Page 100 of She Who Devours the Stars
She made a sound, half laugh, half snarl, and when she reached for me, the whole room spun. Gravity didn’t fail. It forgot which way to point. We toppled together into the center of the suite, tumbling through the low-drift bedding field I’d spent years engineering to be myth-resistant, which was hilarious, because it gave up the fight as soon as Fern’s mass hit it.
We bounced, hovered, lost all orientation but each other. She was heavier than she looked, or maybe I was just lighter than the history that bound us. Either way, it was a relief to let the air have us.
Clothes don’t mean much at our level of contact. You can’t undress a mythic without peeling the skin, too. But Fern’s shirt and mine both went up in a puff of static, seams unzipping themselves as our torsos collided. My war silk fused to her chest, burned away by a pressure differential I could taste in my teeth. Her hands tore at my back, but not to possess, just to find leverage, to keep from flying apart.
She kissed like a girl who didn’t trust her mouth, as if she opened too wide, something in her would slip out and never come back. I let her lead. She needed to. When her lips broke from mine, she didn’t hesitate. She bit hard enough to draw blood, and then tongued the wound closed in a single, perfect loop.
The pain wasn’t the point. The point was that she knew I’d take it. The point was that I needed to be marked.
Her hands landed on my hips, fingers splaying, the warmth of her palms outpacing the mythic energy still radiating off her skin. She pulled me in, then up, as if she wanted to fold me around her spine and wear me like a shroud. I let her. I always had.
Our legs tangled. I felt her knee slip between mine, and suddenly she was straddling my thigh, grinding with a need that didn’t belong to anyone else on the continent. If I’d been human, I might have died from the contact, but I wasn’t. I was Dyris fucking Vaelith, and I’d been peak human even before I became the Nullarch’s Sexretary.
She was trying so hard not to hurt me.
I wanted to hurt.
I leaned back, let the bedding field catch us, and pulled her down so her chest was flush to mine. Her breasts were smaller than you’d expect from the stories, but her heart was not. I felt it, pulse for pulse, right through the sweat and whatever remained of the shielded mesh.
She clawed at my sides. I laughed, and the vibration made her grind harder, frantic and wild. I arched, letting my ribs open up, offering the softest parts of me as a dare.
Her mouth found my throat. She sucked, then bit, and my vision dotted with black and white. I moaned, louder than I meant, but the suite was soundproof and the tower already on lockdown.
She worked her way down, nipping at my clavicle, my shoulder, the sweet spot just below my ear. I could feel her mythlight spike with each new piece of flesh, her hips bucking against my thigh, harder, harder, until I thought she might lose the thread and just devour me whole.
I let her.
When she came up for air, her face was flushed, her eyes wide and unguarded.
“You don’t orbit me,” she gasped, voice a rough hiss. “You anchor me. I hate it.”
I smiled, teeth showing, and wrapped both hands in her hair, yanking her head back so I could see the want in her eyes.
“Then come apart on me,” I said. “Make it matter.”
She did.
The world went white, then black, then all the colors at once. I felt the resonance fracture every light fixture in the room; heard the echo of our biosignatures slamming together as if the Accord itself had decided to mate us for science. In the floors below,sensors spiked, alarms pinged, and a tech assistant three decks down fell off her chair with a cry of pure, unearned pleasure.
It spread.
The mythic grid hummed, then overloaded. Satellites above the city flagged a spike in atmospheric heat, flagged the South Tower as a critical event zone. I laughed, and the laughter broke something in Fern, because she pushed me down, hard, and bit my shoulder so deep I felt the mythic pressure leak straight into my bones.
I grabbed her ass, pulled her closer, and rolled us so I was on top, pinning her with my thighs, my hands, my mouth. She didn’t resist. If anything, she opened up, legs spreading, back arching, her entire body a plea I’d waited my whole life to answer.
We kissed, and this time it was slow, deliberate. Every inch of her tasted like starlight and blood, like the aftermath of violence and the promise of forgiveness. She licked the salt from my skin, lapped at the sweat pooling in the hollow of my throat, and when I moaned again, she moaned back, as if we were the only two people left in the universe.
Maybe we were.
The room was gone. The city was gone. All that remained was the friction, the heat, the mythic pulse that made every nerve ending light up like a warning flare.
She bucked, and I let her buck. She shook, and I held her until the shaking stopped.
And when it was over, we hovered, breathless, tangled in a gravity that belonged to neither of us but demanded we stay.
I pressed my lips to her ear, my voice softer than I’d ever let it be.
“I’m not prey,” I whispered.
