Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
He pulls back to look at me.
His eyes are fully black again.
The iris gone, swallowed, no center to them anymore, just the wet, lightless black of deep water with no sun to give it a color, and he doesn’t blink it away this time.
I look at him. He looks back.
It’s like staring into a cosmic abyss, into an eldritch void, and the vertigo is real. I feel like at any moment I’ll tip over and fall into them forever and ever.
“There’s my girl,” he murmurs softly, that low voice that sinks somewhere deep in my chest. The voice pulls me back, gives me my balance even as I lie here on this bed.
Then he pushes into me. Slow, slower than he ever has, one long inevitable slide that doesn’t stop until he’s to the hilt, and the angle’s different, deeper, like he’s reached a place in me that’s been waiting for him, and the cold of him is inside my body now making a home.
He doesn’t move. He stays in me with his forehead to mine, and his hand at the side of my face, and his black eyes on me, breathing against my mouth, not moving for a long, long moment.
Then he fucks me. With deliberation and control. Like he’s decided to be inside me for the next hour, the rhythm steady and deep, the angle finding the place that undoes the rest of me that I thought just came undone, his thumb at my temple and a reverence on his face I haven’t seen him give me before, like a man on his knees at an altar.
He doesn’t say mine again. He doesn’t say yours. He says foxglove, love, Iris, low and dragged, again, and again, as if reciting a prayer he’s kept to himself for centuries.
His hand moves from my face to my shoulder and grips hard, and at the join of my shoulder and my neck I feel a point that isn’t the pad of a thumb.
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.