“If we were to forge a bond, you would have access to this power. And I fear what it might do to you.”
Shaking my head, I moved to stand directly behind him, resting my hand hesitantly on his shoulder. “Damon. Look at me.”
The giant male sighed but didn’t move. I could almost feel the battle being fought within him; feel it in the tension of his shoulders, taste it in the air around us, like smoke and ash.
“Nothing about you or your power scares me, Damon,” I whispered. “You never have. So, look at me and tell me what you want. I’ll walk away, but you can’t come begging for kisses. You can’t keep calling me your wife. Not when those thingsmeansomething. If you really want to know the truth, then help me figure it out.”
For a long moment, he stayed quiet. Just the sound of his breathing and the heavy fall of rain filled the space, as well as the thundering beat of my heart.
The thought of walking away from him hurt—it pained me physically, made my heart yearn for better—but I knew it had to be done.
Although I wanted Xerxes’s assumption to be correct, I couldn’t play games. Not with everything else going on. Not when I knew I had to prioritise this war.
Slowly, Damon lifted his head, a harsh, long breath falling from his lips. In the reflection of the window, I saw his face; the sharp features, the deep red of his eyes, and the set of his lips, lips I could still taste on my own.
Our eyes met. Nothing was said for another long, heart pounding moment.
And then he struck, pulling me beneath him, caging me against the table, his chest rising and falling with each panting breath he took.
Damon’s eyes darkened, tongue flickering out to wet his bottom lip. The shadows were back, inching their way up my calves, their crawling touches making my skin prickle.
“I know exactly what I want to do to you, wife,” he growled, using his shadows to lift me onto the edge of the table, parting my legs for him. “I want to take you and hear you scream. I want to feel that bond I so desperately desire snapinto place between us. I want to claim you as mine. Fuck you until you are. And I want to brand you with my marks over and over again until all know who you belong to. And then I want to feel your brand on me, so everyone knows whoIbelong to.”
Damon stepped between my knees. His height made it difficult, but he brushed his nose against mine in an almost nuzzling sort of way. Honey and smoke filled my lungs when I sucked in a breath, electricity rushing through me. That familiar tingle of power, that feeling I used to get when I was close to my mates, the urge to claim them as my own, appeared in my chest.
Only two words would leave my lips when his eyes found mine. “Claim me.”
He seemed to welcome the command. My demon king stole my lips in a fierce, burning kiss, tongue sweeping across the seam of my mouth and demanding entrance. I let him in as he knocked books off the desk and lowered me onto my back beneath him, one hand cradling the back of my head gently, the other going to my thigh as his shadows moved, creeping up my legs and parting them almost perfectly for his giant frame.
Despite how massive of a male he was, he fit almost perfectly above me, just like at the succubus’s club when I’d crawled onto his lap. And just like that day, I felt him nestled against my core. Hard ridges and something else pressed against me.
Damon made a sound in the back of his throat as I skimmed my hands up his arms to the back of his neck. My fingertips brushed the bare skin of his neck before sinking into his thick, black hair. At the little tug of his roots, Damon pulled back with a growl and dropped kisses down my neck to my throat.
“Can I take your clothes, my Queen?” he asked, looking down at me with burning red eyes, chest still heaving with his panting breaths.
My skin prickled as I nodded. “Yes.”
Damon visibly shuddered, but my shirt and cardigandisappeared first, leaving me in my bra and sweatpants. His eyes flickered from mine down to my chest, taking in the swells of my breasts, which almost spilled from the cups of the bra, down to my stomach.
He didn’t say anything, not as he took me in, not as he dropped kisses down my sternum to the tops of my breasts. “These excited me, I will admit,” he murmured, running his tongue over the top of my right breast. “Seeing them in your wedding dress, I wondered what it might be like to taste them.”
It was my turn to shudder as he flickered his tongue over the other. “But it was how you fit so well on my cock that woke me. I lied when I said I felt nothing towards sex. When I had you on top of me, I wanted nothing more than to sink inside you and finally understand what everyone else felt.”
The shadows pulled my bra aside and freed my breast completely. “I cannot wait to do both things tonight. And for eternity, my Queen.”
With those words hanging in the air between us, he covered my sensitive nipple with his mouth. I gasped at the heat of his tongue as it flicked the hardening nub. Damon brought his other hand to cup the flesh, giving him more leverage with his ministrations.
Bucking against him, I wanted more. But his shadows had me exactly where he wanted me: completely reliant on him for my pleasure and release.
I didn’t get a chance to react as my bra finally disappeared and he moved onto my other breast. Just like the first, he covered my nipple with his mouth, grazing his tongue over the nub, each flick teasing and making me crazy with need.
Damon groaned. “Do you like that, wife?”
I was panting, unsure of what to do with my own hands.
Or I was, until the shadows appeared around my wrists and pulled them over my head. “Damon…”
The demon lifted his head, smirking. “Let me have my way with you.”
