I couldn’t answer. I was still too breathless, and every part of me was liquid—warm, syrupy liquid.
"I'm going to take a bath now, and then I'm going to fuck you."
I blinked after his retreating form as he marched into the bathroom. Thousands of responses hovered on my tongue—arguments, refusals, warnings—but none of them made it out. My body betrayed me, shuddering in anticipation.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I sagged back into the bed, staring at the ceiling as if it might hold answers; my pulse still pounded in my throat. My mind was a hurricane; colliding thoughts tore through me until I could barely breathe.
This was madness. Utter madness.
And yet, beneath the confusion, beneath the fear, one truth pulsed steadily and undeniably: I wanted him.
I wanted him to make good on his promise. God help me, I couldn’t wait for him to make good on it.
“Am I really doing this?” I whispered to myself, my voice hoarse, almost foreign in the still chamber.
Somehow, I managed to get my Jell-O limbs to move. My fingers fumbled at the hem of the dress, dragging the silky fabric up, off, and tossing it aside as if shedding it would shed my doubts too.
My chest rose and fell too fast; heat was still thrumming in my blood. Every nerve in my body remembered his mouth, his hands, his tongue, and the memory alone made me shiver.
Fuck.That had been the best orgasm of my life. Nobody had ever undone me like that. Nobody had ever made me fall apart so completely, so helplessly, not with their tongue, not in any other way.
I pressed a hand over my eyes, half laughing, half moaning in disbelief. “It had to be a fucking alien, right?”
But my body didn’t care about the answer. It was already humming with anticipation for him to return.
What in thegreat abyss was that?
I stood in the bathing chamber, barely aware of the heat rippling from the water behind me, my heart was pounding in my chest like some fevered beast clawing to break free. It wasn’t supposed to go like that. I was supposed to put the fear of the gods in her; to teach her a lesson she’d never forget for the rest of her short, reckless life. That was what I’d intended, what I’d promised myself since the moment she appeared on the battlefield.
By a supernova’s curse, the moment she stepped onto that field, I could have killed her. My blade had been a breath from her throat; my aura had been raging too hot to tell friend from foe. Even now, I was still reeling from that instant, still hearing the phantom slice of steel through the air, still seeing her wide mortal eyes staring up at me, alive by nothing more than chance.
Fear.
The word rattled through me like a foreign tongue, sharp and ugly. Fear was for mortals. For children. For those without power. I had never known it. Not in a thousand battles. Not even when entire legions of Mmuhr’Rhong clawed from the Abyss.
But in that moment—seeing her stumble into my line of fire, fragile flesh one heartbeat from my blade—I had felt it. A bolt of ice down my spine, so absolute it stole the air from my lungs. My hand faltered, my heart lurched, and for a sliver of time, I had been undone.
And it twisted me.
The thought of her lifeless at my feet, her blood staining the ground by my hand, hollowed me out in a way no war ever had. The thought oflosing her… It was unbearable. Maddening. Like staring into a future I could not, would not, allow.
May the gods help me, I didn’t know what terrified me more, that I had felt fear for the first time in my long life… or that I could already no longer imagine existence without her in it.
So instead of answering my question, I’d let her shatter me. Let her pull the mask off my face and see the monster underneath, and rather than recoiling, she’d drawn me closer, like she was daring me to break her. She’d provoked me, mocked me, but then the moment my mouth was on hers, she’d come apart so quickly and so honestly that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to devour her or protect her from the entire damn universe.
I’d thought I knew how to want someone. I hadcenturies of experience bending bodies to my will, teaching obedience with my hands and tongue and cock until they melted. But that had always been a transaction: a hunger, swiftly sated. With Ella? It was like starving. The longer I held myself back, the more desperate and savage the urge became. I wanted to conquer her, yes, but I also wanted to watch her unfurl, to see what new chaos she would spill each time I pressed her to the edge.
That edge—for the first time in my memory—felt razor-thin. Before today, I’d never slipped, not once. Since I entered this Abyss and set foot in this world, I’ve never lost myself. Not to drink, not to rage, not to desire. Most of all, never to a female.
But her? She’d undone me with a single whimper.
I tightened my grip on the cold stone at the lip of the bath, trying to anchor myself in the now. My cock throbbed, angry and insistent, so hard it hurt, and I wanted nothing more than to march back to my room and finish what I’d started. It was the memory of her face—her flushed lips, her eyes glassy with shock and heat—that made me hesitate. She’d wanted it, yes, but she hadn’t known what she was inviting. And gods, I was too close. Far too close to a line I’d sworn never to cross.
I tried to slow my breathing, to will the storm beneath my skin into something smaller and manageable. I had entire drills for nights like this—centering, channeling, letting the aura run like a creek rather than a wild river—but they were useless. The exercises had been written forbattle, for rage you could aim at an enemy. They were not written for wanting.
Everything about her hit like an assault. Her scent—salt and sweat and something sweet and feral—filled the bathing chamber and turned my head. I could still taste her: the memory of her mouth, the way she had broken under me. My hands trembled with a dozen urges at once: to protect, to possess, to press her so close the world narrowed to the heat between us. Those were urges I knew how to act on. The other urge—the fissure yawning under the surface, the one that made the black crawl out from its edges—terrified me.
