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“What’s wrong?” Rada grabbed me around the waist. She was taller than most human females, but her breasts still landed around my waist, and my cock slapped against her stomach. A rush of her scent perfumed the air around us, and I tried not to react, but when I exhaled, I made a humming sound.
Her perfume grew stronger, her touch far more intimate, as she hummed in reply. “Lusca. I thought you said I wasn’t ready for that sort of thing.”
Muffled giggles emerged from behind the curtains in the longhouse, and I pulled her to the doorway and out into the thick fog.
“Are we alone? I can’t see anything. I can’t hear anything.” I detested the quiver of fear in her voice. Didn’t she know I would drown the world to keep her safe? Not that she needed me to protect her.
“Focus,” I said. “You already have my magic inside you.”
She muttered, “I’d like to have more than magic.” Her hands traced patterns over me that I recognized. Letters spelling out the words of the song I’d sung to her, though I knew she did not speak the language I’d sung them in. Only my few surviving brothers and I did.
Hands tangled in my hair, pulling me down so that her lips were close enough to mine that I could taste her sweet breath, cold mint and rain, and subtle hints of the sea, honeyed rosemary, and pine. All her mates. Almost all.
“I can feel you growing weaker, Lusca. My chest hurts.”
“What do you need, Rada?”
“You know what I need.” Her hands tightened, and she bridged the small space between us. My world dwindled to one pinpoint of sensation: her lips on mine, her tongue flicking out to taste me.
“Sing me a song, Lusca. It’s time.”
RADA
Iwasn’t certain he would do it. Lusca had gone on and on about how young I was when we were together at our island, after we first met. “I would be the monster many see me as, if I were to take you as my Empress now.” I’d been so angry back then, and hurt. It had felt like rejection.
And then I’d kissed him, and he’d sung me a snippet of a song with words I’d never heard before, but understood at a soul-deep level.
“My beloved is the sea, the depths that hold me,
My beloved is the waves that roll across my being without cease,
That shimmer and roar and etch the shores of time.
My beloved has come at last to me. Though I am hunger itself,
She feeds me with her bright spirit and I leap into the sky as lightning.
She rages and I boil for her, she sleeps as I sing our hearts into one.
Beloved, I am bound to you, I am within you…”
He’d stopped singing then, and it had felt like a death.
I held my breath now, knowing I might not survive the pain of being pushed away again. But his massive hand slid down my cheek to cup my face. “I cannot deny you, my love. Not again. Never again.”
He lifted me and carried me toward the sea, stopping just long enough for me to drop my clothing on the sand, though I knew no one could see me in this fog. His skin felt almost icy against my own overheated body, and the heat that Edan had tried to force on me receded until it was a small ember, buried deep.
His legs, or perhaps his tentacles, splashed as we moved into the water. I felt him relax slightly. A shiver of power moved through me, as well. I had no idea what would happen once we were bound. But… “Do you think he’ll know?”
I didn’t have to explain. His hand moved to my throat, and a liquid film, like a covering made of cold seawater, settled over the burn mark there. “This is my domain, not his. I hold power here he cannot rival.”
“As long as we stay in the water, we’re safe?”
His answer was a long, drugging kiss. His power could barely be contained by the human form he wore. It felt like kissing the sea, as if I were trying to match myself to a force so great, my mind couldn’t comprehend it. I was drowning and wanted nothing more than to be taken deeper beneath his waters.
I opened my eyes when he pulled away at last, murmuring something in that ancient language. The fog thickened until it was almost a blanket on us, muffling every sound but his voice. Holding me against him, his lips so close to mine, the song seeming to wind around my face before it trickled down to land on my chest, he sang the words from before, but this time, he went on:
“Let the salt of my blood and yours be combined.
