

The eggs begin to catch. I swear, rescue them, and plate the food—eggs, fried potatoes with wild chives, bread toasted at the hearth, honey, and the last of yesterday’s strawberries. I tell myself I’m not attempting to buy her affection with delicious meals.

Upstairs, I ease the bedroom door open with the tray balanced on one palm.

Clara sleeps diagonally across the bed, her hair spread across the pillow, her cheek creased, and one leg out of the blanket prison like she’s balancing her body’s temperature.

Schmetterling lifts his head from the foot of the bed and gives me a look of profound smugness. He has claimed her like he claims everything.

“She was mine first,” I whisper.

His tail flicks. A lie, and we both know it.

I set the tray on the table by the fire, bank the coals higher against the morning chill, and leave her to sleep. There is water to haul.

The bath takes eleven trips. The copper kettle heats over the kitchen fire while I work the well pump, and by the ninth trip, steam curls off the tub’s surface in ghost-ribbons.