Page 58 of Ignite the Infernos

The next thing I know, dishes are crashing to the ground and I’ve been plucked unceremoniously from my chair. My bare thighs smack against the tabletop as I’m roughly set down, and suddenly Aeson is fitting himself between my thighs and running frantic hands all over me.

“What’s wrong?” he demands, his touch warm and his words clipped. “Where are you hurt?”

Fingers skim down my leg and reach for my anklet, and I don’t know why I let him remove it, but I do. I know eventually it has to come off, and somehow it’s easier for me to have him do it than to do it myself. He drops the anklet on the table with a clang and then runs a palm back up my legs until it’s skating over the scars on my thigh. It feels better than it has any right to, and I bite back a whimper while his other hand continues to search my back and arms.

It’s not the first time Aeson has touched my scars, but so much has happened between now and then. I didn’t know what he tasted like before. I hadn’t sampled his groans, licked my way up his throat, or experienced the exquisite bliss of having him buried deep inside of me.

His large hands cup my face, forcing my head back so he can lock on to my eyes. “What’s wrong?” he demands.

Oh, right.

Quickly, I try to unscramble my brain and hold on to the threads of the conversation we were having before. The weight of what I’m about to tell him helps clear my mind, and I pull in a deep breath.

“I didn’t break the curse,” I confess and try not to start drowning in the anguish that floods me.

“What do you mean?” he asks, confused, his gaze darting down to my throat and the lines of the dragon mark stamped there.

“I did something, which is why I have this.” I gesture to my neck. “But I still can’t reveal. My affinity is nowhere to be seen.”

Aeson reels back, clearly taken by surprise at the revelation, and his thumb absently caresses my bottom lip as he studies my face and absorbs what I just said. My lungs freeze while I wait for him to realize just how broken I am, how broken I might always be. I tell myself I’ll survive the moment he pushes me away, that the distance he’ll put between us won’t feel like a cavern, but the space I need to breathe.

My pulse screams for him to say something, do something, and then his eyes widen when the thumb that was tracing my mouth drops to the lines on my throat.

“Ever,” he gasps before tipping my head back and shoving his face closer.

My instincts tell me he’s about to kiss me, but his mouth never connects. “Weird way to try and seduce me, but okay?” I croak as he angles my head the other way and partially blocks my airway with his massive hands.

“Your scars are gone,” he rumbles, shocked, and I jerk my head back out of his hold and stare up at him like he’s lost the last threads of his sanity. “Look,” he insists, and then I’m lifted off the table and suddenly dropped in front of the mirror that’s really a secret vitric port.

“Look,” he grunts again, lifting my chin for me like I’m incapable of the feat.

With a sidelong glance and a severe amount of skepticism, I lean closer to the reflective glass and try to see what he’s seeing.

“What the fuck?” I yelp, lifting my hands to the smooth skin on my neck.

I press my fingers harder against my throat, like the collar of scars might suddenly appear, but Aeson’s right, they’re gone. Without a second thought, I pull my shirt off and examine my chest. There used to be a starburst pattern of tallies carved there, but now there’s only the varying lines of my dragon mark. Frantically I spin, and I take in my back. My mark covers my neck, the tops of my shoulders, my upper back, and then tapers down my spine. And just like the front, everywhere my dragon mark now touches is smooth, ink-black skin.

“What in the stars-blessed fuck is going on?” I demand, my hands and voice quivering with emotion. “Have you ever heard of this happening?” I ask Aeson, whirling around to see why he’s suddenly so quiet.

I stop in my tracks when I almost bump into him. His eyes look as though they’re fighting the press of his dragon. The blue of his irises starts to bleed into the whites of his eyes, and then the pupils slit. In the next blink, everything shrinks back to the rounded eyes of a drake, and the cycle repeats.

Shit. Is he about to go into a frenzy?

I look down and immediately catalog what’s setting him off. I no longer have a shirt on, and not only are the scars I still have very visible, but I wasn’t wearing anything underneath my pajama top. I find the neck of the shirt in my hands and quickly start to pull it back on. Lightning fast, Aeson’s hand shoots out to stop me. I flinch and barely swallow a shocked squeal as he takes my shirt from me and crumples it in his fist.

My breathing suddenly feels shallow and too fast. My heart thunders in my chest, and bolts of awareness skitter across my skin like lightning. Slowly, measuredly, Aeson lifts a hand and runs the tip of his finger down one of the long marks that lines my sternum and dips between my breasts. I watch his stroke slip lower and lower, and there’s no fighting the tremble that moves through me.

It’s the most intimate sensation I think I’ve ever felt. I don’t know if it’s the worship I sense in the caress or the need burning in Aeson’s eyes. Whatever it is, it strips a layer from both of our defenses and exposes a vulnerability neither of us is keen to admit is there.

“Are you going to give me everything, Ever?” Aeson rasps, and I notice his eyes have stopped flickering between forms.

I look up at him, and he drops his hand from my body, like he can scent my answer in the crisp air already. “Not today,” I tell him honestly, and he nods solemnly.

“Go get cleaned up. We leave in thirty,” he orders, and for once I don’t argue.

I turn to move past him, and his arm shoots out again to stop me.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”