I yank her forward and slam my lips against hers. She meets my kiss like she’s been looking for me for a lifetime, and maybe she has.
Maybe I have too.
We’ve lived a thousand little lifetimes, dying a little bit every second we were apart.
“I missed you with my entire soul,” she says, swiping her lips across my jaw.
I know exactly what she means.
“My heart didn’t work without you,” I tell her.
She smiles and looks into my eyes. “We’re quite the pair, you and I.”
It feels like I said those words so long ago, and hearing her repeat them now makes my chest tighten. “You figured it out?”
She shakes her head. “Not until it happened.”
Being wholly fixated on her, I didn’t notice what our auras were doing until her ribbons start reaching out to dance in the shadowed light. Our auras have surrounded us completely and are growing denser.
“What’s happening?” she asks quietly.
“It’s us.”
Our bonded auras start feeding in, both golden glow and basking darkness. It soaks through us.Intous.
The magic that pulses with it is incomprehensible. Unfathomable. It feels as if I’m touching a star and standing in the middle of a parted sea.
Then a sudden need to be buried inside of her snares me, stealing my fucking breath and setting my veins on fire. The bond flooding in demands no separation. I can feel her even more intensely than I did before.
We’re not two anymore. We’re one pair, and that magic isconsuming. The päyur bond surges, heating me from the inside out, flooding me with an intenseurgency that’s demanding to be sated.
Auren clutches me with serrated breath, her ribbons fluttering around with anxiousness. Then the flare of our auras dims, drifting away, and the ground settles, but she’s still trembling. I look down at her, and now, I’m trembling too. Brimming with ravenousneed.
She stares at me, no longer crying, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted, and I can see the need in her too—right there in her dilated eyes.
“Slade…I…”
Her words choke off like she’s dying of thirst, but I know her scorched throat has nothing to do with water and everything to do with the bond magic demanding that we quench a different kind of thirst.
“It’s okay, Goldfinch. I know.”
Her arms tighten around my neck, and she buries her face there. I can feel her core pressing up against my front. Her body is always warm, but right now, she’s blazing.
Now that we seem to have fused, her aura has gone back to a faint shimmer around her skin, no longer blotting out the rest of the world.
The street is still blessedly empty, save for the shell-shocked male who stands beside the fountain. “Auren?”
As soon as he says her name, a snarl rips out of me, and my teeth flash at him with unbidden fury. I want to tear him apart. Iwant to gut him from groin to grin and spill out his lifeblood for daring to speak her name.
I take a threatening step forward, but Auren’s grip tenses around me, and she leans back. “Slade.”
Only her voice could yank my attention so thoroughly. My breath pants through gritted teeth, and I’m fucking hard as a rock, enraged at the nearness of this strange male so close to her.
A small part of me knows I’m acting insane, but there is no room for logical, rational thought. There’s nothing but a base, animalistic need that’s ignited every nerve, demanding me to claim her, to protect her. To satiate her every need.
“Slade,” she murmurs again, and one ribbon comes up, tapping against my cheek like a finger. “Eyes on me, baby.”
My gaze snaps to hers and she nods with a smile. “Take us somewhere safe. Somewhere we can be alone,” she says against my lips, fingers digging in where she clutches me. “Please.”
