Chapter 59

My body is on fire and I feel his heated presence behind me.

The scent of amber and sandalwood wafts to my nose and I rake in a greedy inhale as my eyes flutter open, slowly adjusting to the darkness of our bedroom. I’m lying on my side on our bed, my skin sensitive and tingling as he presses up against me.

Everything feels taut. Achy. My breasts swollen and my pussy throbbing.

He rains hot kisses on my neck, his teeth nipping at the sensitive flesh as his fingers circle my swollen clit before dipping into my wet pussy. I whimper, my body coming alive for him.

“My little muse, I’ve missed this,” he rasps. He grinds his hard body behind me, his thick cock thrusting against the cleft of my ass. “Fuck, I’ve missed this. Every night when we were apart, I’d wish I were by your side. Touching you. Kissing you. Making love to you.”

“Maxwell,” I moan, arching against him, suddenly realizing I’m already naked. He must’ve taken off my nightgown during the night.

The thought that he’s so desperate for me has wetness seeping out of my core.

“Yes, my love.” He grabs my breasts, kneading the soft mounds, and I whimper. “Fuck, I love your body.”

“But your wounds. Are you sure?”

He has only been home for a few days, and while the doctor has given him the all clear, I’ve been hesitant, afraid I’ll somehow hurt him. The image of him bleeding in my arms is still traumatizing.

“Yes, I’m sure. I’ll to go crazy if I wait any longer. ”

Growling, he bites my neck, his fingers plucking my nipples, tugging the distended ends before flicking the tips.

Sharp pleasure shoots to my clit and I let out a lusty moan.

“So sensitive for me.” He moves his hand up my body and slides a finger into my mouth.

I swirl my tongue around it before biting the tip, my other hand reaching between us to grip his cock, and he hisses. He’s so hot and hard in my hands. My core clenches, needing him inside me. I pump his shaft, my thumb rubbing over the slit, and he trembles, his hips snapping into my body.

“Fuck, oh shit,” he groans, his breathing loud. “Belle, I’m feral for you.”

He flips me over, so I’m flat on my back. My fingers trail greedily over his body, feeling every pulse of his corded muscles, every ridge of his scars decorating his body like the most beautiful art.

His eyes glint in the tiniest sliver of moonlight shining in between the gap of the curtains. His gaze is smoldering, intense. Dark orbs of fire.

Maxwell hovers above me, his hard cock notched between my legs, grinding tortuously against my clit with each pass. I thrash underneath him, needing more connection, needing him inside me, needing to feel him come apart in my arms.

I almost lost him. Forever.

The thought slips in as desperation floods my insides. I dig my nails into his back and he growls.

“Little muse.” His voice is urgent, like he senses my changing mood.

“I need you. Inside me. Around me.” The words tumble out on choked gasps.

“Always.” A vow. A tremor in his voice.

With a deep stroke, he thrusts his hard cock into the hilt and I scream in pleasure.

Maxwell slams his lips on mine as he twines our fingers together, pinning my hands above my head. Our hearts surrender to each other as our bodies do the same. We move our mouths in unison, tongues tangling, twisting in desperation, two souls lost in the arid desert, finally finding an oasis with life-sustaining water.

My senses are overloaded with him. His touch. His scent. His taste.

More. I need more.

I grip his fingers tightly as I writhe underneath him, meeting him stroke for stroke, yielding yet fighting back—our bodies dueling in a transcendent dance.

Maxwell grunts as he hammers inside me, like he can’t get close enough. The slapping sounds of our bodies coming together echo in the room.

“Yes. More. Please. I need you. I need everything,” I moan and bite his lip, needing to mark him as mine somehow.

“Belle,” he hisses, his movements quickening. “You’re my everything.”

His cock burrows deep, far deeper than ever before, and I feel myself blooming underneath him, my heart, my body opening for him, my soulmate.

My nerve endings spark, electricity coursing through my body, gathering between my legs, sharpening to an unbearable point. I arch my body, clamping my legs tightly around his back, moving underneath him to the melody of us coming together.

“Come for me, Belle. Let me feel you strangle everything out of me,” he growls, his breathing loud against my ear.

The sparks alight into fireworks and I tremble beneath him, my body hovering on the brink of nirvana.

“Let me come so deep inside you, you’ll always have a part of me with you. Forever.”

His words send me into a tailspin. The thought of him melding himself with me so we’ll never part. The pleasure bursts and sweeps through my body.

“Maxwell!” I scream, splintering into a thousand pieces.

He swallows my cries with his lips, our kisses fevered, desperate, our bodies merging. Over and over again .

“Belle,” he grunts. His movements turn stilted, his hands gripping mine so tightly, like he’s afraid I’ll let go.

Never.

“I love you always,” he rasps and I feel him swell and lengthen. “Fuck. Always.”

My pussy pulses again, a fresh wave of sparks gathering where we’re joined. My eyes roll back from the new onslaught of pleasure, the intense connection overwhelming.

“I’m yours,” I cry as another orgasm crests inside me.

“Mine. Fuck yes. And I’m yours.” He lets out a guttural roar, and I feel the streams of his cum bathing my insides, the pleasure blinding.

Our bodies are slick with sweat, our labored breathing loud in the dark room and minutes pass by before we slowly come down from our high.

He braces himself over me, his cock still semi-hard inside my pussy. Gently, he brushes my damp hair away from my face, his tenderness almost making me cry.

“My Belle,” he whispers and rests his forehead on mine, just like all the times he has done in the past, like my mere presence soothes him.

My heart flutters and pulses and I feel the answering call of his heart nestled inside his chest. This soulful, deep connection—something I can’t begin to explain—makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Happy that I’ve found it. Scared that I’ll lose it.

