“I am so sorry I cling to you, nightmare,” he whispered. “It’s just that you make me feel like I actually exist.”
She sucked in a ragged breath. This was too much. She couldn’t do this. Not with him. Not right now.
So she shifted her hips, arching so that she drew back and then slammed back down against him. This she knew. Pleasure and pain mixed together as they tangled around each other.
He hissed out a breath and his hands clutched at her hips. Together, they spun into madness. With every thrust, she forgot what she was angry about. With every slap of his skin against hers, she could tell herself that her heart wasn’t breaking because of all the things she had to decide were right or wrong.
His fingers bruised her skin. She reached for his hair again, tugging on it far too hard as she forced him to do what she wanted, what would feel good for her and not him. Because this wasn’t about him.
And yet it was. Because with every hissed breath, every gasp, every aching cry that slipped out even though she didn’t mean for it to do so, she found her heart starting to forgive him.
Pleasure fractured. She could feel herself spinning out of control, growing more and more tense.
“I can feel you,” he hissed, his teeth bared in an animalistic snarl. “Come for me, nightmare. Let me feel you unravel.”
At his order, she did. Splintering apart with a moan even as he joined her. Spilling inside of her in a wet gush that she could feel already dripping down her thighs.
He let her legs go. One after the other.
They stood there, panting for a few moments. He stared at the wall behind her shoulder. She stared over his shoulder at the roses.
Then, he swallowed audibly and nodded. “Sleep well, nightmare.”
She watched him walk away with her eyes burning. Tongue tucked into her cheek, she told herself not to call him back. He couldn’t justdothat. He couldn’t just fuck her and then leave because he felt bad for what he had done.
But she supposed, in a way, she felt bad, too. This fractured version of them didn’t feel right.
Her words haunted him for days after that. Days after he had found oblivion within her body, but also embarrassed himself to no end. Had he really repeated the Warrior King’s own words to her? He was just as bad as his siblings after all.
Those were the thoughts that haunted him as he walked down the hall to her room. But he was the Deathless God. He had been created to rule these people, and he would be damned if a single mortal woman made him fail for the first time in his life.
Yet still he paused in front of her door, searching the wooden surface for answers that were not there. Howdidhe fix this? How did he mend what he had broken a year ago?
Blowing out a breath, he decided the best thing he could do was just to make it happen. So he opened the door without knocking and just… strode in.
Jessamine was seated at the vanity, unraveling the long coil of her hair. “I don’t want to see you right now.”
“Well, I think we need to talk about this.”
“I’m saying I don’t want to talk about it.”
“If we don’t talk about it, then we’re both just going to get angrier at each other. We have to work through this. Together.”
She picked up a brush, and it looked like she was holding a weapon in her hand. “I think it would be smart of you to stop talking.”
Was that a threat? She shouldn’t try to fight him. It only made him more excited about the entire situation. “Jessamine—”
“Elric. I’m telling you right now that I am very angry with you. I don’t like what you did, and I don’t want to talk about it until I’ve had some time to think. Once I can do that, then I will ask you to have this conversation.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“I do not know.”
“Then that doesn’t work for me. I need to know that we are all right. I need to know that we are not broken.”
“I don’t have an answer for that right now! I deserve the space to think—”
He felt something in him explode. “Space? Jessamine Harmsworth, the last thing I want from you is space! I want to inhale the very air you breathe. I would live inside of your skin if I could. I want you more than anything I have ever wanted.”
