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Mircea pulled me up before I was ready, pressing against me with tongue and teeth and lips shredded with bite marks from weeks of torture. He cried out when we kissed, but I don’t think it was from pain. I wrapped myself in his body, all hard muscle, sweat-drenched skin and matted hair, and felt him begin to press inside. Blunt, thick strength took me, sinking deep. I shifted up, wanting even more, and in a moment he was so far inside that there was no distance left to close.
He paused for a moment, and we stared at each other, his eyes finally wide open, wild and pained and so golden that I couldn’t see any brown. When he finally began to move, there were no short thrusts from his hips, but an unrelenting deluge, the muscles of his arms and the power of his thighs reducing his body to one long undulation. And suddenly, every cell was screaming to get closer, to clench tight around him on the downstroke, to live inside his taste and smell, to feel every thrust in my teeth. For a moment it was almost like being possessed, only it seemed to go both ways. Some part of me whispered through him with every thrust into my body, which in turn increased my own pleasure until I was sure I would die of it.
“Perfect,” he said brokenly, before swooping in for another kiss. Mouth open, tongue plunging deep, he stroked in perfect time with his movements inside me.
And it was suddenly too hard, too fast, too much. My breathing fractured into harsh, quick gasps when I could get air at all, my body spasming as my mind fought to sort it all out. But it was complete sensory overload, pinned inescapably, pummeled by every forceful movement, the pain blending with the pleasure. He pounded into me while growling into my mouth, biting my lips, saying the same thing with breath and hands and body. Mine! It whispered through me with every deep thrust. Mine. Every frantic push of his hips, every deep, wet kiss echoed with it. Mine, mine.
And then, whether my body could take it or not, it was suddenly even more. Between one breath and the next, we became an extension of each other’s passion, somehow living inside the other’s skin, more like one body than two. His pleasure felt like mine, was mine. He swallowed and I felt it in my throat; he lost himself in the motions of having me, and I felt his ever
y stroke.
His fingertips brushed against my scars with a deep inner thrill (mine, mine) before dropping to my hip, caressing the soft roundness. His hand was on my breast, and I felt my own shivery skin through his fingertips, knew the sensation of my shudder passing down another’s spine, felt his joy as my muscles quivered and then relaxed, surrendering completely.
Orgasm was both heavenly and painful when it finally came. It felt like we were breaking through a barrier into each other, falling deep, tearing loose from the last pretense of control. He thrust again and again—no finesse, no thought, just this, the rapture of it. Every touch burned through me, the pleasure that burst inside my veins echoed in his. I couldn’t tell which one of us gave that raw, stuttering cry: mine, mine, mine.
Without warning, everything came apart. The sensations, color, heat, pleasure, were so intense that I worried I might never be able to put myself together again, intense enough to hurt and make me beg him to stop, beg him to never stop. It went on and on, waves of pleasure in time with Mircea’s unsteady thrusts, sparked harder by the wild shocks that emanated from me, from him, from me, until I couldn’t remember how to breathe anymore.
He suddenly stopped, and there was an odd look in his eyes, surprised and a little broken, but mostly amazed. I was pretty amazed too, because I’d never made anyone look like that before. He stayed there for a long moment, staring at me, before rolling off, and pulling me back against him, his chest rising and falling harshly as he breathed.
He pulled the coverlet up over both of us, making a warm little cocoon. It was easy to just lie there, watching the nearest candle gutter and wax dribble over the holder. It finally went out, leaving the room dim, shadowed and strangely cozy. And it was while we lay there in a tangle of limbs, unsure quite where one body left off and the other began, that I felt it. Nothing dramatic, nothing extreme, just a small snap. But suddenly I was entirely back in my own skin again.
The geis was gone.
“Dulceata?,” Mircea breathed. And I felt it as soon as he said my name, an even, soft hum of something that recognized me and welcomed me like it had known me forever. But it wasn’t a spell. It was the way I’d always felt around him, something that had been masked by the geis and its constant low, stirring heat, its hunger and desperation and pain. This was less overpowering but deeper, more persistent and sweet. I kissed him softly and it tasted amazing, warm and familiar and home.
“Are you all right?” I asked, but I knew the answer even before he smiled slightly and opened his eyes. Long lashes dipped over too-sharp cheekbones, but I felt the same weightless flutter in my stomach as always when that gaze met mine.
“I will be.”
Compared to all my problems, saving the life of one man didn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. So why was I suddenly grinning like an idiot? Maybe because, somewhere along the line, I’d learned to take my triumphs where I could get them. Tomorrow there would be trouble and danger and pain, and I didn’t know if I would be smart enough or strong enough or capable enough to handle it all, especially now that I understood what I was up against. But I knew one thing: today, finally, something had gone right.
“The other you will be back soon,” I said, hoping he was lucid enough to understand. “And I told him too much. He can’t be allowed to keep those memories.”
“No one can erase a master’s mind,” he said hoarsely. “I doubt even the Consul herself could do it.”
“But if you remember, you’ll try to change things—”
“I did. I searched for the mage, but never found him, and returned here only to discover that you were also gone. Afterwards, I reconsidered what you had said, and tried to break the geis before it had a chance to be doubled, but the war intervened. And once it did, there was nothing to be done but see this through to the end.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “But you didn’t know what happened after you left! You didn’t know we succeeded!”
“I knew you. I could not believe that you would leave without completing your mission. I had to trust that you’d found a way to break it.”
“That’s why you sent me away,” I said, my head reeling. “Why you wouldn’t let Rafe bring me to you.”
“I did not want to change this future,” he agreed. “When he went to you despite my orders, and you came to me…For a brief moment, I thought it was over. But then I remembered: I had not yet been imprisoned, your clothes were wrong, and there was no snare on the bedside table. It was too soon. It was the closest I came to breaking.”
I couldn’t imagine it, that solitary, agonizing wait, not even knowing for certain that we would win in the end, that it wouldn’t all be for nothing. I didn’t think I could have done it. I didn’t understand how he had.
Before I could say anything, the door burst open and Pritkin dashed in. His coat was missing, half his potions were gone and he had a gun in each hand. I wondered how he’d managed to get the door open. He kicked it shut behind him. “Did it work?” he demanded.
“Yes, no thanks to you!”
“No thanks to me? How else would you have gotten that creature out of here?”
“You planned this?”
“Of course!”
