Chapter 53

53

Farryn

Ignoring what felt like a whole flock of butterflies stirring chaos in the pit of my gut, I knocked on the door to Van Croix’s office.

“Come in.” Certainly didn’t help matters that his voice carried a husky, perilous tone that set my teeth on edge.

I opened the door to find him kicked back in his chair, shiny, black leather shoes resting against the desktop. He casually flipped that coin over his knuckles, and for a moment, I felt like I’d arranged a meeting with Lucifer himself.

Perhaps I had.

With a glimpse of his unbuttoned, black, high collar shirt, the fabric stretched across his chest muscles, a feeling of dread sank to the pit of my stomach. My willpower was already shriveling like a cold, deflated balloon before I even sat down. Sex oozed from every pore of his body like a potent aphrodisiac, the confidence and determination in his expression warning me I didn’t stand a chance at resisting it.

I would, though.

By God, if it took every ounce of grit left inside of me, I would not fall prey to this man.

Eyes locked on his, I stared at him from across the desk, my fingernails digging into the leather upholstery of the chair.

He stared back, the hint of a smirk on his lips gnawing at me, as I contemplated how to broach the subject of Lustina without admitting that I believed him.

“How?”

At that, he cocked a brow, flipping the coin faster.

“How would it be possible for her to return? The book never quite explained that.” I hated the way his lips pulled into that devilishly handsome smile. The knowing smile of a man who’d effectively won over my curiosity.

“She was cursed. Her mother carried the curse before her and passed it onto Lustina.”

“If it’s passed down to generations, then, why would I be cursed?”

“Lustina perished according to the prophecy. It’s taken centuries for it to reawaken. I know this because I waited with bated breath every day for your rebirth.”

Lips pressed to a straight line, I shrugged. “Lucky me. Guess I should’ve bought a freaking lottery ticket. So, what, I’m fated to die on the blood moon?”

“Yes. Unless the curse is broken.”

“Broken how?”

The coin rolled across his fingers faster, the corner of his lips curving to a much more sinister smile than before. “There is only one way to break the curse. It’s why I called you into my office.”

My mind puzzled the information I’d been fed so far about Lustina. Her mother. I frowned back at him. “I have to become pregnant?”

“Yes. Only an angel can break the curse.”

“But you’re not an angel. That’s what you said.”

“I am half angel, half demon. And fully qualified to break your curse.” The lust burning in his expression as he raked his gaze over me was so thick, it was a wonder I didn’t burst into flames. “In fact, nothing would give me more pleasure.”

Clearing my throat, I shifted on the seat and crossed my legs. “I am not … I’m not getting pregnant. And what then? You curse the baby, too?”

“It would afford me some time to figure out how to break it.”

“Haven’t you had centuries to figure this out?”

“In all fairness, I wasn’t entirely confident you’d return to me.”

Rubbing my forehead failed to calm the chaotic thoughts in my head. The bazillion questions floating aimlessly in my skull. “Bishop Venable murdered her. I just assumed. There was no end to the story.”

The coin rolling stopped and the smirk on his face faded for something more serious. Brows pulled tight, he sat quiet. If the man was capable of feeling pain, of understanding it, at all, then Lustina was clearly the blade.

“The pain of a thousand lashes could not have matched the agony I felt in that single moment, when I lifted you from that cold river.”

“You killed the bishop, then?”

“You’re fortunate if you didn’t read how I went about it. Sadly, I’ve a feeling he ended up here.”

“What? Here?”

“Yes. If I’m not mistaken, he was the host at the little soiree we attended. Goes by Mister Barchiel these days.”

How crazy did fate have to be for putting me in the same room as Lustina’s murderer. “That doesn’t trouble you? That he’s here? In Nightshade?”

“Not much he can do. He’s really no match for my power here. And I’m no longer the same young boy.”

“No, you’re not, are you? What are you, Mister Van Croix? A Sentinel, right? More demon than angel?”

By all accounts, he looked entirely human, though something sinister seemed to simmer beneath his surface. He clearly wasn’t, though. Even if a soul had the propensity to live in Nightshade for an eternity, his carried a more ancient charm. And when he spoke, I could see he’d come from another time. Evolved, but never quite fully assimilated to the present.

He resumed rolling the coin over his knuckles. “Are the morals of man always so black and white, Miss Ravenshaw? I have killed in ways that would seem merciless, and have loved just as ruthlessly.”

