Page 30 of Bloody Bargain
“If it works,” I started again, shoring up my courage, “I’ll owe you, D’abel.”
“The sort of debt your servant might collect on at any time?”
My stomach tightened with equal parts warning and anticipation.
“I suppose?”
D’abel slid his clawed fingers into my hair, cupping both sides of my neck and holding me in place. He pressed his mouth to mine in a swift kiss, piercing my lip with one of his fangs. I hissed, pulling back, but his hands held my face in immovable brackets as he sucked the drop of blood away with an arrogant hum.
“Then I will collect on it now and hope thatmyn chalisfeels generous after her tests.”
He gave me a bright-eyed grin, licking his upper lip with his split tongue suggestively.
“Fat chance,” I blurted, so far out of my depth that the weight of my ignorance was too heavy to tread water. This was the same dying creature I saved two days ago?
D’abel’s chuckle smoldered in his throat. “Fat chance sounds like the odds are in my favor. Rest, mine Tessa. I will hunt for myself while you dream of me.”
My b’adruokh slipped out the backdoor and into the heathlands while I clutched my proverbial pearls and vowed never to owe him anything ever again.
11
She was much lovelier when she slept.
Mine Tessa was a soft creature beneath the barbs that stung so deliciously. Her lashes brushed cheeks that had seen too little sun, sunken and exhausted long before we met. I searched for evidence of my blood in her, but a single drop after the skirmish in the heathlands would not be enough to address her pains. It was, however, a small victory that she took it at all. The pressure of her lips on my finger still haunted me.
I stood above her bed, content to watch her sleep since I needed very little of it and she needed it very much. Many of our hours would be like this. My tail wrapped around her ankle in the warmth of the sheets. My fingers stroking her curls on the pillow.
I brushed Tessa’s shoulder with my claws and she shivered, burrowing her face deeper into the goose down. My claws remained on her skin until she settled, electrified by my oath of fealty.
No… Marriage.
She was right that I would live and die by her will. But I wanted her in return.
This human that had taken up the duties of a b’adruokh on Earth when none of us were left to defend it and who ran towards theaufwhen they should instinctively repulse her. She’d thrown herself body and soul into a darkness that could swallow her in a single gulp, hoping to claim… Vengeance? Glory?
I grinned around my fangs, tasting the air. Mine Tessa had a spirit full of spite. The trappings of glory wouldn’t impress her in the slightest. She would roll her eyes at my adornments if ever I was strong enough to manifest them again. Vengeance, too, would have turned mine Tessa into a ballista bolt aimed directly at the object of her hatred. She would cut a straight path towards her goal and nothing would stand in her way.
Instead… she wandered.
Perhaps her goal was simple destruction. A bear tearing flesh to vent the fires of her soul.
The thought gave my spirit wings. Were b’adruokh not also wanderers that reaped deviantauffrom this world? Whether she accepted it or not, our bond had been inevitable since the moment she brandished her iron blade. Whatever compelled her to this life, my oath offrijazhad been woven into her soul since the day of her birth.
I coiled my tail higher up her calf, the tip tickling the back of her knee. My brother had always called me tempestuous, and no anguish could cure me of that. I was impatient formyn chalisto turn to me.
And she wassearingto the touch. Curled in her nest of bedding, she radiated a warmth I hadn’t felt in centuries. The weight of limbs and the thick cushion of flesh beneath my palms. Burying myself in the body of another, losing my senses to the slippery heat of a being with open legs and moans that made my teeth itch. The temptation was too much to deny as my tail cushioned itself between mine Tessa’s thighs. My pupils dilated with a sigh and my scales swelled as if sinking into a hot spring after years of cold mud and wind.
I did not know that humans would be such embers until my return to the yellow suite, and now…
Perhaps little touches would soothe her dreams. Condition her to me.
I smirked bitterly, leaning on the headboard with one taut arm. It did not take millennia of life to know I was fooling myself. If I touched her while she slept, it was because she would not allow me otherwise. Such a violation was beneath me before my capture, but deprivation did things to a man, and I was not a god, as Gamil so adamantly reminded me.
I loomed over mine Tessa’s neck with a calculative rattle in my lungs, opening the hinges of my jaw so that my tongue tasted the air behind the shell of her ear. She stretched her neck with a sigh and I licked her earlobe, catching it in the split of my tongue with a teasing squeeze. Her hips shifted, her thighs pressed harder on my tail, and I leaned my ters into the edge of the bed, relishing the pressure on my groin as it swelled, the closeness, the way Tessa consumed my senses.
“No,” she mumbled in her sleep, a stitch in her brow. I pulled back, testing the corner of her jaw with my tongue. Even as she clenched her thighs around my tail in pleasurable little stretches, her dreams would deny me.
“As you will it,” I hissed lovingly to her in a deep rumble that prickled the hair on the back of her neck. I would take all of Tessa’s barbs and sharp edges. They were just as lovely as when she was soft.
