39. WEN

“You say that as if it’s a bad idea,” I choke.

Something grim slithers in his gaze. “I already told you, I can’t conceive of a more disastrous one.”

But even as he says that, his hand slips around my nape.

He doesn’t exert force, doesn’t need to. His need is a pull far greater than that of the void itself, has me surging into him.

A groan of agonized relief reverberates within me, issuing deep in both our chests. I dive deeper into his power and warmth, hoarding all I can of him.

Burrowing into him like an affection-starved cat, I sigh my bliss. “From where I’m rubbing, it’s the best idea ever thought.”

With a deeper sigh, his hand leaves my nape, and his other arm moves, contains me, and I’m in his embrace.

His embrace.

His chest rises beneath my burning cheek and falls in such sweet resignation. “This will end terribly.”

“Another warning?” I mumble against his sweatshirt, trembling all over, feeling as high as the time I tasted his blood. Higher, on the most powerful drugs in existence—his touch and nearness and need, his helplessness to resist this unstoppable thing between us.

“More of a prophecy.”

“Whatever it will be, it’s all your fault. I’ve never done this before.”

“Never pursued some sod until he succumbed?”

“I never even looked twice at any man.”

“It’s amusing that you think of me as a ‘man.’”

“You just thought of yourself as a sod, so I was promoting you. But I don’t. To me, you’re your own species. Your gender is the only thing you have in common with other males.”

“And you never touched any of those males?”

“What part of ‘I didn’t look twice’ didn’t you understand? I only ever wanted you.”

He withdraws to look down at me. I bet he sees the truth of my declaration written all over me. He squeezes his eyes. “Only ever me. Heaven and Hell and everything in between help us all.”

As he opens them, I meet the bleak tempests raging in their depths, and suddenly I’m on the verge of tears.

In any projections of what would happen if he ever “succumbed,” I thought it would be ferocious and carnal. I had scenarios of how to deal with that. I’m not prepared for this—poignancy.

I blink back tears and attempt to lighten the mood. “If you feel this strongly about it, maybe I’ll give it a go now. You know, sow my oats. It will also get rid of this ‘Oblivious Novice’ stigma.”

His formidable brow knots. “I told you you’re a monster. But you seem to have more in common with your void than I imagined. You want to unleash me, to satisfy your bottomless hunger for chaos and destruction.”

“Funny that you use the term ‘unleash’ when you’re the leash-wielding Angelhole. But what can I say? This world can use some major redecoration.” At his rumble, I wiggle my eyebrows at him. “Hold your rampage, Godawful. I’m saving all my oats for you.”

His glower is so spectacular, I know I’ll keep doing whatever it takes to make him flay me with more. Is that advisable? Hell, no. Will I do it nonetheless, and be totally unrepentant? Heaven, yes.

“Just for the record, touch any male and they get their first, and final session in my torture chamber.”

“Now I’m almost tempted to see if you’d go through with it. I so want to visit your Sanctum Sanctorum of Doom.”

His eyes narrow with a volatile mix of exasperation and amusement. “You are positively off your bloody rocker, aren’t you, White?”

“I was anything but, until you crash-landed in my path. This?” I point at my head and body, indicating my scrambled sanity and seething arousal. “All your doing. Live with it.”

“Do I even have a choice?”

“Do you want one?”

His huff is the sound of self-deprecation. “I would squeeze any choice that got handed to me until its innards exploded. I told you; you ruined me. I hope you can live with it.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“That’s the one area where your choice is absolute. You can change your mind, at any time.”

“Really? Change my mind and do what? Be what? A nun? You just told me you’d make any male I touch meet their excruciating end at your hands.”

“Lighten up on the provocation, my bane. Don’t make me go on preemptive strikes.”

I slap him on the chest with a grin that must look as demented as I feel. “You lighten up, Godawful. You’re not going on an organ rearrangement spree of every male I interact with.”

“You may continue to interact with other males?—”

“Oh, how gracious of you, to grant me the right to talk to other XY chromosome carriers.”

“But to keep their appendages and organs intact, you better not even joke about touching them.”

“Touch them and they die, huh?”

“Or vice versa.”

“Heh. Lorcan and Gideon will be very relieved to know they may live, after all.”

His scowl darkens the cavern. “Not the latter, if he keeps flaunting this Giddy slash Witty thing you’ve got going on. If I end up killing that oaf, it will be all your fault.”

“It’s not my fault you’re a fucking humorless bastard where your Semi-Sibling of Death is concerned.”

We all but bare our teeth at each other, before I frown. “You can’t mean any touch. I’m not giving up socking and pinching those two. Or getting a lift when needed. Among other bodily contact that will be specified in the future.”