“I’ll always be with you,” he says, like he can read my mind.

My lips wobble and I nod, the movement so small I’m afraid he’ll miss it. But of course he doesn’t.

“Always. After all, I’ve been waiting for you… You’re my missing piece,” he murmurs and presses another gentle kiss on my lips.

After cleaning us up, he curls me into his arms and we listen to the gentle hooting of owls and the familiar howling of the wind outside. But it’s comforting now. No longer scary.

He chuckles under his breath.

“What?”

“You make me behave like a caveman sometimes.” His breath tickles my ear. “I think we might’ve created a baby just now, don’t you think?”

The thought of me swollen with his child makes me smile—any child will be lucky to have him as a dad. But what if I can’t—

“Shhh… Quiet those noises in your head. It’ll happen one way or another. We’ll be great parents, as long as that’s something you still want to do.”

The ache subsides as I burrow myself into his chest. “You’re so good to me.”

“What? I’m no longer Mr. Bad Influence?”

I laugh. “My soulmate. That’s who you are.”

He sobers, and I can feel his heated gaze on me.

“My soulmate,” he repeats, “and you’re perfect, your beautiful pieces, your ragged edges, all fitting next to mine, just the way it’s meant to be.”

I close my eyes and relish the strong thumping of his heartbeat against my ear.

“I dreamed about you when I was in a coma.” I hear the rumble of his voice from his chest. “I was chasing you in the rose garden, but you were always out of reach and when I finally caught up to you, you were broken in my arms and I was devastated.”

He sighs. “It was strange. The dreams felt so real. Like memories. Like I’d lost you before. But that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never seen you in the rose garden before.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rise. His dreams are echoing visions of mine.

He continues, “The dreams would repeat and each time I’d grow more desperate, needing to save you. And that wasn’t all… I’d been having similar dreams most of my life. Always a faceless woman in the rose garden. But now, I can finally make out her features.”

He turns to me and whispers, “She’s you. Your face. Your smile. I’d dream of you painting under the night skies, my arms around your waist. You’d tell me you wanted to go to Venice to paint the canals. We’d be dancing, kissing. It felt so real.”

My heart thuds wildly in my chest. How can this be? How are we dreaming the same things?

“I had dreams about you too.” I swallow the lump in my throat and tell him about the ones I’ve had—him in the rose garden sobbing, blood spreading on his chest, visions of us waltzing in the gardens. I tell him about the letter I dreamed Silas wrote to a woman he loved—how I knew Silas had dimples on his face, just like Maxwell.

“Then there was the locket. When I saw it on the display, it was closed. But I knew what was inside. Maxwell, I-I don’t understand how I could’ve known.”

His body stills, his muscles coiling in tension as he listens to the strange stories, things that sound ridiculous and fantastical to my mind even as I say the words aloud.

But they feel like the truth, not figments of my imagination.

How can that be?

“I’ve always thought my dreams of you are vivid because I have the overactive imagination of an artist.” He rakes in a sharp inhale. “But what if it isn’t? ”

“What do you mean?” It can’t be…what he’s implying. My mind spins to the stories I’ve read as a child—stories about reincarnation and ghosts, souls finding each other life after life.

I think back to what Mora told me in the basement kitchen when I asked her if she believed in the curse. She said there were many things science couldn’t explain. I brushed her off then, but now…now I’m not so sure.

“Have you heard of the story of Meng Po ?” I ask Maxwell, referring to a Chinese legend I read about when I was younger—all part of the Saturday Chinese school curriculum Mom signed me up for. She said it was a way for me to know my heritage.

Maxwell shakes his head .

“Meng Po is a goddess who serves a special soup in diyu , the realm of the dead, to the souls who are ready to be reincarnated. The soup wipes the memory of those who drink it, so they’ll be cleansed of the burdens of their past lives before they’re reborn.”

I let out a shaky breath, feeling ridiculous for telling this story and yet, there aren’t any other explanations that make sense either. “According to a variation of the legend, Meng Po was actually Lady Meng Jiang, who found herself so overcome with grief from the death of her husband, she couldn’t reincarnate. So, she dedicated herself to creating this potion that’d save others from suffering the same fate. It was said some souls evaded the soup or didn’t drink enough, and they’d go into their next lives with their memories of the past partially intact.”

Maxwell stays silent, but I hear his breath hitching.

“It’s a legend, of course. It has to be fake, right? I don’t know why I just thought of it—”

“My family believed in a curse for generations. Of course, it turned out Morris was behind this crap all along. But still, after everything that happened, I find myself open to ideas that we once thought were impossible.”

Something niggles in the back of my mind. I bolt up and turn to him. “Maxwell, but what about the branch? Morris’s journals mentioned nothing about him engineering that. And the other deaths in your family before your grandmother?” I can’t believe I’m even suggesting this since I was the one who kept telling him in the past that the curse wasn’t real.

But what if?

He freezes, and I feel the tension mounting in his muscles. My heart races inside me and I ask, “Don’t you feel like there’s a piece of a riddle we’re missing? An answer that has been evading us this whole time?”

I think about the missing journal hidden in the rooftop garden, the one I haven’t shown him yet. The strong feeling of home whenever I’m in his presence .

Maxwell blows out a ragged breath. “Shit. I never thought of that. I was just so relieved when I learned the deaths were from foul play, because that meant I could be with you.”

I open my mouth to speak. “Maxwell, we can still—”

“Shh,” he holds his hand up, “Let me finish.” He cups my face and looks me in the eye, his gaze intense. “I promise you, I won’t run away this time. We’ll face our future together. We’ll find the damn answers together. If there is a curse, we will break it together.”