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“You… you’re touching me.”

“Yes, I am.”

Despite the oath, not a single part of me felt a compulsion to do anything that would harm her. The tattoo on my back remained still. Silent. Inactive. As long as I kept my composure and control in check…

“Are you going to touch me more?” Rayna breathed.

My chest caved. My restraint crumbled. My hands gripped her face as her body heat enveloped mine, her scent invading my senses and turning them inside-out.

“Without a doubt,” I said.

And it was the sweetest misdeed I’d ever done to crash my lips against hers.

CHAPTER

20

RAYNA

The moment Coen’s mouth met mine, all the invisible Object Summoning strings that held me like a taut puppet completely unraveled.

Every part of me was leaping, floating, soaring as his tongue parted my lips and claimed me. My arms locked around him, my fingernails scrabbling at the back of his head in a frantic attempt to keep him right here, pressed against me forever.

“Fuck, Rayna, I missed you,” Coen groaned.

I couldn’t even take a breath to tell him I’d missed him, too. When his hands roamed down the length of me and cupped my thighs, I gasped. He hoisted me up until my legs locked around his waist, my dress bunched up around my midsection.

And then he was scattering hard, desperate kisses along my cheeks and nose and jaw, each point of contact igniting me with heat. He grabbed a fistful of my drenched curls and tilted my head back, exposing my neck to him, dragging his canines against my skin before he pressed even more kisses down to the top of my breasts where his lips soaked up the dots of rain on my skin.

They weren’t polite, those kisses. They were starved. Animalistic. Frenzied. And God of the Cosmos, I wanted even more as my belly coiled tight.

But Coen pulled back for a moment to smirk right into my face.

“What?” I snarled, furious that he’d stopped.

He swept a thumb along my temple, his eyes sinking into mine. “You’re kind of making us levitate, little hurricane.”

I jerked my head down and gasped. Indeed, we were floating several feet off the ground, and panic flared within me once more.

As soon as Mr. Gleekle’s brand had touched my skin, I’d felt the strangest, sensation of strings erupting from my skin, catapulting outward and touching every object around me. Gravity had suddenly felt of little consequence, as if everything in the world could be pulled or lifted or conjured with these strings.

I hadn’t even meant to tug on one. I’d simply twitched, and the pillar to my left had toppled and crashed to the floor, cracking the stone platform and nearly smashing several of the other students who’d moved out of the way just in time.

“I don’t know how to get us back down,” I told Coen now, my heart flinging itself against my ribs. What if we just kept floating higher and higher and—

“Hey. Look at me.” Coen tilted my face back up. “It’s going to be okay. Let me in and we’ll figure out how to get down together.”

It took me a second to figure out what he meant, but then I nodded and lowered my blockade. Instantly, his dark, fathomless presence melded with my mind until he was sharing that string-like sensation with me, carrying half the weight of it.

“Ahhh. I see. Okay. Can you pinpoint your specific tether to the ground?”

With my legs still wrapped around his waist and my arms locked around his neck, I closed my eyes, trying not to think about the fact that we were literally midair right now. All those invisible strings flowed out from every inch of me, grazing the trees, several honeyeaters hiding in the treetops above our heads, Coen himself, and…

There. One of them seemed to be hooked into the ground beneath us.

“Now can you reel us back down?” Coen asked gently. When my eyes flared, he kissed me again, deep and slow, before whispering, “There’s no rush.”

No rush. Okay. I took a long breath and tried to envision myself gripping the tether and pulling us down…