Only our pillow had twisted me into a knot. Conall had to have given it to us as a prank. Probably a hundred inches long, it resembled a narrow strip barely fitting my head and pushing my left shoulder so high it strained my neck.
“Zion.” Gedeon drew a line from my hairline to my nose, then to my jaw, up to my ear and into my hair. “Say something.”
Each drag of his nails across my scalp leached my being, reducing me to rubble, the fragments of my thoughts disintegrating into wisps of pure pleasure.
I hummed as his scratches climbed a bit higher?—
Tingles exploded all the way to my toes, and a garbled noise vibrated out of my throat.
“You’re practically purring.” He chuckled, the sound adding to the shower of warmth bathing my limbs.
“Hmm.” I slurped in my saliva about to soak into the pillow. He’d turned me into a pool of drool with the simplest of caresses.
Now I finally understood why Shadow enjoyed scratches so much. Pure satisfaction had encased me in a bubble I wished to never pop.
Gedeon paused. “Please talk to me.”
My lungs skipped a breath. He’d said “please.” I didn’t think his vocabulary included words like this one.
“I’ve wanted you for so long, Gedeon.” Wary, unused to this, I stroked his waist, the contour blazing under my palm, the fire so hot I yearned for it to ravage me. “The games I played…” I swallowed. “I figured if I could have you for one night, it would be enough, but I doubt it would have.” My knee burrowed deeper between his legs. “I always hated waking up to others in my bed, but with you…I don’t want to get out.” My thumb dug into his relaxed muscles, carved out to fit my hand perfectly. “I don’t want to let you go.”
“You don’t have to.” His lower ribs expanded and contracted under my touch. “You are mine, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So say it. Say it.” Desperation laced his voice. “Say it, Zion.Say?—”
“I’m yours.”
He sighed, his eyes fluttering closed.
Mapping out the small bird tattoos, the inked silhouettes climbing up Gedeon’s sides, the marks for the fallen, I deciphered what freedom was at last—honesty.
I swiped a few dark strands away from his forehead. “Will you bleed for me?”
His eyebrows drew together. “Why do you need it?”
The day Ilasall’s military had drawn out our parents’ torture, made a show of it, was also the day blood became my fascination. And the river of crimson pouring out of my sister’s stomach had solidified it.
The scarlet liquid streaming through a person’s capillaries had taught me many things. How slowly you had to drain someone to ensure death lingered across the threshold, but never stepped over it. How red cells carried a different flavor depending on my doll’s origins: the cities or the compounds. How slicing the tubular membranes open, exposing the fluid responsible for distributing oxygen, could convince anyone to reveal their darkest desires and secrets.
It all led to control. Once you gained access to someone’s blood, they belonged to you, fully and irreversibly. Exchanging it with someone meant you traded your life for theirs.
I brushed the vein protruding from Gedeon’s temple. “I want to haveallof you.” Then I’d know how that darkness in him tasted. Would it melt on my tongue or choke me to death?
“If blood is what you wish, I will give it to you,” he said, andlunged.
My reflexes blared within me to resist, to grapple, to come to blows?—
Gedeon’s weight on top of me crushed me into the mattress. My instinct to fight receded, and peace took its place, promising…safety. Not a whiff of potential harm.
The combination of his hips pressing into mine and his forearms bracketing my face enclosed me in a cage ofsecureness, the concept so foreign I resorted to clutching his back as a tether to keep myself in check.
“I will bleed myself dry to satisfy you,” he vowed. “I’m not running from you anymore, Zion, regardless of what you ask of me.”
His forehead dropped to mine, the gesture so familiar yet not enough. It never was with him. So I splayed my hands across the expanse of his upper back, over the hundreds of wings inked into his skin, and hauled him closer.
As his mouth collided with mine, I pressed into him, chasing the inhale he tried to take. Bending my knees, I invited him to settle between my thighs. His cock rubbing against mine cast a net woven out of hunger onto me, charring its pattern into my flesh.
I groaned into him, and his teeth hooked over my bottom lip, dragging it away?—
A twinge obliterated my nerve endings. Flames exploded as heat trickled to my chin.