“You loved. Therefore, you must have goodness in your heart.”

“A villain is quite capable of love. It’s only the matter of what he’s willing to sacrifice for that love which separates him from a good man.”

“And what is your regard for other human life? Besides Lustina.”

Something flickered in his good eye, a shadowy darkness that warned me not to venture too deeply into the man’s morals. “My relationship with this existence is what I would consider symbiotic. While I live everyday with the proclivity to destroy and consume entirely, I also have the desire to remain. I suppose you could say, then, that I am suspended along a thin wire between the two.”

“You told me you were banished to Nightshade. What for?”

Never taking his patchless eye off me, he sighed. “Would you like a drink?”

I’d have loved one, but I intended to keep my wits about me. “No, thank you.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Why would I trust you, when you refuse to tell me why you’re trapped here. Seems a reasonable enough request of someone intent on impregnating me, don’t you think?”

Ignoring my question again, he pushed up from his chair and strode toward a bar cart situated next to a leather armchair and pedestal table off to the side. A stack of books sat on the table, of which I could only make out a copy of the Bible and Dante’s Inferno.

“Are there more of your kind?” I asked, noting the dog-eared pages in his copy of the Bible.

“Yes.”

“You’re not what we’ve perceived as heavenly angels, then?”

“Not even close. Your heavenly angels have a moral code. They are predictably good in all cases. They will always choose what is right and just, because they put that above all else--even human life.” The sound of an igniting flame drew my attention to where he lit a sugar cube balanced on a spoon over a glass on fire. “I’m far more selfish. I would burn down an entire city for one woman.” The glance he shot back at me was nothing short of unapologetic.

Realization knocked me upside the head. “That’s why you’re here. You burned down Praecepsia. All of it.”

“You asked of my regard for human life.” He shrugged and took a sip of his drink. “Depends on the circumstances.”

I wanted to tell him that he was morally repulsive and wrong for such a thing, but all I could muster was pity and sadness. Not for him, but me. For never having loved something so fiercely. For my inability to understand how someone could be so ridden with pain that he would dare vengeance. Not even my own father was capable of that.

As Jericho crossed the room back toward me, carrying two glasses of a glowing green fluid I guessed to be absinthe, the urge to back away had me pressing myself against the rear of the chair. He set one of the glasses down on the desk and held the other between us, not quite in offering, as he leaned forward. “I can tell you everything. Every secret you’ve ever wondered. Every code you’ve not yet broken. I can fill that brain of yours with more information than you will ever find in the books of your world. So much to learn and so little time.” He lifted the glass higher then and lightly swirled its contents. “All I ask in return is that you trust me.”

What if I did? Was that not the reason, the true reason, that I came to Nightshade in the first place? To seek out this man? To learn why my father had desperately sought him out? The answers. My father had taught me that nothing was as important as discovering one’s true purpose. Was I so selfish to want that? To crave a level of understanding that not even he could achieve?

After a quick glance down at the drink, I narrowed my eyes. “What exactly do you want from me?”

“I want you to stay long enough for me to break the curse.”

“Long enough to break the curse? Last I checked that could easily be five minutes in the bathroom. Wham bam boom. Pregnant.”

The corner of his lip twitched. “I’ve waited centuries for you. I want to savor it.”

“This is …. This is some weird, alien romance kinda crap. Impregnating me? That’s one step down from breeding me.”

He quirked a brow. “Would you prefer that term?”

“No. I don’t prefer any of it.” Hand lodged in my hair, I exhaled a sigh, feeling like Alice, trying to decide whether to take the drink and fall down his dark little rabbit hole. “Look, this is … flattering, I suppose, but I can just barely keep a plant and a cat alive. I’m not ready for a baby.”

“You don’t have a choice. Or time, for that matter. The blood moon is just a few short days from now. And if you think that I’ll let you perish again, you’re wrong.”

Let me perish? “What are you going to do--force me to get pregnant?”

“I will use every method at my disposal to change your mind.” He reached back for his own drink, watching me over the rim of it as he took a sip. “What would your father tell you, if he were standing here now?”

“My father? He actually believed in all this crap, so he’d probably tell me that I was a fool to walk away.”

