Page 88 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

“Tonight, call me Lady Aventine.”

I felt what these words did to him. I felt the last of his restraint slipping. “Lady Aventine,” he whispered as he began to move in earnest. My vision blurred, the cohesion between thought and stimulation tilting. Each hard thrust was like a promise.Lady Aventine. Lady Aventine.

His dark eyes burned suns in my heart. I was filled with light and warmth and pleasure. And in that moment, I knew I would never run away from him again. That for the rest of my life, I would only ever runtohim.

It was less of a release than an eruptive second of connection, for it happened at the exact same moment, at the exact same outcry and breath and chant of each other’s names. For a while Ionly soared, luxuriating in the warm safety of his arms, the sweet pressure of our entangled limbs, until I found my voice again, “Hector?”

He unburied his face from the crook of my neck and gazed down at me in an amorous, acquiescent way. “Yes?”

I tried shifting beneath him, but he was as immovable as a mountain. And still inside me. Still wanting me. “You’re hard.”

“I’m not done with you,” he said, his lips rediscovering the path from my earlobe to my clavicle. “Far from it.”

My body felt tender, rose-petal thin. Still, I arched into his mouth. “But didn’t you just… finish?”

His fangs dragged over my throat as if to remind me that he was no ordinary man. “I know no end to desiring you, Dorothea,” he said, and want rose in my blood once more. “But if you wish me to stop—”

“I said no such thing,” I protested, feeling myself clench around him, pulling him deeper.

In a flash of movement, he flipped me onto my stomach. I gasped into the pillow as he lowered his body to mine. The pressure of his chest against my back was the most wonderful weight I’d felt in my life. I never wanted to be relieved by it.

Slowly, he brushed the mass of my curls to the side, then guided my arms up, letting them stretch over my head and under the pillows until my fingers touched the intricate carvings of the headboard. “Hold on to this,” he hummed, dragging tingles along my spine, first with his fingers, then with his lips. I heard his breath turn labored as his mouth found the nape of my neck, his kisses growing desperate.

I know no end to desiring you, Dorothea.He’d ruined me with these words. Now, all I could think about was the enormity of his desire. How much I wanted to explore it. How much I wanted to challenge it.

“Do you want to bite me?” I asked.

A rough sound rumbled deep in his throat. I felt his fangs drawing nearer. “Do youwantme to bite you?”

I recalled what it’d felt like to have that single drop of venom in my body. How it had trickled through my veins and grown into an ocean of the most ineffable euphoria. I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to have both him and his venom inside me at the same time.

“Will you draw blood?” I asked.

Hector shifted his weight so we could look at each other. “I will never drink from you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want you to always know that I love you for you and not your blood.”

We were still for a moment, basking in that living silence. I wondered if in his mind he could only see me now, the way I could only see him.

“You know I love you too, right?” I said.

I heard the smile in his voice before his lips formed it. “I know. But it’s nice to hear it every now and then.”

He slipped over me again, parting my thighs with his knees before angling his hips in a way that allowed me to feel the full weight of his hardness as it slipped back inside me.

My breath split into a moan, my fingers curling into the carvings of the headboard. He kept me pinned under him for a torturously long moment without doing anything at all but feeling me feel him. “I will ask you again,” he rasped. His hand threaded through my hair and pulled back my head, making me moan from the sudden shock of pleasure. “Do you want me to bite you?”

“Yes,” I relented. “Please. Yes.”

I had the urge to bury my face in the pillows, to hide the vastness of my desire from him, but his fingers were firm on the underside of my jaw. He bent me further back until my neck wascompletely open to him. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “Let go. I got you.”

Thrill and a comfortable sense of surrender buzzed through me. I felt safe and reassured as his mouth clamped down on that tenderest spot. The prickle of his fangs was swift, but the influence of his venom was swifter, sparkling like magic in my blood.

I could only recall one other moment of my life in which I’d felt such effortless, wondrous abandon. I was twelve years old and lost in an enchanted forest, but I was not afraid, for a girl lost in the woods was a feral, fearsome creature. I wandered around for a while until I stumbled upon a shrub of red roses. How magnificent they were in size and color amid the dark witchery of the changed autumn trees. I could not resist them. I bent over the shrub and tried to pluck one out only for the thorns to clutch my cloak and sting my unprotected hands. I was trapped and started to panic until a boy appeared—pale, strange, pretty as a star. He grumbled something about my carelessness, but I did not listen. Above, the clouds released the sun, and the forest was bathed in the most ethereal yellow light. Everything sparkled. Everything opened. My heart was filled with uncanny joy for how beautiful the world was, how simple and magical and unexpected.

Only the sun had ever come this close to bringing me such bliss. Only the sun.

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