He tensed. She touched him, grazing the tight drum of his belly until her fingers found the towel still knotted around his waist. She tugged it free, letting it fall. It snagged briefly on the hard length of his manhood and then he was bare. Cal set his teeth as her careful fingers traveled down his hip, across his inner thigh. His cockhead began weeping.
“’These violent delights have violent ends,’” he gritted out.
“I know that one. ‘Which as they kiss consume,’ right?” Stretched beneath him like a cat, Nadine allowed her lips to brush his nose. The move, which started out exploratory, innocent, quickly became purposeful as she sought his mouth. His cock brushed her torso and she broke from him to rub against it.
His breath left him on a hiss. “Goddamn it. I will be the end of you, Nadine.”
“Then we’ll start from the beginning and try again, Daddy.”
What inhibitions he still possessed fled from him all at once, galloping like a herd of wild mustangs through his heated blood. Before she could recover, he pushed her back against the bed so roughly that she bounced—a move he regretted when he heard her make a sound, as if in pain.
More careful now, but still deliberate in his intent, Cal shoved up her dress and slid into her on a single stroke. Her hips rode the recoil and she moaned into his mouth.
“You really are mine, aren’t you, Nadine?” he said in wonder. “Ever since you came to Ravensgate, you were practically begging to be corrupted. Didn’t I tell you that you could only be mine in ruin?” He let his hand splay possessively on her thigh, opening her wide to his enthusiastic thrusts. “What dark magic did you work on me to make me feel like this?”
“Love,” she said.
Love? She . . . loved him—even now? Though he hardly dared believe it, he turned her face towards his. “Kiss me, then. Love me, then. Let me be your cage and I’ll give you an open door.”
His sparrow arched and he reached between them, smearing his seed over her thighs and belly, and growling, “Mine,” as he tasted her thundering pulse. Then he kissed her, and in that velvet darkness the house itself seemed to sigh and contract, as if all of its ghosts had been expunged from the very walls like a citrus pulped of its juices. “Yours,” she agreed, as her head fell back in a final sweep of surrender.
And then they slept: the last Master of Ravensgate and his sparrow.
E P I L O G U E
make me soar
For a long time, it felt like he was holding his breath. Waiting—for what, he didn’t know. The uncertainty surrounded him like a storm of his own making, whirling and churning, and the only way he could burn off those dark clouds was when he was with her.
His light, his love.
His sparrow.
This was the love he had never dared imagine for himself. She challenged him, rising to meet him like a bird flying up to an outstretched hand, an unspoken promise between them that he would never allow anything to hurt her again.
She carried the quiet wildness of his woods inside her. Every time he sank himself between her thighs, it was like being back in the glade, suspended in a place at once both close and free, watched over by the sunless blushing flowers that didn’t look like anything else.
He’d had the ring made as soon as he could. Malachite, iolite, nuummite, and emerald: his possession spelled out in rare and precious stones. A bridle light as a caressing hand, but as unwavering as a spider’s net, for she had been caught.
Their marriage had been a very small ceremony. With his brother’s recent death and his father’s disappearance, a large and opulent wedding would have been distasteful. There was also Noelle to consider. Nadine still mourned her sister. Any big to-do would have her name mentioned in whispers, and Cal did not want his wife-to-be grieved by their union. Not when shewas already reclaiming the name of the men who had ended her sister’s life.
So in the end, it was just them, a witness, and an officiant in San Francisco’s City Hall. Cal found that he appreciated the lack of ritual circumstance. Just their small family, a circle of three. Four, if you counted Odessa. He tried not to, though she made a strenuous effort to insert herself into their lives as much as possible. Luckily for all of them, it frequently wasn’t.
After burning Caledon Cullraven’s journal, she had thrown herself into making the house in her own image with single-minded focus. During their last phone call, she had told him that she wanted to turn the house into an inn.
“The requests are pouring in,” she informed him gleefully. “Did you know, I actually needed to create a waitlist? People are really falling over themselves to stay in our grandfather’s moldy old bedroom.”
“I hope you went over it with a fine-tooth comb,” he said grimly.
“Relax, Baby Cal. We got rid of the journal. Remember?”
Cal personally thought there were still far too many skeletons in that house to trot it out before the public, journal or no. True crime aficionados and conspiracy theorists might have replaced the hunters, but the town was still under Cullraven custodianship and not all secrets burned.
“Go lecture your wife,” Odessa said, when reminded of this. “Sheactually likes it.”
Nadine’s aunt refused to visit Ravensgate. She told Nadine she found the place “creepy,” and described Odessa as “a twee horror,” which had made Cal smirk when Nadine told him. Nadine offered to host her at their other property, his ranch home by the delta, but the invitation had brooked a similarrefusal. Cal thought he knew why. On the one occasion that he had gone to Nadine’s childhood home, she had given him a cold, if polite, reception, watching him with distrustful eyes. Later, he had overheard Nikki taking her aside and saying, “Are you sure about him, kiddo? He seems too intense for you, and his familylostyour sister.”
“I love him—and he loves me,” Nadine had responded. “Truly. He’d do anything for me, Aunt Nikki. I never thought I’d ever get to feel a love like that.”
