He moved.
Like silk.
A swirl of twitching shadow through the fog, and in a blink, he was before me. Looming in close enough that I saw it when his mask slipped, and a smile curled in the corner of his lips.
It was not a relief.
Beneath the steely exterior, lust. Bubbling at a furious boil. Scarcely contained, despite the way his hand slipped behind my head. That his fingers were sure, even as they twisted in the fine hairs at my nape.
Because it was a trap. My compliance a sure thing that didn’t beg for fevered intensity when he could command it at a whim.
He pressed that cruel smirk to my lips and I groaned.
He swallowed it. Greedy when he pressed deeper, his tongue flicking in to taste, beard rasping against my cheeks and lips. He pressed me back, crushing me down as everything that he was began to swell. Growing, surging to fill every space where I wasn’t, until he moved to claim that too.
I was consumed.
From every direction.
Every conceivable angle, inside and out—Asher.
The press of naked flesh burned and prickled, and I shivered at his touch. Unashamed by my nudity, because there was no space for such a thought. Not here, where there was nothing but need.
And I did…
Need.
I needed it hard. Fast. Needed him to boil over and fill the place where I ached most. I needed him to mark the spot that only he had ever touched, to burn away everything I’d ever been so I could do nothing but feel.
He only grew cooler. Angry, painful contempt barbed through my nerves. A thing that sat next to hatred in the way that it burned me.
His touch was measured, calculated, even as it drove me to madness. All but writhing, yet unable to so much as lift a hand to sate the pain he’d unleashed in my blood.
It was to be my punishment, this denial. Withholding what had become vital to the next painful beat of my heart.
Cruel, gentle fingers spread me, then. Teasing as they made a slow sweep of my entrance. Testing all that was molten and slick for him.
I sobbed.
Hips tilting back, trying to entice, I whined and couldn’t stop. Robbed of all sense of pride or shame. Unable to speak or beg or pray. Frozen as he tormented me with the force of my own vicious, wretched desire.
That grin grew wicked and with a swirl of inky mist, he withdrew. Back behind a wall of gleaming white. Concealed by a fortress where I could not sense him, his fingers were replaced with a thick, blunt length that only promised to pierce into my depths and went no further.
He stilled.
Poised on the cusp of relief, he hovered out of sight. Out of reach. Waiting.
“Please!” It burst over lips cracked and bleeding. Born from desperation and madness, it was a thing I’d never meant to do, but hadn’t a hope of avoiding. Not now, not in this place, where he was everything and everywhere. Where he saw and felt every lie. Every desperate half-truth that I’d never meant to voice used against me.
I begged.
I felt him smile, then. My enemy. Pleased when the pain became me and I turned to him for relief.
In a single, possessive thrust, he surged forward and—
6
Igasped.
