Instead, she flung her arm out and wrapped her hand around Grim’s ankle.
He gasped as if he had been burned.
Cronan’s shadows rushed out of her head, his expression looking disgusted...but not furious. He didn’t seem to have noticed that she had broken his hold. That she had moved.
Grim didn’t say a word.
And she knew she had succeeded in blocking the truth—about Oro and the starstick—from Cronan. She had fed him a lie.
Doing so had taken up almost all her energy. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, darkness caving in.
The last thing she saw was Grim’s horrified expression, as if one of those memories had made it to him.
GRIM
The witch made him see something.
And as much as Grim fought to forget that memory, bury it down with every other useless part of his soul, he just couldn’t.
He saw the memory like he was swimming in it, like the witch had somehow plunged him inside that moment. He could feel his own emotions in it too. It was as if his feelings had merged with hers somehow. As if they had been intertwined. He had never sensed that with anyone before in his centuries of life. Never until her.
He lay in bed and replayed it over and over, like a drug he couldn’t quit.
A white dress discarded on the floor. His own clothes next to it, a pile of black. And she...
The witch was laying on the bed, fully naked, as if she existed only for him.
With clothes, without clothes, covered in grime, or cleaned and painted, she was beautiful. He knew it from the moment he saw her, a stranger on the floor. She was striking. It was simply a fact.
There was nothing simple about how mind-meltingly perfect she looked on the sheets in his room. Gazing at him with eyes that promised to fulfill everything he wanted.
He did not typically bow before gods. He did not pray. But he bowed before her and worshipped her like a zealot.
Her sounds, her taste, the way she bucked against him, needy and greedy, was enough to nearly do him in. He groaned against her, and it only made her arch her back, fighting to get even closer.
He lifted her hips and pinned her to him, and he could have broken without her even touching him, just feeling her own pleasure crest and shatter. He almost joined her. She collapsed, tired and spent, and he would’ve been happy to rest now if that’s what she wanted.
But before he could get a word out, she was dragging him over her. She was wrapping her legs around him and grinding herself on his length. The movement made him see stars.
“Please,” she panted against his mouth.Anything, he thought.I would give you anything, especially if you begged for it.
So he pinned her hands above her head and leaned down to whisper, “Tonight, scream as loud as you want.”
Then, he slowly sank into her, arms shaking as he fought the urge to break. She took all of him, clawing her nails into his knuckles, digging her heels into his back. She whimpered as he began to move, and he had to force himself to breathe. Her ankles locked behind him as he gave her everything she wanted.
And in this moment, he believed in everything, absolutely everything—because only some higher force could create something this perfect.
Grim’s body jerked, knocking him out of the moment. Out of the memory.
He was panting. He was flushed. He...
He was losing his fucking mind.
This was exactly what she wanted, he knew. She wanted to make him doubt. Make himfeel.
He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
ISLA