“You know what kind of touch I’m talking about.”

“You mean like this?” My hand paints a path of lust and worship from his lips to his erection. Before I can stroke him, he zaps it away with an emerald bolt. But not before I felt him growing impossibly larger beneath my trembling fingers.

The idea of him expanding this way, within the emptiness he’d created inside me, filling me beyond endurance, has me undulating against him shamelessly. “Too bad I can’t even goad you effectively about it. Since the buck started and stopped with you for me, all other males are safe. At least on my account.”

His jaw muscles work as he documents my wanton movements, eyes roaming me with a violent greed that ratchets the gnawing only he can assuage. “Not if they make advances on their end.”

“Advances? I did tell you you should return to the eighteen hundreds, Godawful. Now deliver on some of those ominous predictions. Give me more of you.”

Suddenly, I’m upright and our dungeon blurs around me.

“How’s that for more of me?”

My consciousness flickers as he plasters me to the faceted wall with all that unstoppable power and maleness. I still smirk up at him. “With us fully clothed? A tiny step up from none of you, you half-Heavenly, all-monster tease.”

“This mouth of yours…” He swoops down to hover over it, filling it with his fragrant breath and dark growl. “This voice. It tore through my sanity from the first time I heard it, and has been demolishing it, slowly, systematically, with every word you utter and every sound you make. And this hair …”

He stabs a hand into my scalp, combing down the tousled mass, before twisting it over his forearm and tugging, hard. I moan as a thousand pricks turn my arousal from distressing to excruciating. I throw my head back even as he forces me to, and bites into my neck, over my Mark, as if he wants to rip it out.

I convulse, squashing myself into him, needing to engulf him, dissolve inside him. “Just take me, Godric—finish me.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that, shouldn’t want any of it,” he hisses and his lips crash on mine.

Like his first and only kiss, I plummet and drown into his taste—ours. He rumbles those words I feel I can’t even mimic inside me, as if in invocation. He feeds them to me as his tongue singes mine like a livewire, shocking me with bolt after bolt of stimulation, until my arousal soaks through my pants.

Failing to reciprocate his onslaught, again, I inch trembling hands beneath his sweatshirt, eager to explore his flesh, especially where the wonder of his wings hide within him. Disappointment blooms beneath my fingertips when I feel nothing but the expanse of tough-velvet skin, and sculpted-steel muscles. I whimper my frustration into his ravaging mouth, even as I give him license to do anything, everything to me.

As if heeding my feverish need, he raises me, opening my shaking legs and pressing his hardness between them. Then everything goes blank as he starts thrusting against my core.

It’s not enough. I need him without barriers, and he isn’t removing any. I still feel him almost entering me through them, what he can tear through if he wants. I want him to, and to tear through me, claim me, raze me.

“I want you, Godric, inside me, please.”

His rumble sounds demonic this time. No, something far more frightening. It shakes the cavern as he grinds harder into my mouth, and against my melting core. I feel his barely leashed need to penetrate all my limits and consume everything that I am.

I want him to. I want nothing else.

He sinks his teeth into my lower lip, breaking the skin. I cry out with the jolt of pain and pleasure harpooning to my clit. His searing tongue licks my blood even as he pours his command right down my throat, my being. “Come for me, my ruin.”

A stifled shriek shears out of my endless depths as my desperation bursts, bucking me against him in a seizure of demolishing ecstasy.

As the convulsions ease into constant tremors, I slump into the void and cease to exist.

At one point, I return, in a mind and body that feel tased, by aftershocks, by the stupor of euphoria. I register I’m still wrapped around him, enveloped by his power.

He drove me to orgasm. Just ordering me to. Just kissing and grinding against me. From the column of unabated hardness pressing into me, completing my pleasure, I gave him no such relief.

With one last lingering lick, soothing the lips he abused, he sets me back down on my feet with a gritted, “Take it.”

“Yesss …” I moan as I grab blindly at his bulge. That’s all I want. To take him—everywhere.

He catches my hands. “That’s not what I meant. Look.”

For dazed moments, I can’t look at anything but the cock tenting the indestructible material of his pants, everything I’ll ever want and way more.

Then I realize where he’s pointing. To the swarm of Angel Essence enveloping us.

I gape up at him. “Y-you can see it?”

“Yes,” he bites off, body tense, expression ferocious as he gazes at his own Angel Essence for the first time.

“How?”

“You’re making me see it.”

“How am I doing that?”

“Whatever you’re doing to me, or how you’re doing it, we’ll figure it out later. Just take it now.”

The hunger that had barely abated roars back tenfold, blanking out any logic or caution.

I stab my hand into the indescribable mass of fiery darkness and destruction—and everything detonates.