1. WEN

“You can’t hide from me, White.”

That voice. The most incredible thing I’ve ever heard. The very sound of compulsions, and endings.

Ever since the night I first heard it, it’s been always ringing in my ears, my very being. Always inflaming my desires and warping my thoughts. Never letting me rest, challenging me, forging me into something I no longer recognize. Something better, stronger. Something voracious. Bottomless.

Thatvoice. His.

Godric. The bane of my life.

He told me I’m his, too.

Being the one thing that he can’t control, or control his reactions to, has become my addiction. Even if it might also become my destruction.

Maybe it already has been. Maybe that’s why his voice is the only thing filling the nothingness enveloping me.

“Be a good bane, White, and stop avoiding me. Open your eyes.”

“Must I?” I mumble and bury my face into something that feels like malleable steel smoldering under a scorching sun.

The scents of Godric, mint-laced storms and death-tinged nights, inundate me, flooding molten heat into my core. I rub my thighs together, and moan. With the sudden burn of soreness. It feels as if I’d torn every muscle fiber, and they’re in the throes of regeneration.

It should be a familiar feeling, since that slavedriver had been pushing my body beyond its limits. His Phase One in my “rehabilitation” had stopped inches from kicking my mortality’s bucket. The moment I’d passed it, he’d whacked me with his reward; the glad tidings of Phase Two. An even more merciless regimen to forge me into the weapon he needs.

Though I’d whined and called him every synonym of unfeeling, I’d been bursting with eagerness for anything he’d put me through. I’d never known I could feel as alive as when I’d been under his proverbial whip, being remade to his ruthless “specifications and requirements.”

Still, this doesn’t feel like the aftermath of brutal exertion. It feels as if my very soul had been scraped raw.

But a more profound ache, that unremitting hunger, for him, is drowning out the discomfort and disorientation. All I want is to savor the windfall of his nearness. Before he pushes away and leaves me bereft. This time, maybe forever.

“You will look at me, White. You will see me.”

I remember he said something like that before. With that same spine-scraping intensity. When or why are what’s missing. Other memories are, too. All feel recent, but they keep flitting out of reach.

Miraculously, he’s within it. Right here, beneath my cheek, against my body. It’s only his sheer physicality, and my carnal reaction to it that reassure me that I still exist in corporeal form.

Even if I don’t, he’s here with me, and I only care about hoarding all I can of him, while I still can.

I throw an arm and a leg over his daunting mass. “Just touch me already, you massive hunk of frustration.”

A long beat of silence. Of cessation.

Then he exhales. “You don’t want me to do that.”

I shiver all over, his menacing rumble spreading in the wet heat between my legs. I wind myself tighter around him. “If I wanted it more, I’d implode—and engulf you whole.”

I remember I’d said something like this before, too. If without sexual context. When I had, and what I’d meant, I don’t know.

Weird how some things are crystal clear, while others lurk behind a blank barrier. Not that it worries me. My only worry now is that he gives me what I’m yearning for.

“Do you even know what you’re asking for?”

“A little less conversation, a little more action, please…” I hear what I just hummed and giggle, start rocking against him to the peppy rhythm of the Elvis song.

His inhalation is so sharp, I feel it cleaving into my own chest.

The only good part about this affliction is that it’s mutual. I seem to affect him as totally.

My lips spread over the hot, heaving hardness beneath them as I undulate against him, breathlessly crooning, “All this aggravation ain’t satisfactionin’ me.”

He suddenly shifts, breaking my hold over him.

Before I can cling to him, he pushes me on my back—and comes fully over me.

The sheer brunt of him paralyzes me. Even when he must have activated his hovercraft power, giving me only enough of his heavenly body mass to secure me.

As if I’d want to escape. I’d happily lie beneath him unto eternity.

“How’s that for action, my bane?” His whisper is like fingernails scratching deliciously against every itch I never knew I had.

My body bows up, an arch of greed for every inch of him, what he’s deprived me of for what feels like a lifetime. It’s my mind that can’t keep up. It can’t reconcile him going from not brushing against me by accident, to full-body impact.

Air escapes my lungs as I finally open my eyes.

He’s really there, on top of me, filling my sight and senses.

