I couldn't think. My head fell back against the stone and my hips rolled against his hand and I heard myself making sounds I'd never made — wrecked, guttural, begging sounds that didn't belong to a princess or a god's daughter or anything clean.
"You kissed him." His fingers curled inside me and I sobbed, his thumb continued to insult my clit, it felt so good, sweat gathered on my forehead. "You stood under those pretty lanterns and you kissed him and I had to watch." Hakan started thrusting his fingers in and out of me, his thumb grinding with merciless precision. "Did it feel like this?"
"No." The word ripped out of me as he slowly removed his palm over my mouth. "Nothing — nothing feels like —"
"Like what?" He withdrew his fingers — almost all the way out — and I nearly screamed at the loss. I needed him, I was throbbing for him, ready to beg him to keep touching me. "Say it."
"Like you. Nothing feels like you. Please —"
He drove his fingers back inside me. Harder. A third finger and the stretch burned and I keened — raw, animal, a sound the shadows swallowed before it could reach the walls. His mouth was at my throat, teeth and tongue, and his hand was relentless between my legs, and his blood was everywhere — on my thighs, my nightgown, the wall where my hands clawed for purchase.
The climax built like a storm — pressure and heat and the collision of his darkness and my light, the two forces spiraling together. When it broke, I shattered, and he didn’t stop, instead he picked up the pace as I rode his hand. My back arched off the wall, light exploded from my skin — golden and violent — and it met his shadows and the tower blazed. Dark and bright. Black and gold. Not fighting. Fusing.
Then it collapsed, but I felt that burning sensation everywhere. The light died. The shadows retreated. I slid down the wall on legs that couldn't hold me and he caught me, lowered me, hisarm around my waist and his hand still between my thighs and both of us shaking.
He pulled his fingers free. Slowly. Watching my face as he did — the way my breath hitched, the way my hips chased his hand. Then he looked at his own fingers — dark with blood and slick with me — and he brought them to his mouth.
He licked them clean.
Slowly. Deliberately. His eyes on mine the entire time, watching me watch him taste his own shadow blood mixed with the wetness of my body. His tongue sliding between his fingers, his lips closing around each one, savoring it — the corruption and the divinity, mingled, inseparable.
I stared at him. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't look away.
"Now tasting you will be embedded in my mind forever," he said. His voice was quiet. Almost reverent. "And every time I do, I'll know you're still on me. That I'm still in you. That there isn't a single part of you that's clean of me anymore." A pause. His thumb pressed into the wound on his arm, slow and deliberate. "Good. That's how it should be."
We sat on the cold tower floor. Breathing heavily. His blood drying on my skin. His arm around me, shadows settling like a blanket, gentle now.
"Your blood is on me," I whispered.
"I know."
"Inside me."
His breath hitched. He pressed his face into my hair and I felt him tremble — not from cold, not from the shadows. From the weight of what we'd just crossed.
"This changes things between us," he said against my hair.
"I know."
"I can't go back to pretending."
"Then don't."
He pulled away. Looked at me with eyes that were slowly returning to green — something new in them. Not the arrogance, not the cruelty, not the mask. Something quieter. Proof that he was still capable of more than destruction, and that he knew it, and that it terrified him.
He kissed me. Barely there. His bloodied hand cupping my face, leaving dark fingerprints on my jaw.
"Don't tell Sarp," he said.
Quiet. Desperate. He knew what we'd just done in this tower was the most dangerous thing either of us had ever risked.
"I won't."
He nodded. Wrapped his arm. The blood was already slowing — darkness sealing the wound. I fixed my nightgown. Tried to wipe his blood from my thighs. It smeared but wouldn't come off — staining my skin the way he'd stained everything else.
I left the tower first. Took the servant passages back to my chambers. Ran a bath and watched his blood dissolve in the water — dark tendrils spiraling through the warmth like ink, like shadow.
I pressed my hand between my legs where he'd been and felt the ghost of him still there.