“Then, don’t be a fool.” The cool, wet surface of the glass pressed against the palm of my hands, and with a small bit of reluctance, I accepted the drink from him. A simple gesture, yet one that felt as if I were signing over my soul. With a push off the desk, he leaned over me and lifted a stray tendril of hair, his gaze momentarily distracted as he toyed with the lock. “Drink,” he said in a voice so ominous and dark, it reminded me of the villain in fairytales, coaxing the young innocent into her own demise.

With a trembling hand, I brought the drink to my lips and sipped. A black licorice flavor danced across my tongue, so delicious that I sipped more. I’d never had absinthe in my life, had always thought of it as something only the strange gothic types enjoyed. But whatever he’d put in the drink seemed to quench a thirst I never knew I had.

A warm hand gripped mine, as Jericho lowered the glass from my lips and chuckled. “Slowly.” His gaze dipped to my lips, and he leaned forward to lick the liquor from them. “It was once believed that absinthe caused hallucinations. Madness. Depravity. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who likened the drink to poetry.”

“It’s delicious.”

“Indulgences considered most corruptible usually are.” His tongue swept over his own lips, as his gaze moved further down, toward my throat, and I wondered if he’d bite into my neck. Instead, he pushed away. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Trust, Miss Ravenshaw.”

Trust. Right. After taking one more sip of the drink, I set it on his desk and stood up from the chair, a slight wooziness settling over my head. Couldn’t have been drunk, surely--I’d only sipped about half the glass—yet, I felt the warm, fuzzy sensation of a slight buzz. Hand in his, I followed after him, out of the office, through the corridor, the cloisters, to the door of the bell tower.

The bell tower.

Still, regardless of the small and conveniently-distant voice inside my head warning me to turn the other way, I followed him.

“It’s supposed to storm tonight. I’ve been told it’s dangerous up here when there’s lightning.” Hand in his, I let him guide me up the tower’s narrow, stone stairwell, lit only by the few flickering lamps that hung from the brackets on the wall.

Grip tightening as if I might try to get away, he glanced over his shoulder at me. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”

The stairwell opened up to beams and scaffolds, moving gears and the tired sounds they made. We hit a magnificent landing en route toward the bell at the tower’s pinnacle, where the back end of the clock’s enormous hands ticked off the seconds in mocking. Counting down the end of innocence. I’d heard the vague rumors of the things that happened to girls in the bell tower. The utter depravity held mostly secret by its ancient walls.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, stalling at a window, through which a cloud of lightning gave an ominous flicker over the black sea below.

His firm hand gripped me possessively, and before I even realized he’d changed direction, he backed me into the wall. Capricious as the wind that rapped against the window, he fixed his attentions on me, the chilled stones at my back a reminder that there was no escaping him.

The gentle brush of his knuckles down my cheek belied the shadow of malice that slipped behind his otherwise cold, inscrutable eye. “Because I’m so unreasonably rapacious when it comes to you, Miss Ravenshaw, that not even a bolt of lightning should dare touch your skin without consequence.”

In that moment, the thunder seemed more distant, somehow, or perhaps it was the incessant thump of my heart drowning it out.

“You’re jealous of lightning?”

He leaned in closer, the delicious scent of bergamot and licorice as intoxicating as the warm absinthe still pulsing through my veins. His lips traced a featherlight path along my jaw. Teeth grazed my earlobe, breath hot against my neck, as he whispered, “I’m jealous of anything that occupies your mind so unremittingly when you’re with me.”

Eyes closed, I fought the shiver that rippled over me like a sweeping gale across a fragile sail. The wicked promise of a rough sea. It wasn’t until he pulled away that I opened my eyes to his and caught warning of the danger below the surface, the inevitable squall that would crash over me.

I wanted to drown in it.

At the light tug of my arm, a voice inside of me beseeched, Do not go into that abyss, but I ignored it for the curiosity that blazed over those thoughts like a wildfire, the relentless pull of the unknown.

Following after him somehow felt like venturing into the deepest, darkest waters I’d ever navigated. Terrifying and thrilling.

When we finally reached the bell of the tower, my heart kicked up to full-swing terror, as I stared out at the open sea with the angry gusts of wind whipping at my hair. Over the din of blowing wind and turbulent waves, the clank of the bell echoing through the belfry left an eerie and unsettling feeling in my stomach.

“I really …” My voice wouldn’t carry over the storm’s noise, and I gathered my hair to keep it from lashing my face. “I really think we should go down now!” Cold rain pelted my skin, leaving enough moisture for the frigid air to bite. Lightning struck the water, closer than before, and I backed myself to the wall behind me, eyeing the staircase that led back down. “I want to go back!”