A fringe of midnight silk is raining down the slope of his leonine forehead, his cheekbones and jawline jutting sharper in a face that’s more mercilessly breathtaking than ever.

Feeling way over my head, I wheeze, “So, uh, what action is that exactly?”

In answer, his eyes swirl with violent viridian as he grinds down into the juncture of my thighs.

My consciousness flickers as I stare up at him mutely. Only he has ever been able to silence me.

One eyebrow rises in an arch of darkness and goading. “Isn’t that what you’ve been after, from the first day?”

“Uhh, I don’t know what I was after at the time, okay?” I gasp, feeling like a fish that had been smacked down on land. “I just wanted …”

“What you shouldn’t want,” he completes for me. “Now that you’ve gotten it, you don’t know how to deal with it. With me.”

His cruel accuracy steadies me, makes me glare up into his incendiary eyes. “You can read my ‘mercurial’ mind now?”

His masterpiece lips quirk, flashing me a single, singular dimple. It erases my annoyance, and sends everything inside me spinning in a vortex of need—and uncertainty.

Something isn’t right here.

I just can’t begin to think what it is.

A breath stutters out of my constricted lungs. “But yeah—you’re right. Wanting something and getting it are Heaven and Hell apart. I always feared I wouldn’t be able to handle it. Handle you.”

As if to prove my fears right, he rocks his hips, a leisurely, deliberate threat of sensual annihilation.

I almost black out again at feeling his intimidating erection thrusting against my quivering flesh. Then he leans down to lick the shell of my ear like the semi-celestial panther that he is.

Nipping the lobe, making me lurch with the arrow of pleasure that lodges between my legs, he pours his lethal purr into my brain. “Then you should not have pushed and pulled at me, with your every word and glance and breath. You should not have done everything in your probably endless power to destroy my resistance, my very sanity, until I gave in.”

A jumble of objections fill my brain. But no coherent, let alone valid arguments form. My mouth falls open on a gurgle as garbled as my feelings. One he cuts short with his tongue as it surges between my lips.

He feeds it to me, in languid thrusts, painting my insides with his brand. And a realization rises from the shroud blanketing my mind. This happened before.

He kissed me before.

I can’t remember when or how this momentous event came to pass. I only remember that I didn’t know what to do then, either.

Not that he seems to want me to do anything. Nothing but let him drain me, devour me.

This. This is exactly what I want. What I wanted all along. This—invasion, this—merging.

My every cell shrieks in delight, in recognition, in greed. For more. All. All of him. Doing it all to me.

The surroundings I can’t really register swirl into non-existence in a haze of heat and hunger. My senses are being soaked to the point of drowning, in his feel and taste. My body is trying to morph into a more pliable form, to transform into the very medium of surrender.

The need to wrap myself around him, to take him inside me is gnawing, and I spill its agony into his lips. With a growl that liquefies my bones, his kisses ratchet from consuming to wrenching, and those fingers that can pulverize steel wrap around my neck.

I gasp as they start to squeeze, all my blood hurtling in opposite directions. Some to my head, distorting my consciousness further, and the rest to my molten core.

It’s like that first day, when I had my first real orgasm, imagining him doing this to me. This feels even better than the fantasy, but I feel I will soon faint. Or climax. Probably faint while climaxing.

All I want is a release from this distress. But I can’t come without him putting his back into it—so to speak. If I did from a mere squeeze, it would be the ultimate admission of his power over me. No matter what had changed between us since he dragged me into his world on his damn leash, I must maintain our dynamic.

This is still a duel. It will remain one, until my last breath.

As if feeling my struggle to hold back, his hand presses a fraction harder on my windpipe as his lips cling to mine for a tantalizing moment, before he raises his head.

If I could draw breath, I would have shrieked with the loss.

His eyes, now aglow with that terrifying yet intoxicating emerald, document my condition with savage intent.

Obsidian lightning skitters over him as his knees push mine apart, spreading me wide for his bulk. Then he presses down into me, giving me more of him, impeding my breathing even more. A tortured whimper escapes me as the chain reaction in my core revs higher.

“Still want me to touch you, my bane?” he taunts as he drags my arms above my head, before engulfing both wrists in his palm, manacling me more effectively than iron shackles. I know. I’d escaped those. I’d never escape his grasp.

