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He lets go of my hair. His hand comes down flat on my ass and smacks my sensitive skin, hard, stinging, just as I’m coming.

“I see you liked that,” he says gruffly, his voice rising with pleasure.

I nod. I make a noise. I’m barely here.

He does it again, harder this time.

I make the noise louder. He fucks me faster, moving with a wildness that’s all animal. The hand that smacked me is back on my hip, and he’s holding me still, fingers digging into my sensitive flesh, and he’s taking me, taking me for all he can, while I’m still pulsing around him.

“Fuck, you feel—I can’t…” he groans.

He brings his hand down between my legs and his fingers find the thickened spot they’d worked before, and he keeps the rhythm of his hips going and he adds the fingers at the front, and the two of them together are more than I can take and I come again, hard, for the third time, throbbing against his fingers and his cock at the same time until my knees give out.

He catches me and pulls me back against his chest, keeping me upright and he fucks me through it, and his teeth are at the side of my neck biting, and I’m shaking against him and he’s holding me together with the one arm around my waist.

He makes a wild, tortured sound I’ll never forget, not even in my most decadent dreams, and he goes still with the whole of him buried in me, and I feel him come. He pulses inside me, hot and thick, and stays buried in me through all of it. His forehead’s between my shoulder blades, hand splayed over my hip. His whole body shakes against mine.

For a long moment neither of us moves and the only sound is the one of our ragged breaths clouding in the air.

The cemetery’s quiet. The dead are quiet. The sky over us is the color of a bruise, and the air’s cold as it wicks away the sweat from my skin.

He slides out of me slowly and I can’t help but make a small bereft sound at the loss of him.

He wipes me carefully with the inside of his coat.

Then he lowers my dress and turns me gently by the shoulders. He straightens my bodice, pulling it back over my breasts, and he kisses me once on the forehead. The tenderness is so disarming after the feral ferocity of what just transpired.

We’re silent, staring at each other, trying to make sense of the world again. It feels like everything has changed and there’s a trickle of fear at the back of my neck, unsure of what happens next.

I think I need to make the tea when I get back to my room. The one my grandmother taught me. The one every island witch learns by the time she’s twelve, to prevent pregnancy. That would take at least one fear out of the equation.

I lean my forehead against his collarbone and take in a steadying breath.

He puts his hand on the back of my head.

Dusk has given way to red night, making all the green a shade of grey. Across the lagoon the Mortis is lit in long warm windows. It feels like a world away. In some ways, I want to stay amongst the graves with his seed still inside me, and make a new world right here.

But then he grabs my hand and pulls me toward the edge of the cemetery and then quickly drops it as soon as we reach the bridge. What we had is not allowed to cross.

Chapter

Nineteen

SATURNA

Iwake up in a body I half recognize.

I’ve slept hard, the kind of sleep I haven’t had in weeks, the kind of sleep I used to get as a child when all was right with the world and Morena was snuggling next to me in bed. The light coming in at the shutters is the golden pink of late morning, well past breakfast. The sheets are twisted around my hips. My hair’s come out of its braid and is everywhere.

I lie there for a long time just taking stock of everything that happened last night.

Everything hurts. In good ways. The best of ways. The tender skin of my rear where his palm smacked me twice, the inside of my thighs, the places on my neck where he’d bitten down. My throat’s a little tender from where he held it. I run my palm down the front of me under the sheet and in a way it’s like I’m wearing a stranger’s body, one that’s been used in a way mine hasn’t been before, and used very well. I let out a slow breath and laugh. Joy spreads inside my chest, a dangerous feeling.

I’d come back last night with my hair wild and my dress rumpled and the whole of me carrying him home with me, and I’d been functional enough to put a few logs in the fire and get the flames high enough to heat water and make my special magick tea, a hemlock and blackberry brew. I drank it standing at my window with my eyes up at that membrane sky and let it work on my body overnight.

I feel a flash of pride for using a spell, even if it’s the kind that belongs to a garden or kitchen witch, something I’ve felt more and more estranged from since starting this school and hiding everything.

Then my mind turns over and I can’t help but think about him. I think about the sound he’d made when he first slid into me. The way his hand had closed over my mouth. The hot full weight of him coming inside me and the shaking that had gone through him after. His forehead between my shoulder blades. The way he’d wiped me carefully with the inside of his coat.