With one last ribbon, I bind Willa to me and lose myself entirely. She comes hard, a sharp cry on her lips, body tightening and shivering as she rides the rush of her climax. Waves of fractal light, the infinite color of the stars, spill from her in time with her pleasure. The sight of her, bound in my magic and in control of her own, sends my own climax tearing through me. With a groan, our powers singing over our skin, I spill into her.
Together, we collapse in a sweat-slick heat, her body entangled beneath mine. And I don’t want to let her go; don’t want to take my eyes off her for even a moment, lest she disappear. I don’t want to see the world around us, a world that will force us apart, that will make her hate me. That will steal everything good between us, and turn it to rot just like everything else I touch.
Willa smiles up at me, shy but luminous, and I grip her tighter. My heart feels like it might explode—like every emotion I’ve spent centuries burying will burst through it at any moment.
But as my breathing evens, my fingers begin to spasm. Slowly, at first, and then more viciously, as the pain that lay dormant while I was enraptured in her rises up to ensnare me, my despair along with it. It was foolish to hope the agony would abate forever; stupid to believe that just because I drowned in Willa’s fullness, I, too, could become full.
Splitting pain slices through my skull, and my skin grows tight over the corrosive feel of my joints. My fingers tremor again, violently enough that, this time, Willa notices. I try to push away as her brow furrows in concern; to hide my face from her before my body betrays me entirely. Before she can see the true depthsof my weakness—the way my magic decays everything from the inside out.
But now that Willa has known the depths of me, there is no unknowing. She catches my face between her soft hands, dragging my gaze back to hers.
“I said I want everything,” she says softly. “I told you totellme everything. That doesn’t just mean the things I want to hear. It means tell me your pain, Niko. Tell me all of it.”
For a moment, I consider it. Telling her everything, drowning her in the weight of my self-hatred and my mistakes; telling her the way I’ve split myself apart trying to make them right, only to spiral back into my selfish ways. That I’ve taken something for mine I don’t deserve, something Icannothave if I ever want the pain to end.
But I don’t say anything, because the taste of her is still in my mouth, the feel of her branded into my skin. And as weak as it is, I can’t give it up yet. So instead, I settle for the closest thing I have to a truth.
“Darling, there is no pain when you’re near. You areadytumin a lifetime of purgatory.”
Chapter thirty-three
Adytum.
The word rolls through my mind as Niko draws me close, wrapping his arms around me. I wonder what it means as I breathe him in, all sandalwood and ice. And beneath it, the scent of me.His death is curled above our heads in a tangled heap, ribbons that had been wild enough to break awindowonly moments before, now limp with exhaustion.
My own weariness trails lazily through my limbs. Unlike the exhaustion that’s plagued me for decades, this one is not a hollow cold. It’s sated and warm, its heaviness a thick blanket tucked around me.
Despite the tremor of Niko’s hands, he caresses them slowly over the small of my back. And though all I’d like to do is curl into his touch, to let him take me again right here amidst the wreckage of broken glass and discarded clothes, I know he needs to rest. His lashes flutter as he watches at me, like it’s a struggle to keep them open.
“Take me to bed, Niko,” I tell him in a soft exhale, running my fingers over the tattooed planes of his chest. Tracing the ink spiraling over his throat, and up to his jaw.
He groans in response but makes no effort to move from the floor. He only grips me tighter, leaning into my touch like a purring cat.
I giggle, and then clap an embarrassed hand over my mouth, like I can trap the rest of the sound in my throat. Niko grins, leaning in to taste the blush creeping over my cheeks, as I wonder what the hell has gotten into me. I do not giggle. Ever. Nor do I turn into the simpering fool I am at the moment, desperate formore.
Normally, the act of sex is transactional—a scratching of an itch. And when it’s finished, I can’t wait to shove them out of my space and return to the comfort of solitude. I can’t stand their saccharine faces, nor the feel of their touches gone soft. It’s always made my skin crawl.
But with Niko, his tenderness feels just as good as his dominance, and I find myself happily languishing in the glow of his attention.
Most men take and take, and after it’s over, I’m left feeling more wrung out than before. And while Niko had taken every piece of me, he’d given back so much more. I’m not emptier for being with him, but filled to the brim, stretched new with everything I’m feeling.
I want more. More of his pain and his death and his relief. I want him to take me and use me until I shatter; until I am so overcome with pleasure, I am the master of my own pain. The way he knelt before me and devoured me whole—I’ll never get it out of my mind. I’ll chase the feeling of power he gifted me until the end of time.
His fingers spasm more violently, and a tight grimace pulls at his mouth as a tremor wracks his body. Worry threads throughme that he’s pushed himself too far—that I’d been too lost in the euphoria he offered to consider whatheneeded.
“Or how about I take you to bed since I’ve already thoroughly debauched your virtue?”
Niko grins, his eyes flicking back open. That black stare felt too intense to bear when we first met, but now I want to drown in the way those eyes hold me. Obsessive madness and defiant challenge.
Worship.
“I did tell you it was my virtue that needed protecting. Apparently, I’m in need of a pillow wall between us at all times, or there will be no windows left in the Lunaedon.”
“About that—”
Niko waves off my concern. “The palace is self-sustaining. It’ll repair itself soon enough.” He purses his lips thoughtfully, his eyes drifting to the mess. “Hopefully before Rina returns, and I have to endure her lecture on being a courteous housemate.”
He scowls like he’s been subjected to the lecture a time or two before. With a laugh, I close my eyes to imagine us in Niko’s bed. Buried beneath the silky sheets, bare and entwined.
