My eyes warm as power collects behind them in response to the crimson glow above me. My fangs snap out of their own accord. Shadows snake out from his shoulders, gripping me around the wrists and pulling them all the way up over my head. My own shadows draw out, just slower and more clumsy with the new, smaller movements, and I touch the sides of his face with them. A face I want to get to know.
“Fuck me like you’ve wanted to this entire time,” I hiss. “Fill me with your cum like you’ve dreamed.”
Black brows twitch in amusement as he shoves himself balls deep in me. “I should make you beg for it.” Something tickles my ass, and I know it’s his shadow, ready to wind me open and fill me with everything he has.
I arch my back in pleasure, laughing at my own amusement. “We’re beyond that, shadow-man.”
Ghoul licks the column of my neck, up my mating mark and up to my ear. “Tell me how good it feels, snakelet. Tell me how much my cock makes you want to come all over me.”
My body tenses around him, slow pulsing motions I don’t even know if I can control. A finger of shadow slips inside my ass, toying with my entrance, making me gasp his name.
“I wish you knew my real name,” he breathes. “You’ll be using it before the end.”
Ghoul fucks me hard and fast, like a serpent striking over and over again. His hips snap in and out, moving us both across the floor. He growls into my neck, hands tightening over mine as I scream his name to the broken ceiling, taking him and his furious needandhis power that comes barrelling forth like a dark tornado that pulls and sucks and writhes within me. I let it twine around my own golden power, let them dance in a manic cyclonic wind of their own making.
I’m dizzy and breathless; we’re both sweating and crying out as Ghoul comes inside of me. My cervix is flooded with him, and he fucks his pleasure into me in hard, brutal movements that I revel in. “Give it to me,” I pant, squeezing his hands. “I want all of it.”
He lifts his head, and our gazes lock, our faces truly meeting for the first time. “Aurelia,” he says. Another first, and I come from the need in that single word. Come from the feeling of our powers finally touching. I come from the sudden unrestricted emotion I see in that face.
Because there, in the dark, with blue and red glowing between us, the thing I see—profound in its beauty and wholly unexpected—is pure devastation and devotion.
I wake the next morning to a heartbeat in my ear. My pussy is sore from the girth currently occupying it, and with a sudden jolt, the harsh light of reality comes crashing down on me. Ghoul’s chest is warm under my ear, and I blink up at the light. Familiar dawn light streams through tattered curtains. My eyes fix on the yellowed material in wonder. How many times had Ghoul stared at me through them?
“Regina,”comes a faint voice in my head.“Regina, are you there?”
“Savage?”I reply, rubbing my face.“Are you alright? I’m alright. Is Minnie okay? Is everyone alright?”
“You sound far,”he says in dismay.“I want you here.”
My body pangs in multiple places, and I try to stretch out my stiffened joints. My leg protests, and I grimace. But a hand, brown, tattooed and large, runs down the seam of new and old, and I sigh, looking up at him. Shadows linger about his head like a dark halo. Like one of the angels that fell from heaven to walk the dark path. Hot crimson lasers regard me.
“I won’t be long,”I tell Savage.“But tell me you guys all made it home in one piece.”
“Um…”Savage sings.“Maybe not fully in one piece.”
I sit bolt upright.“Who is it? Who did it?”
Scythe’s faint voice, hard as rock and dark with unhappiness, whispers into my mind. “Regina. Yeti is injured. Everyone else is whole. Where and when can I pick you up?”
My heart twists as I look down at Ghoul. Yeti should have been the last person injured. Poor Minnie. They’d only come to help us. Guilt twists in my gut. As if he knows what I’m feeling,Ghoul cocks his head, his fangs snapping down beyond his lower lip. He rises onto his elbows, and I give him a meaningful look.
“Two days,”I say.“But it will be faster if I come to you.”Dark brows furrow over flared nostrils.
“Every day without you, I suffer.”Scythe’s voice is almost a hiss in my mind.“Every day without you I want to kill someone, regina.”
It almost makes me smile.“I love you too. But you need to go to sea.”
“Xander is taking me tonight. The next day we will come for you, and I will not hear another word on it.”
A low hiss comes from Ghoul’s mouth, and I lean over to kiss one of his fangs.
“Yes, sir,”I say to Scythe.
“Good girl.”
I have to let out a sigh to release the tension as Scythe disconnects. Instinct makes me lie back down on Ghoul’s chest. The basilisk lord is forced to lie flat as I press my weight against him.
A deep-rooted awareness in my marrow knows that these next moments I have with Ghoul might be my last chance to feel my fifth mate’s skin on mine, so I close my eyes and simply listen to his sounds. Simply feel his warmth seeping through me. We sleep like that for the next day and a half. Serpent bodies are made to sort of hibernate during this time, so neither of us needs to use the bathroom. And while I need only sip water, Ghoul will only drink my venom.
