Heat blooms in my face, and I might be at risk of dropping this knife into my foot.
Before such a thing can occur, Castor confiscates the blade and sets it aside, then he takes my hands in his, dragging me a step closer to all his beautiful bare skin. He kisses my fingers. “Oh sweetheart…” He settles my palm against moist heat, pressing my fingers into him until they’re wet and his shape has engraved itself in my brain. “This is called theconsequences of your own actions. If you didn’t want me seduced, you shouldn’t have started flirting.” Tenderly, he kisses my forehead, then he lowers his lips near my ear. “I’m halting my natural healing abilities for you. Use your magic. Feel the threads of my tissue.Carefully, slowly, sew me back together. If you’re too quick about it before you fully understand the process, I’ll scar.” His lips nestle against my neck. “If you scar me…do it on purpose.”
I gulp, feeling less brazen than approximately five minutes ago. Fancy how I forgot this wholecheer Castor upscheme would involve my hands against his bare open wound.
Cheek to my shoulder, he murmurs, “Just focus on the skin for now. I’ll handle the other organ you hit.”
“I hit another organ?”
“Mmhm.” He snuggles, kissing my throat, perfectly content for the first time in days. “Put my blood back in my body before you close the wound. Sense it with your heart. It tastes like me…” His fingertip grazes my lip, iron, sweetness, addicting ambrosia,him. “Doesn’t it?”
I melt, turning into a puddle of helpless wanting, which wasn’t part of the plan at all. Alas. The consequences of my own actions are brutal this noon.
Kissing his finger, I focus my energy. Flame lights at my fingertips, reaching inside him. It takes a moment to wrap my senses around the complexity of what I’m trying to accomplish, but once I figure it out, the wound closes—sure and steady. I’m almost positive I could go faster, but he saidslow, so I force itslow.
His damp exhale coasts across my neck. “That’s my girl.”
I shudder as the last bit weaves together.
Castor chuckles. “You did it.” Sultry, he moves my wrist up his chest, makes me push him, then tugs me along after his fall as he tumbles onto the couch.
My heartbeat leaps when I find myself pressed to his cool bare skin.
Blade back in hand, he uses the cold flat of it to tip my chin up. The point grazes me, cutting, and he pulls it away to replace the scratch with his lips and tongue. As I fall into the sensationof his magic creeping inside me to heal the cut, he fits the hilt to my palm. “Carve me up, darling, and heal me just like this, with your fingers and your mouth. Touch me in my soul and sinew.”
I shiver and find myself unwittingly closer, yet not close enough—I fight the pull with everything left in me. His palms fall to my hips, planting there, steadying me. Each of his fingers indents my softness, holding me stable atop him.
“Let my body be your canvas. Take my heart out and hold it in your hands. Let your loving touch bury deep inside my flesh…make me believe in it.” He lets his head fall against the back cushion, and then he says, with a touch more venom, “Rewriteme into your wildest fantasies.”
The terrible urge to cut him open and climb inside compels me. The dreadful wish to place myself in the cage of his ribs, forever taking up the space of his lungs, grips my mind. I want to carve myself into him, sew us together, become one thing, one creature, one entity.
Forever perfect. Forever accepted. Foreverloved.
Fluttering, I stop fighting the gravity and give myself the grace to see wherever this moment leads. “You already are my wildest fantasy given life,” I whisper, testing the blade across his cheek. The slash of red against the sharp angles of his face is an art unlike anything I’ve seen before. I follow the line of red with my tongue—slowly—until the cut is healed and my lips are near his long ear. “You are everything to me.”
His hands slide and his arms circle my waist, cementing our bodies together. “What wouldn’t you forgive me for, my sweet heartbeat?”
“Leaving me.” Letting the knife slip to rest on the couch beside us, I embrace him. “Just that.” My cheek falls against his chest, listening for the proof that he’s alive with me. “Only ever that.”
He retrieves the blade, skates the tip over my clothes across my back. “So…if I cut wings for you out of your flesh…you wouldn’t mind?”
“I’d thank you for the chance to fly.”
He lets the blade pinprick into me, between my wingbones, testing, then he drops it, and I listen as it clatters to the floor. Clutching me, he tangles his fist in my hair and whispers, “What if…I free them, then saw them off, then keep them beaten, bloodied, and useless, like a trophy? What if I display them beyond your cage and keep you, my flightless bird, in the golden bars out of reach of them forever?”
“What if you do? Will I know how to love you less? Or will you have charmed me too sweetly when you kiss the wounds closed? Will I treasure the scars as gifts from you, as proof that I don’t need to be flawless for you to want to keep me? So what if you hurt me in wanting me, just as I am right now—flightless and fearful? Will you still say my name as though it is a new word? Will you still spend your every spare moment seeking to take care of me? And will you still think of me constantly when we are apart?”
“Yes.”
I breathe, basking in the fire and the night, which is the taste of his skin. “Then cut me open, take my heart in your hands, rewrite me to be your fantasy, and love me as deep and wide as you are able.”
In a whirl, he has me pressed to the sofa, laid out against the cushions on my stomach. Sweeping my hair off my neck, he kisses the nape. “You’re sure?” he murmurs, voice dark and tantalizing.
“Even if I believed you would, yes, I’d still be sure.”
His finger parts the magic of my clothing, cutting a clean line down the fabric, drawing an icy touch against my bare skin. “Ifyou believed me?” He kisses my revealed spine. “What’s not to believe?”
“Had I wings, you’d bury yourself in my feathers, terrified that you might harm a single one. There isn’t a chance you’d take them from me.”
