She felt the lines of the cross underneath, raised, almost lifting from her skin.Take him. He’s always been yours to take.
She tried to summon her training. The breath cycle she'd learned in the program. Four in, hold for seven, eight out. She got to four and her chest seized, and she couldn't hold, couldn't wait, couldn't slow the pulse of her own blood. The breath broke into a gasp. The gasp tasted like him.
A vision crashed through her without warning.
Her clothes were gone. The silk and the embroidered gods had fallen from her body and lay in a black-and-gold heap on the flagstones. She was naked in the sun, and her skin was living metal. Hammered gold contoured muscle and bone. The symbols her clothes had carried were now etched into her flesh in raised relief.Urquchillayacross her sternum.Urcaguaryalong her collarbones.Supaycoiling down her spine.Pacha Kamaqacross her belly. She was an icon, a living altar, a homage to her ancestors. The sun struck her gold skin and lit her on fire, and sheradiated.
She became the heat the sun had sent into her, and she opened her mouth, a sound that wasn't words but was the cosmos answering itself.
She heard her own gasp shatter the vision. She was back in the library. She was clothed. Her skin was skin. But her body was still trying to become what the vision had shown her. The pressure under her sternum was the cosmic equivalent of pregnancy. Her body wanted to expel something that had been growing inside it for a year.
She pushed off the wall and started moving without deciding to. Through the library. Past the long table. Past Fly's whiteboard with its conspiracy-theorist diagrams. Her feet were moving on a path her body knew. She was going somewhere, and her conscious mind was just a passenger.
The library door opened in front of her before she reached it.
Flash filled the doorway.
He looked the way she felt. His eyes weresilver, the gray gone, the iris and the pupil collapsed into the same color, and the silver was lit from inside. His chest was rising and falling at the rhythm her own chest was rising and falling, and around her, the entire house breathed on the same pulse. His hands were curled into fists at his sides as if his hands had been ordered not to reach for her and were defying the order one knuckle at a time.
He pulled on her like a vortex, relentless, a force she couldn’t fight. The sight of him unlocking something so deep, so feral, she growled.
The door closed behind him.
"Killa," he said, and the way he said her name hit her cells like a bell, a recognition older than the room, older than her, with roots she couldn't see.
She didn't know she was going to move until she was already in motion. She crossed the library in three strides, and she wason him. Her body slammed against his, and her hands were in the cotton of his shirt like it offended her. She pulled and the seam at his shoulder gave with a sound like fabric tearing in a dream. She felt the heat of his skin through the breach she'd just opened. She made a sound that was a growl. She pushed him.
He took one step back from the force of it. His back hit the door.
She advanced. Her hands went to his face. She raked her nails down the side of his jaw, not deep, not breaking, but enough that the lines of her passing rose pink on his skin and stayed. He made a sound, low in his throat, pleasure, hunger meeting hunger, and the sound of it unleashed something wild in her.
Consume him. Devour him. He is wholeness. He is yours.
She fisted her hand in his hair at the back of his head andpulled, and his head came back against the door, and the column of his throat was exposed to her. With a low, needy sound, her mouth closed on the place where his jaw met his neck, and she bit him hard. His hands came up to her hips and gripped her so tightly that she was going to have bruises. He was heat, velvet over steel, the physical manifestation of his masculinity thick and hard, and she lost her mind. That grip was permission and the bite possession. She held her teeth on him for a long second. Then she released and dragged her mouth down his throat and bit him again at the base, where the neck met the shoulder, harder this time, and he cried out in carnal pleasure and a kind of unstrung release.
With her hands under his shirt, her nails scoring his skin over the hot ridges of his abdomen, she licked the mark she'd just made. She raked her teeth down the side of his neck in a line that left red trails, ownership.Mine,her body sang.This throat. This pulse. This skin. Mine.
His hands moved from her hips to her ass as he lifted her against him. The fullness of him pressed through the soft fabric of his shorts, hard and thick, and the cup of his hands on her was the only thing she could feel.
He released one hand, roughly sliding it into her hair, his mouth at her temple. Her hands went impatiently for his waistband. She shoved her hand down inside his shorts, and her palm closed over his erection, smooth velvet and beautiful hard heat. He made the cry again, deeper this time, his face contorting in unspeakable need. His head went back against the door and his throat was open to her, and she renewed her claim, biting him again and again, but instead of satisfying her, the pressure built.
“I need your mouth on me, fucking me. Jae, beautiful eagle, my red, white, and blue raptor.”
13
Her handon him was the answer to the question her body had been screaming for an hour. The heat of him in her palm, the tip smooth, moist, demanding her mouth. The weight of him. The pulse of him against her fingers as she ruthlessly jacked him off, her thumb swirling.
She was no longer alone in her cells. She had something to hold. She had something that belonged to her. She had something that wanted her with the same gravitational pull her body had been generating without an object.
She pulled her hand out of his shorts and dragged it up his stomach, grabbing the hem of his T-shirt in both hands and tearing it in half, all the way to the tantalizing hollow of his throat. She pushed the pieces aside, clamped her mouth over the flat disk of his nipple and sucked him hard, bit him just as hard, the contact with his skin a shock that made her whole body jolt as if she'd been struck. She kept moving her hand. Up his ribs, still sucking him. He was moaning, his back arched, all hers.
She traced the chakana with her nail.Heat radiated out of it. His ink answered hers like two stones humming at the same frequency. “I never gave you permission for this.”
“Yes, you did. You took my clothes, and you took my heart. You asked me to watch the skies. That was a promise,” he rasped out, his chest heaving.
She reeled, her mind spinning, words coming to her like in a dream.I watched you and I hungered. I had no words to get through to you, but even then, every line of you belonged to me.Those words were in her head, in his. Both of them were frozen in the recognition.
His hand came up and pressed over hers on his ribs, holding her palm flat against the scar. “You marked me with silver and fear. Permission was taken and granted in blood. I gave before you took, and I accepted that end.”
