Page 156 of Voidwalker
Honesty.
“You’re intoxicating,” she whispered. “You make me feel desperate, but not like that fleeing hare. Like I’m scenting fresh air. Like I have claws. Like I could topple head-first into the Void just to bask in the abyss. Every second is vicious, and soft, and I never want to be anything else.”
Fi wished she could bottle Antal’s reaction, measure out every minutia of stunned silence as he hung at the edge of her porch. She tipped the door open.
“Fair beast,” she said, “would you care to come in from the cold?”
Antal swept her inside like a gale. Darkness wrapped them, the only light a trickle of moonbeams and aurora through the windows. The ember glow of his eyes. Claws brushed her hair as he pulled her into him, an eager rise to her breath, a desperate hitch to his.
“You’re fire in my hands.” He kissed her. “Unyielding.” Another, teeth hungry on her lips, ozone sparking her tongue. “I can’t seem to get my fill of crashing against you, just to see how you’ll surprise me next. Yet that’s not when you’re most dangerous. When you soften for me, when you trust me here against you. I don’t feel like I have claws.”
Fi swallowed fire in her throat. “Claws aren’t such a bad thing. The way you use them.”
Void save her, maybe shewasthe witless maiden from a story, lured to the predator’s teeth not by moonspun dresses but velvet words.
But this felt different. In Antal’s arms, they were two hunters tossed into a cage, pacing the grounds, each testing the sharpness of the other’s fangs. Until they finally came together.
Antal pulled her hips to his, tail wrapping her calf in a possessive arc. “You have hunger in your eyes, mortal. What would you ask of me?”
Fi wanted to melt for him. The fight was a sliver more thrilling.
“A dangerous proposal,” she returned. “When I’ve just shared a cautionary tale about asking favors from daeyari?”
“Perhaps we can negotiate.”
“Is this a matter of negotiation?” She ran her hands up his chest, fingers carving canyons into soft fabric and hard muscle. “Or passion?”
“One can be a play on the other.” His breath brushed her ear, a nip of fangs against her chin. “I think you’ll find my request… attractive.”
“That being?”
“Stubborn woman. I want to know how loud I can make you scream.”
Oh. Was that all?
Each time he stole her breath was a defeat. Fi would take the loss a thousand times if it meant this fire through her veins, this snare of his mouth as he drew her into a fiercer kiss.
“You want to hear me scream?” she warred. “You’ll have to earn it.”
He hummed a sound of delight. Of anticipation. “You enjoy giving orders. Tell me what to do to you.”
Fi needed no pause to think. She’d weighed this moment a dozen times.
“Bite me.”
He hesitated. Delicious. Fi devoured the sweep of his eyes, Antal trying to read what she wanted. She’d never loved victory and defeat so much in equal measure.
“How?” he asked.
“Like you did before.”
He dipped his head, a questioning brush of teeth along her neck.
“Yes,” Fi rasped, heart hammering her throat. Pulse quick beneath his lips.
At the first press of fangs, she gasped. He moved too soft, caressing nips along her neck. Playing gentle? Fi was no fragile thing. She clawed fingers into his shirt, pulling herself into the heat of his mouth.
“You can do better than that,” she said. Shebegged.