Ignoring my pleas, he walked the perimeter of the belfry. Calmly. Casually. So absurdly at ease it made me wonder if he’d lost his mind. With his back to the sea, he stood before me and, one button at a time, began to remove his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

Every instinct inside of me urged me to run from the man and never look back. He’d clearly gone mental, and the longer I debated that thought, the closer the storm would get.

Go, Farryn! Run! The loon is undressing in a lightning storm at the top of the bell tower. Doesn’t get any crazier than that!

Yet, I couldn’t. Mentally unsound as he might’ve been, he compelled my curiosity like nothing else. Despite my better judgement. Despite the very real possibility that I could share the same fate as my mother.

Eyes squinting against the errant drops of rain, I watched him slide his shirt over his shoulders and toss it aside. A slicing sound cut through the air, and on reflex, I shielded my face from what I was certain would be a flash of lightning striking the bell. The cold drops of rain no longer stung my skin. I no longer felt the needling bite of cold air, and the sound of thunder seemed to have retreated out to sea.

I lowered my arms to find Jericho standing before me. At his back, an enormous set of black wings nearly stretched the width of the belfry. Trembling, I took in the impossibility of them. The likelihood that I had begun to hallucinate, because in my world, humans didn’t have wings. Only fictional men did. His skin bore the markings of what looked like silvery tribal tattoos over his arms and chest. I’d seen a hint of them beneath his robe a couple times, but had no idea there were so many. Their metallic surface gave off a slight glow in the surrounding darkness, and glimmered with what looked like electrical currents running across them.

The air fizzled inside my chest. For a moment, I stood gasping for a sip of oxygen, like a fish thrown from the sea. Fear and awe battled inside of me, as I took in the sight of him. Standing across from me, with the bolts of lightning at his back, the storm that still raged around us never once ruffling the feathers of his wings, he was sublime. Chaotic. Dissonance in the flesh. Both terrifying and incredible at the same time.

The single thought churning inside my head was where the hell he’d managed to hide those enormous things. The physics of it all seemed impossible.

It was impossible.

All of it.

Chest rising and falling with heavy breaths, he looked at me the same way I imagined a spider gazing upon a captured butterfly. Hungry and slightly amused. He stepped around the bell, his wings brushing over the surface with a sound that reminded me of steel raked across steel, or a blade unsheathed from a metal scabbard. An oddly pleasant, yet threatening noise that sent a tickle to my stomach.

“What are you?” I asked again, keeping tight to the wall as I backed myself around the other side of the bell, away from him.

“We discussed this.”

“I can’t …. This can’t be real. I’m dreaming. I must be.” Could’ve been the absinthe he’d told me was known to cause hallucinations.

“I could say the same. What are the odds that you would return to me? That you would find me here, in this hell.”

“Mister Van Croix …” Honestly, at that point, it felt weird calling him mister. Did winged creatures go by such formalities? “I am not who you think I am. I’ll admit, there are some really weird coincidences, but I am not Lustina.”

“You are. And you’re mine.” He stepped closer.

I backed up as far as I could without diving over the bannister. “You’ve brought others here, though. You’ve done … unspeakable things with them in this bell tower.”

“I have lived as a starving man in your absence. One who’s grown tired of the futility in searching for your beauty in others. They were never what I wanted. What I craved.”

I couldn’t deny his words sent a chill down my spine, I just didn’t know if it was fear, or arousal which incited it. Perhaps a mixture of both, because as messed up as it was? The wings, those tattoos, his eyepatch …. They turned me on in a way I’d have never confessed in church. Clearly, I had issues. “Have they … seen you like this? I mean, the other girls were okay with th-th-the wings, and all that?”

“Those with whom I’ve found mindless diversion have never seen my true nature. You are the only one.”

A flash of lightning struck his wings, and a scream ripped from my chest as the feathers sparked like a livewire in a storm.

Frozen in place, I watched in horror and waited for his body to seize and twitch, as I imagined a body to do when electrocuted.

Instead, as if undeterred, he continued to stalk toward me, his gaze even hungrier than before, if that were possible.

“That should’ve killed you just now.” I pointed a trembling finger toward the tiny bolts of electricity dancing over his wings.

“Your understanding of what should be doesn’t apply to this world, Farryn. Or me, for that matter.”

