“I know. Fuck, I know.” He managed to pant it against my lips before he cried out. I was greedy when my fingers came up, spilling through his sweat-slicked hair so I could pull his head back as pleasure blossomed over his face.
I wanted to see it.
I needed to see it as he came inside me, his body tensing and his shoulders shaking. It was everything—all encompassing. His pupils blew wide and his lips parted, and Cole looked at me like I was the only thing he could see.
Like he was just as helpless as I was.
He cried out my name again and tore from my grip, pressing his lips to mine and grinding deeper inside me. Cole’s hand reached between us and his fingers wrapped around my cock… and that touch was all I needed. He stroked me once, twice, and nailed that place inside me that made my vision burst again, and I followed him over the edge.
I came on a scream, and he licked into my mouth and drank the sound down like it was water and he was a man dying of thirst. He kissed me until my lips felt raw, fucked into me until my body was twitching in protest… and then with one last, soft moan… he collapsed against my chest, still buried inside me.
Fuck.
Fucking gods.
I’d never felt so…
Whole.
I had to try three times to make my tongue work, and even then I wasn’t sure that my words didn’t come out garbled.
“Perfect… so good. You’re so good, Cole.”
He shivered at the praise and dropped his head to nuzzle against my throat. I barely caught the words he whispered, hidden in my hair, pressed against my skin.
“I want to be. Fuck… for you, I think I want to be. I don’t think I can pretend anymore, Sephtis.” I didn’t miss the soft heat that joined the press of his lips—tears that fell as he curled around me. Warmth that pooled into the curve of my shoulder as I shifted us both so I could pull the blankets over us. Cole cried, and he held me… and for the first time, it truly felt like he never wanted to let me go.
If this was it—this touch, that soft confession—if that was all he could ever give… It was more than enough for me.
Chapter 25
Cole
“You know,Wren and Theo didn’t stay here for more than a few days.” Gethin’s voice was petulant, but he’d brought us groceries for the third time in the span of a week and grabbed us a change of clothes. For someone who was trying to act like a complete asshole, he kept checking in on us like he was a mother hen.
For someone who said he didn’t give a shit at all, he wasn’t letting me starve.
“Yeah, well… if you want to point me in the direction ofbooks about getting Death to fuck off…” I gestured to the shelves lining his wall. “It’s not like you’re really organized here, asshole.”
“It’s not really what I was thinking of when I started collecting the books,” Gethin snapped, and I pressed my lips together. Even though he hadn’t said a damn word about what the bookswerefor, I’d done enough snooping to find that there weren’t just books written by other people in this place.
He had journals.
Years and years worth of journals. It was wrong of me to snoop through them, but since I wasn’t really in the business of beinggoodafter I’d killed a man, I didn’t stop myself. They talked about a man named Liam.
His brother.
Apparently his obsession—a feeling so strong he lost his wings for it, so painful that he killed to fill that void.
Gethin’s books weren’t about avoiding Death, because from what I gathered… he caused it far more often than he should have. He’d been a cupid—the same thing as Wren.
And now…
Well… now it seemed like he killed anyone who got close enough to love Liam.
I could have told him that was a shit way to show affection, that isolating him was probably doing more harm than he realized… but Gethin’s business wasn’t mine, and at the end of the day, I wasn’t actually sure I had room to talk.
Every night, I fell asleep in the arms of the man who’d killed my brother. Every morning I woke to find his golden eyes looking at me and giving me a reason to actually get out of bed and keeptrying.
