Page 191 of May: Bloom & Bane

“You are the only thing I would choose to keep when everything else is gone. What I feel for you goes beyond love, Eden—beyond even death.”

My fangs lengthen rebelliously, a groan escaping as I drag them down the sweet curve of her neck. Venya aches in my gums, begging to flood her veins and finally mark her as Death’s for every God and monster to scent.

But her words echo in my head: not until you’re whole, Ashán. Your true form. Promise me.

I wrench my mouth from her throat, my skelva trembling where they grip her hair.

“Aevún, help me. I’m running out of reasons to stop.” (Gods)

“Ashán?” she breathes, pulling weakly against the shadows bound around her wrists. “Don’t back away. Please bite me. I want everyone to see your mark.”

Temptation plagues my blood. “Do not ask me to take back the promise I made to you.”

“That was before you were gone for so long.”

“I have spent my existence incomplete. I will not make you settle for an incomplete version of me.”

“You’re not⁠—”

“But there is something else I can give you. Something I’ve never given anyone.”

Her hooded eyes search mine.

I lift a single skelva and drag it slowly across the still-living half of my throat. Sage’s green skin parts beneath it, a thin golden line welling with the faint shimmer of my venya.

“Drink,” I rasp. The shadows at her wrists dissolve into smoke, freeing her hands at last. “If you can’t have my fangs tonight, then take this instead. Take me. Let me feed you.”

Her eyes drop to my neck, fixated on the liquid trailing down my skin.

My chest tightens as I wait for her to accept my proposal—to ingest a reaper’s venom directly from the vein is a devotion deeper than any mark I could ever give her.

Eden’s hands slide up my chest, shaking where they settle on my shoulders.

The first touch of her lips against the wound steals every coherent thought from my head. A quiet moan escapes me. She drinks me like she’s starving, one hand fisted in my hair to keep me still.

I am a creature of death. A thing that takes and takes and takes. And yet, for her, I would bare my throat without hesitation and let her drink me down to the last ember of life.

Her hips roll against me, burning my flesh as she grinds harder against my shaft.

“That’s it, ash’kaela,” I groan, my skelva splaying wide across her back. My shadows coil tighter around her thighs. “Drink. Vresh—drink me down.”

She gasps against my throat, her fingers clawing down my shoulders as the venom enters her bloodstream. It races through her veins like wildfire chasing oil, lighting up every nerve at once. She whimpers against me, her hips bucking helplessly against my shadow. A fresh rush of slick wets my lap as her thighs clamp. Her throat swallows hungrily as she chases the high of me.

“Feel that?” I purr dizzily, my head tipping back as much as she’ll allow it. “That’s me in your blood now, Eden. Flowing through you the way you’ve flowed through me since the first time I glimpsed your light.”

My vision blurs. The stars above us smear into long, silver lines, the world narrowing to nothing but the sluggish thud of my own heart while it tries to keep up with her hunger.

The more she consumes, the more her devotion pours down the open line of my throat and into the void inside me. It climbs ravenously, dragging more of me to the surface to answer her need. Sage’s warm green skin recedes beneath my hands, bone climbing up our ribs, swallowing flesh and replacing it with the cool ivory of my true form. Smoke pours from the seams of where I’ve split open into the world. Three-quarters of us is me now.

The chest beneath her hollows and hardens from warm muscle to the bare cage of my vorí, her lips sealed over a throat that is barely flesh at all.

She’s pulling me out—after reaching for her through bars and cages of someone else’s nerves, my mate is dragging the monster into the light with bare hands and her hungry mouth, and she isn’t afraid.

“Look what you summon, ash’kaela,” I rasp, curling a skeletal hand around the back of her neck. I draw her off my throat until her eyes meet mine. “No one has ever wanted the parts of me that aren’t pretending to be him. No one but you.”

Her drunken gaze roams over the new planes of bone and shadow.

“There you are,” she breathes. “My dark prince.”