As I rolled my nipple between my fingertips, I spread my legs. Garrick was powerless against the invitation.
“Koryn,” he exhaled as he sank to his knees before me. His hands bracketed my hips, holding me in place as he buried his mouth between my breasts and breathed me in.
I rocked against him, desperate for the release that was already so close. The heat of the fire was gone, leaving only our bodies against the cold air from the open window. My fingers went to work on the buttons of his surcoat. They shook, but I managed, and then my hands were surging beneath the fabric, seeking out the warmth of his skin underneath. I dragged myfingers along the ridges of his muscles, savoring his strength. He could take me, carry me, consume me.
“Witch,” he groaned.
I stiffened. Damn it all, I could not help it. That word had been hurled at me hundreds of times in hate, but from Garrick’s lips it was too intimate.
Garrick noticed. He was too attuned to my body—the exact reason I’d sought refuge in his arms. He rocked back, resting his weight on his heels. “What is it?”
My mouth opened to lie to him, but no words came out. Damn my conscience and this insistent part of me that refused to die. I was a witch. The words should have come easily. I should have been able to take what I wanted from him and be done with it. But I could not hurt him the way he’d hurt me. He’d deceived me to save his mother. I was doing this to save myself.
I searched for the words and came up with only the crudest version of the truth. “I want you in this bed with me.”
Garrick did not hide the hurt on his face. He’d promised me honesty, and it was there in the lines around his mouth and the way his silvery brows contracted together. His pain should not hurt me. It could not hurt me.
Ice. I was frost and ice. I was impenetrable. But the block I’d built in my chest to protect myself felt more fragile than ever. Guilt dug its claws into the ice, fracturing it. Fracturing me. Garrick had hurt me, and now I was determined to hurt him back. I let Maura murder that woman. I deserved to hurt.
Garrick’s eyes still glowed, a ring of bright turquoise encircling the pupils. But he spread his palms across the tops of his thighs and dug his fingernails into the leather to keep from reaching for me.
His throat worked around the words, but he held my gaze prisoner as he spoke. “You will give me your body but not your heart.”
“I do not have a heart,” I said. It took all of my effort to keep my voice even when all I wanted to do was yell and drag his body against mine.
Garrick sighed. “I am tired of hearing that particular lie.”
“Do not speak to me of lies,” I retorted. The words were flat, but they still revealed too much, and Garrick read them for what they were.
He lifted his chin so that our faces were even. Me sitting on the edge of the bed, him on his knees. “If your heart was so dead and gone, this would not hurt so much.”
The ice in my chest no longer had smooth edges. It was made up of a thousand jagged points, and they each seemed to pierce into a different tender place. I pressed my lips together, refusing to give even a single shaking word. I would not let him see those parts of me, the vulnerable and dark corners of my soul. Not again.
He leaned forward so that our faces were only an inch apart. His lips were so close to mine, I swore he was going to kiss me again. “Be angry at me, witch. Scream, rage, attack. Do whatever you need to do. I can take it. I will still be here,” Garrick promised, his breath caressing my mouth. But he did not kiss me. He rocked back on his heels and waited.
The seconds stretched into minutes, the only sounds our breathing and the occasional hiss of the wet wood in the hearth as it crumbled and shifted. I thought I heard the flap of wings in the distance, but Isanara did not speak into my mind, so it must have been my imagination.
I was not sure how much time had passed. My stomach rumbled rudely. At least it temporarily drowned out the sound of my own blood thumping angrily through my veins. But Garrick marked the sound, too. The man’s obsession with feeding me was going to get the better of him and break our stalemate.
But when he spoke, it was not about the mundanity of food.
He stared directly into my eyes and did not flinch.
“I will not accept empty touches, not when I know what it feels like to truly have you. When you are ready, I will be here. I will always be here,” Garrick vowed. He looked over his shoulder at the bleak tableau of the soot-covered hearth and burned-up chair. “Even if I have to sleep among the rubble.”
CHAPTER 19
KORYN
“I told you before,”the Dark God said, the slightest annoyance audible beneath the customary smoothness of his words. “That will not be necessary.”
“It will be if I decide to stab you with it,” I scowled, clutching my ice dagger tighter. I was getting better at reading him. Or maybe just better at annoying him. But if I had to spend the entirety of my afterlife driving him to distraction, then so be it. It was the least he deserved.
He’d created me, he’d chosen me, he’d offered me the bargain. I’d promised to be his wife. I had not promised to be a dutiful one.
Maybe this was who I was meant to be. For so long I’d struggled against my power and the evil that Maura demanded of me. How easy it would be to just give in to it, finally. Maybe then the pain and guilt would go away. Would the fae woman’s face stop haunting my dreams?
We sat on the bed again. Isanara was out foraging again. Unlike last time, the Dark God had appeared while Garrick and I were dressing, determinedly facing opposite directions and avoiding each other. The Dark God had stood in the middle of the room and offered commentary on both of our bodies.It did not matter that every word out of his mouth had been complimentary. It had been fucking humiliating, and if I got to annoy him in return? It was the least I wanted to do to him.