Being at his non-existent mercy only sends my body building up to a detonation.

Trying to buck beneath him, seeking his feel, his weight, his domination, I rasp, “I want you to do more than that. I want you to do everything to me.”

“Everything?” His eyebrows rise in lazy incredulity as he removes his choking hand, and I almost drum my feet in frustration. “You really have no self-preservation, do you? What if I took you up on your offer, and you can’t ‘handle it?’ Maybe you should peruse the menu of what awaits you at my hands, before you make such a sweeping declaration.”

He firms his grip on my wrists to the edge of pain, and it makes me tremble with a brutal surge of arousal, until I can barely form words. “T-tell me.”

His lips harden, and his austerity only makes my every inch buzz with a more ferocious charge.

When he speaks again, his voice is as forbidding, drenching me in marrow-melting tremors. “I will dominate you, in every way your little reckless heart can and can’t imagine. I will silence your worries, end your challenge, and take away your choice. I will destroy your every inhibition, your every limitation. I will bend you to my will, and enslave you to my desires.”

His words pummel me harder than any blow I’ve ever suffered. And they send me clear out of my mind with an eruption of voracity.

I writhe and shudder beneath him. “Yes, yes—I want all that. I want it. I want you.”

His other hand comes up, and he rests his fingertips over my bottom lip. He waits until I try to kiss them, suck them, anything, before his ruthless smirk dawns once more and he trails them down, scorching a path of madness down my chin, my neck, until they’re around my throat once more.

“Do you?” He waits until I nod, my breath hitching. When he speaks, his voice is so deep, it feels like a bass line reverberating in my very being. “Do you want me to invade you, body and soul, and leave no corner of you unplundered? To fill your ravenous void, until you’d wither without me buried deep inside you? Until you can never feel whole again without me pounding you to completion? Do you want me to make you spend the rest of your life incoherent with the need for more of me, and begging for anything I want to do to you? Are you dying for me to addict you to the ecstasy only I can bring you, and willing to do anything, give up everything, to have it?”

“Yes, that—all that,” I choke. “Just use smaller words—don’t talk at all. Just do it. Do it all. I’ll die if you don’t take me right now.”

“What if you die, if I do take you?”

“I don’t care.” And I don’t. Every inch of me is burning up. The emptiness within my soul and between my legs is pounding at me with a crazed demand that only his being and flesh can assuage. I feel it will consume me, leave nothing of me if I don’t have him. I need him, in every way, no matter the consequences. “Just take me. Finish me. That’s what you wanted too, from that first time.”

“Even before then, my bane.”

What does that mean? How could he have wanted me before we met?

It might make perfect sense, and I’m the one who can’t understand anything anymore. Who can blame me? With this god on top of me, about to take me?

The hand holding both of mine relinquishes its bruising grasp, only to drag down my body to cup my core. The other resumes the pressure on my neck, and my body bucks beneath him without volition, seeking more contact, more friction. More. Just more. Everything. Anything.

He grinds the heel of his palm where I need. Yet, it’s not what I need. The urge to have him inside me overcomes my enervation, and my trembling legs move, wrapping around his hips.

As if I electrocuted him, he jerks, growls, throws his magnificent head back—and bursts into flames.

Crimson-tinged emerald fire engulfs him, like the horrifying Burning Angel I vaguely remember. But unlike that angel, I can see his face. He looks like himself, yet different, the image of utter hunger and heartlessness. If possible, this ignites my lust for him higher, stoking the inferno between my legs. I tighten them around him, bringing his hardness grinding against me.

“You know what? You’re right. I shouldn’t have cared either. I should have done this the day I found you. Time to rectify my mistake.”

The wickedness lacing his scalding tones, the cruelty crackling in his heart-stopping eyes are too much. Everything in me screws up tighter, preparing to burst into a climax that will wreck me and end all of existence as I know it.

I’m at the brink when something else sears through the delirium. Something wrong. Very, very wrong.

He’s no longer shielding me from the brunt of his flames.

The realization razes me in the same second that I hear it. The blood-curdling snap. Of my neck.

It’s why I don’t feel a thing as I burn to ashes beneath him…