She still looked confused. “Xander called her the love of your life.”
Damien hesitated, sucking at his teeth and thinking, but there was really no other way around it, and he had to tell her. “I may not understand love, but I’m fairly certain it does not inspire this.” He gestured vaguely to the scar across his face.
Amma closed the distance between them, taking his head inher hands and tipping it up. “She did this to you?” She held him so firmly, touching him without reluctance or disgust.
“Well, no,”—he swallowed, the admittance difficult—“she compelled me to do it to myself as penance for trying to leave. In order for it to remain, I was forced to reopen the wound every morning and evening for a moon.”
Her careful fingers glided over the raised skin like when she had climbed atop him in the karsts drunk on magic. She’d been so tender then despite her lust, and now her face had gone even softer, a thoughtful bend to her brow that looked as though she might cry. But then everything changed, and her features scrunched up as she blew hard through her nostrils like a boar.
“What is this face you’re making?” He sat up, afraid to incur whatever wrath she had building within.
Amma’s hands cupped his face again, and she growled, “I’ll kill her.”
Damien surprised himself with a laugh, relieved, but only for a moment: there was no change to how her blue eyes cut into him like divine steel. Shehadkilled a man, and recently too, after all. “Amma, I appreciate the chivalry, but you would not come out unscathed, if you survived at all.”
She huffed, stomping a small foot. “You said everyone’s powers are dulled here.”
“But violent actions aren’t tolerated unless you declare a formal duel, which no one does because the council nearly always ensures both party’s deaths. Otherwise, I would have cut Xander’s tongue out for daring to speak to you.”
Amma groaned, hands sadly falling away from his face. “You would have killed Cedric for me too, so I just…”
He watched her head dip, a frustrated sort of defeat. He stood from the bed, looking down on her. “Yet you didn’t need me to. You ran him through all on your own. I saw the gruesome aftermath. I know what you’re capable of.” A flood of hotblood pumped through his veins, rinsing away the much worse memories.
“So, I could do that to Delphine too.” When Amma grinned up at him, she arched a single, blonde brow and bit down onto that thick bottom lip. He would have liked to be biting it instead, especially as she clasped her hands behind her back, pretending to be both sweet and vile at once. “Can’t I at least make her bleed a little?”
Breasts barely contained and swaying hips on display, Amma was all venomous honey, and he flexed his fingers, wanting a taste more than anything in all the planes at that moment. The collar, the talisman, both stood in his way, but Amma wasn’t truly helpless, was she? Stabbing Delphine would certainly give her some power back, though it would condemn her too, but there was, perhaps, another way he could give her what she craved that might even satisfy them both.
“I don’t know that you could survive an altercation with anyone,” Damien said, wanting to touch her but waiting. “When I had you captive this evening, you nearly came undone under my hands as is.”
She gasped, dropping her mouth open. “A baroness does notcome undone.”
“Never? Not once? Not even by your own hand?” He watched the redness bloom across her cheeks that told him it wasn’t true. “You see, without practice, you’re too vulnerable. And you forget that here, you’re not a baroness, you are a concubine. One that earned herself a little torture.”
She took a deep breath, chest heaving toward him, so close he could feel the warmth off of her. “That was only a little?”
“Yes, and you put up nearly no defenses at all.”
Amma swallowed, wiping the last vestiges of ferocity from her face. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to, Master Bloodthorne.”
Fuck, of course she had to say it like that.
“I suppose you managed to behave for a short while, didn’t you?” Damien was quick, grabbing her beneath her thighs and in one, deft move, spinning her. Amma gasped as she was dropped backward onto the bed, and Damien climbed atop, pinning her there. “Congratulations, you’ve earned Master Bloodthorne’s mercy. That is, if you will allow me to give it to you.”
She held very still, trapped beneath him with wide eyes, but then that mischievousness sparked in them once again. Amma’s grip on the back of his head was inescapable as she pulled him down, pressing soft but greedy lips to his own. Damien could barely hold himself up, knees on either side of her hips as she clung onto him by his hair. Her tongue darted into his mouth, such a pushy thing, and she arched her hips against his.
Damien took her wrists. Fingers released him immediately, and her arms went lax in his hold, too easy to press down on either side of her head and keep still. Pulling himself away to catch his breath, he smirked down at the flush across her cheeks and the heaviness of her eyelids.
“I knew you were wicked,” he breathed, dipping his head to bite at her ear, nipping down her neck while she squirmed under his grasp. Her next inhale was sharp as he reached the smooth hollow of her throat, feeling her skin hitch.
A small, pleased sound broke out of her as he trailed his lips over her collarbones and down the swell of her breasts. He wanted to unravel her, to free her of those restraints that kept her tied to quiet gasps and timidity, and replace them with his own bonds, ones she could be wild beneath. Caught in his hold, the pulse in her wrists surged.
“Stay still,” he commanded, releasing her.
Amma’s next ragged breath tripped itself on a stuttered affirmation. She would do her best to obey, he knew, and if she didn’t, even better.
With her head tipped back, eyes falling closed, she wasarching her chest, and the thin material that had been teasing him all day went taut. She was practically begging to be released from it, and with the tie somewhere beneath her, there was only one, quick way.
Unsheathing his dagger, he sliced up through the fabric, and her breasts sprung free. Amma’s eyes flew open with one of her delightfully stunned cries, the kind that made his cock twitch in response, but then he realized he was looming over her with a weapon and chucked the thing across the room. It pierced the wall, hilt quivering as it landed, and her eyes flicked to it then back, but she didn’t get a moment to consider her nakedness. Damien dropped his mouth onto an attentive nipple, drawing another cry from her throat, the depth of it exactly what he wanted.
