Page List

Font Size:

I pulled away like he’d struck me.

He yanked me back toward him, his hand cradling my face. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

My lips met his jaw, tasting salt and blood on my tongue. He shuddered.

“Emotions are too high. I was so close to endangering you tonight, and that’s inexcusable.”

“Then we’ll be gentle,” I said. “I want it to bemyblood.”

Kylo groaned. In one swift movement he had me in his arms, my back against the wall. His breath was warm as he sucked at the skin over my collarbone. “Gods, angel,please. Did I not just say I was tormented?”

“I don’t recall.”

His laugh tickled my skin, leaving goosebumps in its wake. “How am I to be gentle with you when all I want to do is march you down to the Nighswander Estate by your collar—the prettypink one with a bow on it—and claim you as I brutally torture every born who watched you bleed?”

“Do you have enough limbs to do all of those things simultaneously?”

Shadows leaped from him, coiling around my wrists and pinning them to the wall above my head. I panted, burning with my own aliveness and desire to be as close to Kylo as possible.

“I guess we’ll soon find out,” he whispered in my ear.

He studied my eyes again, searching.

“I’m not a wounded baby bird,” I growled. “I want you. I belong toyou.”

He hardened beneath me, grinding against my sensitive core. Only the fabric of my panties and dress stood between us.

“I’ve missed when my wounded baby bird gets growly with me.”

I rolled my eyes, and Kylo retaliated with a kiss that shook the house’s foundation. Like a dam had broken, he consumed me, naked and bloody. My bindings fell away, and I trailed my hands down his chiseled form as Kylo sucked and teased my lips with his fangs. His tongue tasted all of me, body and soul.

It was as though we were trying to prove with our bodies that everything was settled and we were both fine. But no matter what I’d agreed to and how badly I wanted Kylo to forgive me and not be upset with me, I couldn’t shake the cascade of doubts rushing into the foreground.

I’d already told Aster I would return to him at the end of the week. How was I going to explain my sudden change of heart? How were we going to lure Juliette away now? Before she hurt anyone else? What about my own intuition, the vision that something we needed was inside Conrad’s study?

Kylo read my thoughts—the warring desires to please him and to be useful to the clan.

A feral noise escaped him as he pinned me harder against the wall. He pulled out his dagger, its energetic field radiating the energy of fresh kills. I could hear the sound of shadows feasting, born choking on blood, shouts that faded swiftly into silence.

Kylo sliced off my panties. The violence, the blood, the weapons, the looming threat of war—it was all a drug, a balm to ward against the crack in our foundation.

The fissure we both wanted to ignore.

He pushed me up higher so that my legs fell over his shoulders and his shadows held me in place. His lips skated across my core before he devoured that too. He cursed as I moaned and writhed against him.

He gripped my ass as he fed on my flesh, sucking, pulsing, easily bringing me to the brink of release with his mouth alone.

He plunged two fingers inside me. “So wet and needy for me, aren’t you, angel?”

“Yes, Kylo.”

He angled to hit the spot that had me unraveling against him.

“May I please come?”

Kylo kissed my bud. “Yes.”

I came hard, riding against his ridiculously skilled tongue, legs trembling.