I couldn’t move. Stunned with shock, I stood motionless, a prisoner trapped inside my own body. Sparks still flickered over his wings where the electricity bounced over him as if seeking escape.

As he reached for me, I braced for the painful current to latch onto me. To burn me alive from the inside out. Wild energy coursed beneath my skin, vibrating my bones, but the sensation was far from painful. On the contrary, it was intense.

Overwhelming.

Arousing.

Eyelids heavy, I couldn’t help the smile on my face as every nerve in my body blossomed to life. The titillation prickled across my skin and up my thighs, where it culminated at a far too neglected spot, as if commanded there. Biting my lip, I let out a moan and brought my knees together as tightly as I could, a poor attempt to resist the tingling pleasure and the rush of heat that shot straight to my core.

All he’d done was gripped my arms and pulled me against him, yet I could hardly keep myself upright.

“You will give yourself to me, Farryn. And you will willingly watch me devour every inch of you like it’s my last fucking meal.”

“Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?” A stupid question, really, and I blamed the liquor. I knew exactly what he wanted.

“To keep you this time.” He lowered his face to my neck, forcing me to tip my head back.

I’d never felt so helpless in my whole life, and as he ran his lips over my skin, the urge to cry watered my eyes, the way his energy snaked through me, burrowing deep inside my bones. A bubbly champagne sensation rippled over my flesh everywhere his mouth touched, and I let out a whoosh of breath through my nose when he sucked the edge of my throat. It felt incredible. A strange and wonderful commotion that left me weak in the knees. I was nothing more than a ragdoll in his arms, one he could manipulate any way he wanted.

My mind fought to latch onto sanity, but too many signals fired off inside my body at once. Chaos. I wondered if that was how it felt in the thick of a lightning bolt.

“You belong to me. You always have.”

“I’m not a toy.” Oh, God, what a pathetic retort. I’m not a toy, I mentally mocked myself. Way to be tough, Farryn.

Meanwhile, my panties practically shook trying to hold back the deluge of arousal I supposedly wasn’t feeling. This wasn’t just a traitorous body situation, but a whole lot of messed up psychology I’d never wrap my head around.

“I shouldn’t want you this much.” One arm still wrapped around me, he reached for my bottom, grinding me against the impressive bulge still trapped in his pants. “To take a human woman this way, one still so full of life, it is forbidden. And I will never be redeemed. But I can’t walk away from you. Not now. Not ever.”

“And if I don’t want this?”

“Tell me you don’t.” He circled his hips in taunting and lifted my thigh, and the tickle from before quickly heightened to an agonizing need. One so strong, I shuddered in his arms. “Tell me to walk away, Farryn,” he whispered. “Tell me you don’t want me to grab you by the throat and fuck you against this wall right now.”

God help me.

As if the plug to my brain had been yanked free, I blanked to nothing but the visual he’d planted in my head. As if he’d somehow crawled inside my brain, knew my darkest fantasy and had figured out how to weaponize it against me.

I wanted to be taken.

Roughly. Passionately.

I’d yearned for it long before I understood why.

I wanted to be the object of his lust. Ravaged. I wanted to know the excitement and fear of having my clothes impatiently torn from my body, my overthinking arguments silenced by a hungry mouth. I wanted to put the control in someone else’s hands.

To feel the breath-hitching, thigh-trembling exhilaration of being pressed against a wall with a hand at my throat, to hear the shaky whispers in my ear of being fucked like an animal.

And somehow Van Croix knew this.

Fingers digging into my flesh, he moved against me in the distinct motion of sex, the waves of a calm sea rocking into my hips. The vibration heightened, pulling at my stomach muscles, and I wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders to keep upright.

“Tell me to stop,” he taunted.

I ground my hips into his crotch like a horny teenager desperate to finish. Needing release so badly, I clawed at his skin. “I can’t,” I whined pathetically. Ugh. So much for not giving in. “Please.” The wetness against my thigh marked the spot where my panties had rubbed across my skin, so damp I wondered if I’d peed myself, at first. Pulse after wickedly tormenting pulse curled inside my belly and shook the muscles in my legs. Had he brushed so much as the tip of his finger across my panties, I’d have probably combusted with all the pressure and heat building inside of me.

It was too much and not enough at the same time.

“What do you want. Tell me.” He licked my neck and bit the edge of my jaw. “I want to hear you say it.”

