Page 53 of Alien God

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Torrance

When the door opened again, I assumed it would be Aiko. She’d been with me the entire day so far, but a few minutes ago Shoshen had come, speaking quickly, and they’d gone away together. I’d taken that moment alone to finally change back into my still-damp clothing. My bra was still pretty wet, though, so I just wore trousers, panties, and my T-shirt. When the door opened once again I turned to face it, smiling, expecting to find the tall fox woman I’d actually grown to like despite the circumstances.

But it wasn’t Aiko.

It was Asha Wylfrael.

He entered the room like a storm in the shape of a man. Crashing dark clouds and searing lightning. Something’s different, I realized, panicking, stumbling backwards and away from him. He was a brutal male at the best of times, but this... this was different. Something had happened while he was gone, I was sure of it. Something that had infuriated him even more than my presence had.

“What’s wrong? What is it?” I asked shakily as he crossed the room to me in lunging, ground-swallowing strides. “Don’t come near me!”

He didn’t answer, but his grim mouth tightened, his eyes on mine, almost as if he’d understood what I’d said. But if somehow that was true, he certainly didn’t listen to me, because he just kept on advancing, relentless. Heart in my throat, I moved until my back hit the wall. Fuck! Trapped. I plastered my palms to the crystal, as if I could feel my way along to some escape. My eyes sought the door on the other side of the room, but my view of it was immediately blocked by Asha Wylfrael’s bulk.

“Don’t-” A gasp strangled my words as he seized me. He caged me in, one hand at my jaw, and in a rush of fear that he would strangle me, I shouted and struggled. He responded to that with a grunt and a shift of his position, one of his hard thighs pressing between my legs. The sudden grind of his leather-clad muscles against my clit made me jerk.

For some reason, he was only using one hand to hold me. A quick glance down told me he held something – a bag of some sort I hadn’t noticed before – in his other. Though he certainly could strangle me with only one massive hand, it now seemed that wasn’t his goal. Instead, he turned my head roughly to the side. His grip was like iron, and I forced myself to be still, scared my jaw – or my neck – might snap if I tried to wrench away from his hand. He muttered quietly, sounding immensely irritated, then did something that shocked me to my very core and made the place his thigh pressed between my legs pulse shamefully.

He fucking blew on me.

His breath cascaded along the side of my face, rustling strands of hair away from my left ear. It was like an electric shock. The hot whisper of sensation twanged through my nerve endings like licking fire, making me tremble and twitch.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. He replied instantly, mimicking the flow of a normal conversation, once again giving me the jarring sensation that he’d understood what I’d said.

His free hand rustled, doing something with the bag. A glimmer of something rainbow-coloured, flimsy like lace, fluttered in the corner of my eye.

And then my ear was on fucking fire.

This was different from the hateful, pleasurable fire of his breath on my skin. This felt like actual fire. I cried out at the shocking pain of it, my entire body going rigid. Behind the burn there was sound, too, buzzing rising like my head had been filled with hornets.

What had before been a tremble became a vicious, quaking tremor. Every muscle shook so violently I distantly wondered if I was about to have a seizure. The pressure at my jaw eased, but I barely noticed it above the agony in my ear. My hands flew upward. I wanted to rip my own fucking ear off, but Asha Wylfrael was in the way. His head was bent, his mouth against the burning place, his lips moving rapidly. So, I scratched and clawed at him instead, all thought gone from my head, reacting on pure instinct to the pain. He didn’t move. Didn’t react to me clawing at him like a feral animal. Didn’t even pull back when I grasped a chunk of white hair that had fallen loose and pulled as hard as I could.

The burning began to fade so slowly I almost didn’t notice it. The buzzing died down, too, and through that buzzing came words.

Asha Wylfrael’s words.

Words I could fucking understand.

“It won’t last long. Just hold on. Blast, your kind must be extra sensitive. It will ease, Torrance. It will ease.”

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