Page 99 of The Song of the Void

I worked my fingers into her shoulders until her muscles relaxed. Slowly, I sank to my knees, watching the excess oil drip in honey-like trails down her back. Vanilla intermingled with a hint of ocean brine, a fragrance that nearly made me feral. I needed more of it, needed her closer, needed to taste her. I wrapped an arm around her stomach to draw her towards me, but my skin cooled to ice when my hand fell on the slight ridges above her hip.

Scars. Letters carved into her skin that didn’t fucking belong there.

Zephra flinched. Barely, but she flinched. It would have been idiotic to think she’d be fine after everything she had been through, and I couldn’t undo the pain inflicted upon her. The only way for me to help her was to love her so fiercely that one day, those memories of fear would vanish like smoke.

I trailed kisses down the curve of her spine, massaging her back.

Tremors rippled through her with every touch. “Rei, you’re spoiling me,” she breathed.

Kisses turned into love bites, and the way my teeth and lips left marks on her glistening skin gave me an idea. Using the tip of my finger, I wrote a four-letter word in the oil coating her back. I grinned and wrote it again, on the other side of her spine. I wrote it over and over, one word to overpower what Vaetrik Tynedall told her she was.

She snickered. “I don’t think you have this massaging thing down, that tickles. Are you drawing on me?”

“No, love.” Satisfied with myself, I swiped my hands flat up her back as I stood, rubbing away traces of the word I wrote, but never the emotion. My voice pitched low, deep in my chest. “Face me, and if you don’t want those panties soaked in oil, take them off.”

While she took her sweet time obeying, I dipped my hands into the bowl to coat them again. Zephra tossed her hair over her shoulder to give me a perfect view of her breasts and fluttered her eyelashes. “They were already soaked, just not in oil.”

“Hm.”

Our lips met, soft at first. I rested my hands on her ass and massaged until she whimpered into my mouth. Needless to say, my dick was already hard as iron, but her needy sounds ignited something deep inside me—I had to bite her lip to keep it contained. I glided my hands away from her ass and up her stomach to coat her tits in oil, rolling the sensitive peaks of her breasts between my fingers.

She rested her hand against the bulge in my pants, the thin layer of fabric that separated us, infuriating. Breathless and blushing, Zephra cocked her head at me in that adorably fake-innocent way she had mastered.

“Did you like how the oil tasted, Blue?”

“Mmhmm,” she mumbled between kisses.

“Good. You’re not done tasting it yet.”

Spellbinding blue eyes locked on mine, heat and want and trust burning in her gaze. A sly smile lifted the corners of her lips, exposing the gleaming tips of her fangs. “Oh, really?” Her slender fingers made quick work of my trouser buttons, freeing me from the constricting fabric. She dipped her hands in the bowl of oil, rubbing them together as she considered my body. Wickedness hid in the sharp shine of her eyes. “What did you have in mind?” Oil dripped from her fingers onto my chest, sliding down the ridges of my muscles like magma.

I captured her wrists, pulling her hands to splay across my chest, then guiding them down, following that trail of thick liquid lower and lower.

She let out a husky laugh, as if scandalized by the order she knew was coming. “You should sit on the bed. Please?”

Normally, I’d tell her no, that I’d been aching to bury myself down her throat, but she already said please. How was I supposed to deny her when she asked like that? I lazily dropped back to sit on the edge of the bed, ushering her over with a curl of a finger.

Zephra melted to her hands and knees and crawled to me, slowly, as if she wanted to savor my insatiable gaze drinking in her body’s deliberate movements. When she reached me, she paused and looked up. A wordless question.

I cupped her jaw. “I’m going to paint your pretty tongue, and you’re going to look me in the eyes when you swallow. Understand?”

“Yes, Reiven.”

The air between us crackled, desperate anticipation a brewing storm there in my bedroom. She wrapped her hands around my length, and⁠—

Fucking Spirits, fuck.

The heat of her skin, her hands sliding up and down in tandem, her oil-slick fingers constricting around me like molten gold—all of it had me ruined at once. Then she took the head of my cock in her mouth, and I had to grasp the sheets beside me until my knuckles went numb and bloodless. Her tongue slid across the tip, circling it playfully. Divine pressure replaced the tease as she sucked hard enough to make my head spin.

She gasped my name, half-formed sentences in between devastating dips of her head to engulf me with her mouth. “Rei—tastes so good—please let me—give this to you⁠—”

Nothing compared to watching a fucking goddess like her worship me. No wonder I had such an inflated ego. I leaned back, hands tangled in the sheets to keep myself from stealing control away from her. A pesky thought hit me, that she was usually not this eager unless she was up to something, but I couldn’t focus enough to let that thought have more than a moment.

Her lips twitched into a smirk, and a second later, a cruel shot of pleasure jolted through me from where she gripped my cock. I grunted in surprise and instinctively reached for her hair, but she dodged and sent me another electrifying burst of pleasure. She rarely used her Siren powers with such intensity; it almost felt like she meant to…make me embarrass myself.

“Zephra.” My voice cracked just saying her name. Damn. “Don’t even think about⁠—”

“What? Aren't you going to paint my tongue?”