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I broke the kiss and snapped for air. “Enosh—”
“Shh.” His lips reclaimed mine until they throbbed, only parting for one agonizing second as he pulled his shirt oven his head. “Nothing but the bone in the ground growing restless, eager to come to my aid. Touch me, Ada.”
I let my fingers glide over the slopes of his shoulders, over the firm set of pectorals, and down the defined muscles rippling over his abdomen. “Tell me you’re at least tempted to give in.”
“More than ever before.” Gradually, his pace quickened, making my insides convulse with a need for release that shook me to the core alongside the world. “Decades. Centuries. Eons. One day, you will love me. And on that day, when you become wholly mine and nobody else’s, I shall open my gates and return to my divine duty.”
At his next thrust, I pulled him deeper into me. Our kisses lost precision, but my benumbed lips pressed down wherever they reached as I ground against him, meeting him beat for beat.
When my breath caught in my throat and my entire body tensed, Enosh’s back rounded, strong hips pinning me to the soft mink beneath us. Snarls hissed passed his clenched teeth, cutting across my lips as a cry wrenched from my throat.
The world seemed to collapse around us, trees threatening to bury us beneath their branches as we peaked. Only when the tangle of our panting breaths calmed did the forest grow still.
Aside from the groans.
My eyes snapped to the underbrush and my heart gave a massive whomp. “Why are they here?”
Enosh followed my line of sight to the dozens of corpses looking at us from between shrubs and standing on fallen trunks covered by moss. Men, women, children… they bore their milky-white stare into us, their faces smudged, their hair covered in lumps of dirt, grass, and wilted leaves.
A bemused scoff rumbled from Enosh’s chest. “They must have thought their master at great risk.”
“You didn’t call them?”
Enosh regarded me, his air of superiority vanished, the face beneath the mask laid bare to the almost sheepish grin on his lips. “Not precisely… but I am ever-so pleased with their eagerness to protect me.”
Protect him from what?
The question fanned a little spark to life in my core. During our lovemaking, my husband had accidentally made the dead crawl from the ground. My temporary surrender had blown his mask off, right along with his control. Perhaps he was no less trapped than I, exposing a heart he claimed he no longer had.
I placed my palm against it.
A heart that fluttered wildly against my skin, long after his breathing had calmed, right where it bred love with no care for precautions. Should that scare me?
It scared him. I could tell from the way he fled my touch, disguised as no more than a shift to get comfortable.
“Perhaps we made a child now,” I said.
“No, Ada. I’m afraid you will have to gather more patience for your womb is nowhere near its fertile state.” He sat up as leather encapsulated his legs and a fur-lined dress of silky skin formed around me. “We ought to hurry now, so we may reach—”
Something hit my eye.
Both clenched shut on reflex, throwing me into darkness as my ears pricked at an onslaught of groans and whistles. I wiped a hand over my face.
Wet. Warm. Slippery. Blood?
“Stay down!” Enosh’s bark resonated along with a barrage of quickshk-shk-shks, like spades cutting into the ground, and a heavy weight settled on my chest. “The corpses must have led them straight to us.”
Them.
My heart burst into a sprint and my eyes shot open. I blinked once, fighting the burning blurriness in one of them. The outline of Enosh sharpened with the second blink. At the third, my stomach dropped.
Heavens, no!
Red rivulets ran down his abdomen, coming from a gaping wound between his shoulder and his chest, the flesh and skin shredded around the tip of an arrowhead. The feathered fledging of yet another arrow protruded over his shoulder, where they must have shot him in the back.
“Oh my god!” My shaky hand reached for his wound. “You’re injured.”
Enosh only hushed me and picked me up, my body so heavy I could barely lift my arms to clasp his neck. Because he’d once more given me armor, row upon row of bony scales that still formed around me as he hoisted me onto the horse. “One leg to each side, for we shall ride faster than ever before.”