“You! I want you.”

“Only me.”

“Yes, only you.”

“I can’t tell you how much this pleases me.”? Releasing my thigh, he reached up under my dress and peeled my panties down, allowing me to step out of them. To my horror, he pressed the damp fabric to his face, breathing it in, and groaned. His expression held something feral and wild.? “I want all of you. Every drop,” he said, before gathering my arms together above my head.

Using my panties as a tie, he bound my wrists together, and dear God, it was the hottest, most indecent thing that’d ever happened to me. Over my head was a bracket, from which he removed the lantern hanging there, and in its place, he slung the knot of my binds. Balancing on tiptoes, I dared not to so much as breathe, for fear I’d lose my footing.

“Why the binds?” I managed to say, before the floor of the belfry slipped from beneath my toes.

“Because nothing thrills me more than seeing you strung up and at my mercy. And I’m surely not known to be merciful, my darling little supplicant.”

A rigid finger pushed up inside of me, and I sank against him. Another digit joined the first, pumping in and out on a wet sound. My body clenched around his fingers, giving him exactly what he wanted, as seen when he removed them and his smile lit with smug satisfaction at the sticky fluid glistening over his skin.

He licked away my arousal from his fingers, then carefully loosened the laces of my gown and pulled the fabric just enough to expose my breasts to him. A sound of satisfaction escaped him, his unpatched eye glimmering with appreciation as he reached out and took hold of the swollen, neglected flesh, massaging it in his big palms.

I moaned at the ache. How long I’d needed to be touched.

Flickering sparks lit up his wings again, as what must’ve been another bolt of lightning struck him. The vibration from before intensified, and when he put his mouth to my breast on a long, tormenting suck, I could feel the tiny quiver of electricity on his tongue. It rippled across my flesh and converged at the apex of my thighs. On reflex, I bucked forward and tipped my head back. A sound, a cross between ecstasy and hysterics, beat through my chest. Every nerve felt like a bouncing livewire, desperate to ground itself into something. Every touch magnified.

Intense.

“I’m going to enjoy fucking you, Miss Ravenshaw,” he rasped against me.

From his wings, he plucked a feather, and the white, electrical threads dancing across its surface told me it was still charged from the lightning of moments ago. A thrum of fear rose up inside me, and I lost my footing for a moment. A soft, vibrating tickle caressed my thighs, and I fought to catch my balance as a new surge of pleasure swelled inside of me.

“This current running through you? It magnifies your sense of touch. I could breathe on your skin, and you’d come as easily as if I’d played with your wet little clit.”

I let out a sharp exhale and a moan, my body swaying as I hung limp from the bracket. Weak with pleasure.

He kicked a crate propped against the wall closer to me, and hiked my thigh up on it. Fingers pressed against my flesh, he held me open. Exposed. Vulnerable. The anticipation twisted and coiled deep in my belly. “Things are about to get a little shaky,” he whispered in my ear, and the moment the feather hit my clit, sending a jagged pulse of electricity through me, I tipped my head back on a deep guttural scream.

Every muscle in my body trembled and shook, as the plumes of the feather skimmed over my sensitive flesh. I curled my fingers and let out a long, droning moan. It felt so good, it brought me to tears.

He dragged the feather over my hot, trembling thighs, sticky with my arousal, and my muscles pulled with tension as the tiny pulses danced over them. The light sting of the current, coupled to the soft sweep of the feather, had me writhing and breathless. As the incessant vibrations relentlessly tickled me to climax, I bucked and cried out, screwing my eyes shut to the jagged flash of light.

Not once.

Nor twice.

Three times, I hit the pinnacle of ecstasy, my head light and dizzy, and I screamed out, “Oh, God!”

Jericho chuckled darkly. “He could only dream of being buried between your thighs right now.”

The clink of a belt alerted his intent, and I looked down as he sprung himself free. Once again, I found myself questioning the laws of physics, as I took in the size of his erection that was undoubtedly not human. Electricity danced over the surface, the veins in his cock pulsing, as if excited. Hungry.

At that, he hiked both of my legs up and wrapped them around his waist, leaving me dangling from the bracket by my panties. Weak and exhausted, all I could do was let him maneuver me however he wanted. His plaything to do with as he wished.

With my sex positioned against his stomach, he grabbed my bottom, stirring my wetness over his skin, and his masculine sound of approval left me blushing.

