Page 15 of Solstice

“Is that what you think this is?” Ivy finally asked.“Reveling?”

“I enjoy you.” I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her closer so our soapy skin touched everywhere from our chests to our pelvises. “You’re worried about what happens when this is over, but it’s never over, X. Not between you and me.”

She tried to move away and pull up her mask, but I wouldn’t let her. I twisted her back around and forced her chin up, so she had to look me in the eye. She couldn’t run from me anymore; I caught her fair and square.

“We were in this together when we were kids,” I continued. “We’re in this together now. We’ll be in this together when we find that fairy bitch and make her take back her gift.”

Ivy stared at me with her incinerating gaze, perhaps trying to figure out if I was sincere, so I opened my mind to her, letting her in through our touch.

I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. I couldn’t explain how I knew; I just did. Call it a punch to the gut. A throb in my heart. The damn near certainty that, if not for her, I’d be an insufferable, lonely prick. Ivy squeezed her eyes closed and tears streamed over her cheeks, but I cupped her jaw and wiped them away with my thumbs.

I kissed her, brushing my mouth against hers, tracing the bite mark from earlier with my tongue.She sighed and wrapped her hands around my wrists but didn’t agree, at least not verbally. I felt it buried in the deepest parts of her mind, even if she didn’t want me to see it. Ivy felt the same; she just couldn’t admit it yet.

That’s fine,the monster inside my head whispered.We’ve got a long time to convince her.

4

Ivy

For forty-eight hours, Lex and I dissolved into wicked debauchery. He wanted to hold me down and remind me who I belonged to, who I hadalwaysbelonged to, and Lord help me, I couldn’t find it in me to stop him.

Lex had a way of being infuriatingly right about everything.

I’d wanted the fight. He understood this side of me like no one else could. With Carter, there was no competition. He liked to submit to me as much as I liked to submit to him. I was the more dominant one with Miri, which suited both of us. But Lex was the only person in the world I could loseto, Ilikedto lose to—only in private. To the outside world, we had agreed it was business as usual. I had a reputation to uphold, after all. Our two days alone passed far too quickly, and Lex had a lot of time to make up for.

“I caught you,” Lex hissed, circling the table.

He did.

My heart raced, and my skin tingled where the rope dug into my wrists and ankles.

“I told you if I caught you, I’d make you pay.”

He did that, too.

“And now you’re blindfolded and tied to my dining room table with a gag in your mouth and a plug in your ass.”

Yep. Sure am.

I let out a pretend groan of frustration, my muscles clenching around the metal in my butt.

He tsked. “You should have run faster.”

Huffing out a sigh, I ground my teeth deeper into the gag. If I could see him, I’d shoot daggers out of my eyes. But no, the first thing he’d done after catching me in the woods was blindfold me. After he’d secured my hands and feet, he made me admit he’d won and slung me over his shoulders like a deer, carrying me back inside.

Now I was strung up wearing only a thong and restrained on a table in the kitchen. Deprived of most of my other senses, my hearing had elevated to painful levels, and I had become aware of every inch of exposed skin.

“Say mercy?”He clenched his hand around my thigh, slowly dragging it higher to my throbbing, wet cunt. I loved this part of our play the most: how often he checked in on me, how often he leaped into my mind to make sure I was still into whatever mayhem he’d unleashed.

“Fuck off, Lucifer.”

He laughed a sick, demented noise that had driven me to fury my whole life, but tires crunching on the snow in the driveway made both of us snap to attention.

“Who’s that?”

He stepped away from me, and our connection broke.

“Stay here,” he said. Then his footsteps disappeared toward the front of the house.

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