Page 33 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

“I’d marry you too. I do marry you. You’re right. What business is it of Prime Minister Reinhardt? None. I choose. I want to choose. And I choose to marry you now in the dark. No adultery. We are married.”

Just like that. No minister. No cathedral. No register to sign. There’s nobody to hear it but me.

It isn’t even a question. He isn’t asking for anything. He just says it.

He shifts and lifts himself onto me, joining us together and I let out a moan. This is what the world is now. Just him and me joined.

“I marry you,” I say back, and even then I am not sure if it is true, because he might just be saying it. We’re both mad with whatever prime match chemistry is driving us insane. He might just be saying it.

But then he moves, dropping down and his mouth goes to my neck, to the place where the shoulder meets it. He holds there breathing.

I know what he wants. Every alpha knows. I have never wanted it but I want it now so bad my teeth ache with it.

“Yes. Yes, I want you. I want to bond with you. I want to be yours.”

He bites.

It hurts, a bright clean hurt that goes straight down my spine. He lifts his head. His mouth is wet. He is shaking.

I get my hand in his hair and pull him down and get my mouth on his neck, and I don’t ask, because he already told me.

I marry you.

This is what we are to each other.

I bite.

He cries out and comes, all at once, clenching down on me, and the sound goes through me and the taste of him goes through me and I come inside him with my teeth in his neck.

For a while there is nothing in the world but that.

When it stops I am lying on my back in the dark with my prince on my chest and there are two heartbeats in me. Mine. And his, also going fast, a beat behind mine.

9. Aurelio

I wake up because I am cold on one side and warm on the other.

The dark is total. The lantern is out. I am lying on Roan with my face in his neck and his arm heavy across my back, and for a moment I do not know where I am, and then I do.

He is asleep. His breathing is slow and even under my ear. His heart is slow too.

Mine is not. And there is a second beat under my own, a little behind it, and it is his. I lie still and listen to it. The sound is so soothing, I drift off for a moment before I remember.

I put my hand to my neck.

It is there, where the shoulder starts. The skin is swollen and hot and when I press it the pain goes down my arm and into my chest and I have to stop.

He bit me. I asked him to. I bit him first.

I lie in the dark with my fingers on it. In Monteverra there is a word for an omega who comes to the altar with a mark on his neck that his husband did not put there. It is not a polite word. Nobody would say it to me, but they would not need to. The mark says it for them.

There is no washing this off. This is permanent. If I go back, this is the first thing that they will see.

But I am married. At least in my own head. I doubt that will make any difference to them.

I make myself breathe. I hold still. I am good at that.

I chose this. I put my mouth there and I bit down and I meant it. If I could take it back, I would not.