Darkness settled over us, as his wings closed me in.

“You belong to me, Farryn. Should another man dare to lay so much as a finger on you, I will flay his hand and shine my boots with his skin.”

The sound of that should’ve disgusted me. Should’ve had me running from him and never looking back, but it didn’t. Because I didn’t grow up with anyone so intent on wanting me, or protecting me that way. I’d always taken care of myself, even while living with my father. I must’ve been sick for the way it turned me on. Besides, I knew in my heart, it’d never come to pass. There wouldn’t be another after Jericho. How could there be? In the span of one night, he’d ruined me for all men. Particularly the human variety. After all, what human male had wings that doubled as a thousand disposable vibrators?

He might as well have pulled out a contract for my soul at that point.

Stroking a hand down my hair, he tipped my head back, his gaze unyielding, the determination there inviolable. “Say it,” he growled.

“I belong to you.”

His jaw clenched, as he lowered me to his tip, the tremors across its head and down its shaft twitching my thighs. One slow thrust, and I arched my back on a moan, as my body invited in him inside with a slippery glide. Inch by inch, he rooted himself deep, and as I stretched around him, a whimper of panic escaped me.

Once fully seated, he stilled, resting his head against my shoulder, breathing. “You feel exactly as I dreamed you would.”

Arms wrapped tightly around me, he moved in a slow and languid pace, the wet slide making for a sloppy sound that only goaded my arousal, making me wetter with the incessant drive of his hips.

The vibrations pulsed inside of me with every upward thrust. The feeling of being wholly connected to him, so powerful and consuming, brought tears to my eyes. Something foreign and new rose up inside of me. Like barbs across my heart, it squeezed a slow, aching pump to my body. The first blooms following an endless winter. I closed my eyes to an unbidden visual.

The men in robes breaking in through the cottage door. The screams. A red-haired woman reaching out for me. “Lustina!” The men dragging her away. A crowd of people gathered, spitting on me and calling me names. The smell of burning flesh on the air. More screams. “Mother!”

The visions arrived fast. Too fast. Fear strangled my breath, and I gasped for air. “They burned her. Alive. In front of me.” Tears filled my eyes, my chest aching with the pain. “Oh, God, what is happening to me?”

“It’s all right.” Jericho kissed my cheek, still thrusting in and out of me. “All your memories are returning, darling. Don’t be afraid.”

A blue-eyed boy with black hair. Lying in a meadow with him. Legs wrapped around his body. Holding him. The fear of being caught. Love. So much love it swells in my chest. His scent. His hands. His whispers. “I love you, Lustina.”

My whole body shook beneath his, a cold sweat breaking over my already damp skin. “Oh, God. Oh, God, I remember everything! Jericho, I’m scared.”

“Shhh,” he said calmly. “Let the memories return to you, my love.”

The water. So cold. So quiet. The blood moon. Air waning. The silence.

Everything made sense. His obsession. His fears of me leaving. His love. “I understand.” Everything I’d believed shattered for the impossible reality that I’d been reborn.

More tears sprang to my eyes, and he gripped my throat, kissing me fiercely.?Passionately. Possessively. Tongues and teeth and heavy breaths that felt like a battle for the sublime. More passionately than I had ever been kissed before. He dragged his nose over my throat and bit down in the crook of my neck, as his fingers curled in my hair. A sharp sting faded into the gentle sweep of his tongue, and he held me tight against his body, thrusting into me with unbridled vigor.

God help me, I surrendered to it. I surrendered to him.

“Do not ever leave me again. I will not survive the loss of you twice.”

“I promise,” I whispered.

My body tightened and quivered, as the climax neared. Higher and higher I climbed, until at last, I broke. A flash of light rippled over his wings, and he threw his head back on a roar of ecstasy. The warmth that filled me spilled across the back of my thighs.

When he pulled out, I looked down to see the fluids dribbling down my thigh—white but speckled in what almost looked like thousands of microscopic diamonds.

Those sparkles of energy carried up inside of me, jolting me from the inside out, and I arched again, crying out, as another climax crashed over me.

A drunken intoxication claimed my muscles, while an overwhelming satisfaction settled deep into my bones. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

Jericho lifted me from the bracket, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging to him like a fragile, trembling bird.

“I was there. I remembered everything. Her. Us.”

He held me tight, stroking his hand down my hair, and whispered in my ear. “Now you know why I can never let you leave.”