I let out a growl of my own and arched my back so that when his fingers came back down, he could not help but touch me.
This time, we growled in unison.
“You are terrible at taking orders,” Arran said, his voice strained. I took sadistic pleasure in knowing he was just as tortured as me.
“Give better ones.” I rolled my shoulders back, pressing my breasts into his palms. He hissed through his teeth. “Take it off.”
“Are you the one giving commands now?”
Ancestors spare me, but he sounded like he might actually enjoy it if I did.
Another time, I promised myself.
I needed his hands on me—here, now.
“Take it off. And do not rip the ribbons. I do not have another set with me.”
Arran’s mouth was on mine as the last syllable left my tongue. Gone was the gentle exploration of mere minutes before, replaced by the feral need that coated every interaction between us. I would not let him rip apart my bustier, so he nipped at my tongue and lips instead. Not sharp enough to draw blood, but enough to have me moaning for more—more pain, more intensity, more Arran.
I was so caught up in the savage battle of our mouths, I did not realize he’d unlaced my bustier until it fell away. My breasts sprang free, heavy and full and tingling at the cold air. If he did not touch them soon, circle his tongue around a nipple and suck it tight and hard, I was going to die just to spite him.
Instead, bastard that he was, he skimmed my burning skin with only his fingertips.
Arran was an absolute fucking liar.
Hewas the one trying to killme.
Because instead of sucking a nipple into his mouth, or taking the weight of my breasts into his hands, he leaned forward oh-so-carefully and kissed my throat again. He braced one hand on the ground, the other against the wall of ice just above my shoulder, as he branded me with his tongue but did not touch another inch of my body.
And Ancestors be damned, but I loved it. I savored the sweet torture—that Arran even wanted to torture me like this. That on some instinctual level, he knew what this would do to me, how sweet it would make that final joining. It felt like a step closer, to who and what we’d been. Whether he could hear it or not, that tentative hope colored every beat of my heart, every moan that he coaxed from my lips.
Arran’s mouth finally, finally moved lower. Past where the skin of my neck was pulled taut by the weight of my breasts, to the spot right above my heart.
“I need to taste you,” he breathed, so low I almost did not hear it between my gasps and moans.
“You’ve already destroyed my leggings.” I did not clarify whether I referred to the pieces he’d cut away to tend my leg, or the mess of sticky desire between my legs.
“Not that—yes, always that,” he amended. But he paused where he was, elongated canines snagging on my breast. Pressing into the skin, just where the curve began. “This.”
Oh.Oh.
There was no hesitation. He’d asked—sort of—but he did not need to. Not of me.
Maybe another female would have been cowed before him, this powerful male, the most powerful in millennia. But evenbefore I’d inherited a power to match his, I’d given myself to him without restraint, showed him the darkest parts of myself.
Giving him my body was nothing, everything—because it already belonged to him.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Always, yes.”
Arran’s breath shook as he exhaled. He slid his hand between us. “That Ancestors-damned scabbard—”
“It cannot stop you.” I pressed my eyes closed, even in the dark. I would not let those memories, that terror, into this moment. This stolen, sacred place between us. I had walled off parts of myself for years, I could do it now, even as I was forced to explain. “You are the other half of my soul. The scabbard cannot protect me from you.”
If Arran realized the implications, it was impossible for me to see. All I had was the flaring ring of desire in his eyes, a black circle of fire visible even in the interminable darkness of the ice cave.
I felt his nod, because I could not see it. And then a second later, I felt him sink his elongated canines—the mark of a terrestrial, of the beast within, of the differences between us—into my vein.
Neither of us moved. It was too excruciating and exquisite.
