“Please,” I whisper, my lips close to his.
“You have to go back now, Anya,” he murmurs, before my lips touch his.
But after they do, it’s like we have caught fire ourselves. His mouth is motionless for only a brief moment, and then his hands come up to cradle my head between them, pushing me against his hungry lips. We kiss like the air in our mouths is the last we will ever breathe, and he spins me around, walking me back to a rock formation. He lifts me at the same time, pulling apart Zethki’s robe, letting me wrap my legs around him.
I feel the hard, pulsing mass of his cock against my mound, try to work my hands down between our bodies to free it. For a few moments this dangerous act is outside of time and space, and I’m certain he will be inside of me soon. I don’t care, I don’t care how dangerous it is or where we are, or that Zethki could awaken any moment and come looking for me, and find this scene that would almost certainly be terrible. Rys doesn’t either; he’s consumed by a primal force and his cool exterior is in shreds.
But when my fingers find their way beneath his robes, and I brush over his throbbing cock, then grasp it, making him inhale sharply, he abruptly pushes away from the rock wall and lets my thighs slip from his hands. He is shaking his head in the Kerz way—barely noticeable.
“No,” he groans. He holds his hands up to me like I’m a predator and looks away. “Anya, please.”
My head is spinning, and my pussy aches for him. I need him as much as I have ever needed anything, I want him, I don’t care what the cost is…
He is still stepping back, and he does something I have never seen him do. Clumsily, he runs into a loose rock and stumbles. Still holding his hands up, like I’m attacking him, he repeats, “No.”
He stands tall again, cracking his neck, hiskrythaflame. His eyes become serious and hardened. “Zethki must not know you are gone. He will… he will smell me on you…”
I look at the pool. The memory of my dreams resurfaces; there is something about this pool, and us, and hiding secrets. I may not remember it perfectly, but I remember the feel of it.
He follows my gaze. “He will smell this spring,” he tells me. “Anya.” His hands form fists. “Please. We must return you. Now.”
My eyes are wet again. But I know he’s right.
He steps toward me, now that he can see that I have accepted this predicament.
“I will come back for you. I will make you mine. But you must trust me now. We go.”
I want to kiss him again, and he burns me with his longing gaze. But he turns abruptly and begins to walk up the dimly lit steps, into the darkness of the dungeons.
He is right.
So I follow.
* * *
He is holding a vial in his hand. I know, without asking or even remembering, that it’s a memory-erasing solution, the explanation for all that has happened. I look at it. We are huddled in the shadows of the great hall that served as a wedding ceremony room, and is Zethki’s war room and dining hall.
I look at it. He’s holding it in his open palm, as if he doesn’t know what to say about it, or do with it.
“How many times?” I ask him.
He stares at me, and my heart turns to lava and pours through my lower body. “Many.”
“I always choose to take it?”
“Always.”
I look at it again. “If I take it, I won’t remember to wait for you,” I say.
He brings my head to touch his forehead, fingers in my hair. “Does he hurt you?”
This is a difficult question to answer, fraught with danger. If the answer is yes, what will he do? And if I say no, what will he think? The truth is somewhere in between, at least it was when I didn’t remember Rysethk. Zethki is dangerous and dominating, and the threat of his violence lingers always in the air. But so far, he has been a vigorous lover, and an insistent one, but not a monster.
“He’s not… terrible,” I say, finding no other words. “He doesn’t… he’s waiting for the comet.”
I see in his eyes, and a faint trace of a smile, that my suspicions were correct: the comet was a lie, the very lie I had dared to hope for.
“He loves you,” Rysethk says, looking down between us, moving a hand up to my exposed neck, tracing his fingers over my skin as his claws extend.
