Page 117 of Bonetide

It’s his nail.

But it’s longer than a nail.

And sharper.

I gasp.

He doesn’t ask if I’m all right, doesn’t pull back to check, doesn’t soften his grip. He keeps fucking me and his thumb bears down until the point breaks my skin, the small pain bright in the dark, and I feel the wet of my own blood under his thumb where he’s opened me.

But the sound that comes out of me isn’t protest. In the dark, with his voided eyes on me and his cock in me and his sharp thumb at my throat, the sound that comes out of me is the sound the old version of Iris would be ashamed of.

It’s more.

I want more.

He hears it. The reverent expression leaves his face and something older…ancient…comes up underneath.

He fucks me harder. The slow goes fast, the reverence goes hungry, his other hand down at my hip now with sharp points at every fingertip, and I feel them drag up my side as his hand moves, thin, shallow lines of skin opening under fingernails that aren’t fingernails anymore.

He bites my shoulder, the sharp teeth returning and the pain is blooming hot, and I make a sound that’s half cry, half moan, but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t lift his mouth, fucking me and biting me and dragging claws down my side in red lines, and I’m not telling him to stop, and he isn’t asking, either.

I come around him yet again, with my blood under his thumb, his teeth in my shoulder, his claws at my hip, and his cold, damp body flush against mine, and it goes through me like a meteorite—fast and obliterating—and he’s still going, still fucking me, the hunger not done with him.

He pulls his mouth off my shoulder. It’s wet, blood at the corner of it, and he looks at me with his fathomless eyes, the discipline he’s held for weeks finally gone, and what’s on top of me now is the part of him that’s been under the surface of the man all along. Lurking just under the water.

“You know,” he rasps.

I make a breathless sound.

“Tell me you know what I am.”

I find my voice. It’s small, barely there, but it’s mine. “I know.”

A long, shaky breath leaves him, and he swears.

Then he comes inside me, hard, with his forehead pressed to my collarbone, and the sound he makes isn’t a word in any language I know, instead it’s primordial, low, dragged out of his chest, the feel of him spilling into me isn’t hot, but the cold of the deep sea.

He stays in me a long time after. The black bleeds slowly out of his eyes, and when he lifts his head from my collarbone, they’re Alasdair blue again. His teeth are blunt, and white, and straight. The points at his fingers are gone into tidy nails. But there’s blood on his mouth, and under his thumb, and a thin, wet trickle of it running down the curve of my shoulder, a reminder of what he is, and can turn back into at any moment.

He doesn’t apologize for any of it. He looks at me and waits for me to say something with all the patience in the world.

I find my voice again. “I know what you are.”

He doesn’t move. “So tell me what I am.”

I swallow hard. “A monster.”

He lets it sit in the dark for a moment. Then he says, “Aye.”

I let out a bitter laugh. “And you knew, you knew this would happen.”

“And I warned you that things would change,” he points out firmly.

“I thought—I thought you’d become emotionally distant if I slept with you,” I stammer. “Not become an actual monster!”

He gives me a careful, albeit bloodstained smile, and his hand comes up and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear with a softness I’ve felt from him the nights before.

“Oh, I never became a monster, Iris,” he says, melancholy tinging his voice. “I always was one. You just took me off the leash.”