“Is that what you want to eat?” I ask, taking her to the kitchen.
She’s still avoiding my eyes. “I’m not hungry.”
She won’t be. Serpents don’t eat during a mating lock. “But you will be thirsty,” I say, carrying her to the sink.
Her muscles clench around me as she turns to face me once again, and I hiss. “You’ve been waiting to do this,” she says accusingly. Her breath is warm on my face. So sweet. So much power. If I could spend the rest of my days simply drinking her in, simply tasting her scent on the air, I would die happy.
So I say nothing as I reach up into the cupboard where I know the glasses are. Taking one, I set her ass on the sink, looking over her shoulder to wash it out behind her back and then fill it with water. She takes the glass from me, licking her lips thirstily.
There was a time when I never thought we’d get this close to one another. When I thought that contact with her would be relegated to a faraway dream. Where all I had to keep me going through the gruelling days was hope. Hope carried on blue eyes and shadow-black hair.
“Do you really think this will take three days?” she asks quietly, swirling the water in the glass and peering down as if it contains the answers. I want to tell her thatIhave the answers. And that only oneothersoul has the answers she needs to save herself. Long dark lashes flutter as she drinks the cold water, only emptying half of the glass before handing it back to me. I take it from her and place my lips where hers were, and knock the water back. She watches me drink it, her eyes on my mouth and nowhere else. I soak up her awareness like a desperate man.
She doesn’t raise her gaze again. Is she shy all of a sudden? “It may take three days, yes,” I say quietly, setting the glass down on the bench.
She swallows. “When did you know I was your regina?”
I put a finger under her chin and tilt it upwards.Look at me, I want to say.My mask is off. Look back at me. Those eyes, blue as an ultraviolet beam, meet my gaze without blinking. Without breathing. “In the early days, I thought you were like me. A kindred spirit, lost and alone. I couldn’t figure out your orderand understood that you hid yourself in a similar way to how I did with my shadows. I had…a strong need to look after your welfare. But as we both grew up, I began to understand that what I was feeling for you was a soul-tie.”
“What about your family?” she asks. “Your parents and their den?”
I inhale a deep breath, letting her scent wash over me as I place my arms around her ass and lift her up again. Her bed will be too small for me, so I set about gathering her purple blankets to lay them on the living room floor like a nest.
“No one was able to tell Mace when he enquired, and I grew up with my adoptive family, believing my real family were dead for unknown reasons. Perhaps they were executed for what they were. I’ll never know how many basilisks were in their den or if they were a mixed pack like the Fengaris.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, as I lay the both of us down on the layers of blankets. She gazes at my face, studying me, and I cannot move the arms I have around her. Her inner walls clench again as she adjusts her hips, and this time, she grunts under the stretch of my cock.
She frowns, looking down between us. “Does that hurt you?”
I snort at that. “I am doomed to the shadows of hell, snakelet, but at least I get to see heaven for three days out of the darkness of eternity.”
Chapter 80
Aurelia
Without his mask, with the full force of his presence upon me, I suddenly find it hard to breathe. Find it hard to think beingthisclose, cervix deep. Ghoul’s presence has always been overwhelming. Like the stifling dark in a small room, you can feel that basilisk lurking so close to the surface.
He really is pure, coiled, malevolent power.
I can tell he wants me to look at his face. I don’t know if he feels relief, or if he feels anything at all under the power of his basilisk. Being able to shift into different forms, I’m not subject to the order powers in the same permanent way as the other orders. Ghoul cannot or does not want to escape the dark powers of his monster. They are too crucial to who he is.
The monster is me and I am the monster,he’d told me when we’d first met.
It’s just unfortunate that the giant serpent is even more psychopathic than a shark.
I have to breathe through the stretch of his cock, now that the heat of my initial arousal is cooling me down. And as we lie here, I suddenly can’t believe we’re back in my little bungalow.
When I’d left it the night after my wedding to Halfeather, I’d never thought I’d see the inside of it again. My eyes burn, and not in the lethal way. Ghoul leans in and scrapes his fangs across my bottom lip. His cock is still hard as diamond, but it twitches just a little as I suck in a breath at his touch.
How the fuck am I going to spend three days with this beast? Who only answers the questions he wants to, whose power sends infinite tingles across my skin? He flexes his hips, and I moan as my clit is jostled into pleasure.
“Are we going to spend three days fucking?” I ask wryly.
His tongue, this time forked, slips out to taste me. My eyes widen as the crimson glows. “If you are mine for three days, then I get to do as I please, do I not?”
“Well, technically,” I say, “if your cock is stuck in position, you can’t really do all that much, can you?”
I’m on my back before I know it, my legs over Ghoul’s muscular shoulders as he thrusts into me. I cry out at the sudden pleasurable fullness, tingles spiralling through my clit. So hecanmove inside me. Just not all the way out.
