Page 47 of Wicked Bonds
I’ve fed from hundreds of dreamers over the years.
Rose’s energy doesn’t just feed me. Her magic is so tightly wound with her sexuality that drawing one means dealing with both. It’s like trying to drain a lake through a straw. Every pull threatens to overwhelm my carefully maintained control, to smash the defenses between feeder and food.
I deepen the feeding, pulling harder as I drive into her harder with my hand, my lips around her clit as my tongue works it. Her back arches off the dream bed, her hands clutching at the silky sheets. The energy pouring off her is almost too much, it burns through me like holy water. But the pain is exquisite, almost bordering on transcendent.
This is what addiction feels like, I realize. This is how mortals destroy themselves chasing the next high, the next hit, the next moment of feeling truly alive. Because Rose’s energy doesn’t just fill the hungry void inside me, it makes me feel things I thought I’d burned out of myself centuries ago.
“Please,” she gasps, and she’s close now, so close that the entire dreamscape shimmers with the force of her approaching climax.
I don’t lift my head. I speak to her from my mind to hers. “You’re mine, Rose. In every dream, in every waking moment, you’re mine.”
She shatters, soaking my hand, shaking and sobbing.
Her energy doesn’t just pour into me, it erupts like a volcano.
And fuck, it feels incredible.
Every nerve ending in both my dream form and my physical body fires at once. Back in the chair, my actual body convulses, hands gripping the armrests hard enough to leave gouges in the wood.
I take, and it’s too much, and not enough. It could never be enough.
Stop, I tell myself.
I pull back off her clit, lick her through the aftershocks while I shut the feed down to a thin trickle. My fingers stay inside her, easing, coaxing. She is still shivering. “Good girl,” I whisper against her belly. “So good.”
That’s when I feel it.
It’s not supposed to happen. Feeding is meant to be one-directional, me taking from them, nothing flowing back. But as I watch, something solidifies, like a cord in the space between dream and waking.
A connection. An actual fucking connection.
I’ve heard of this happening, in the old stories. An incubus who feeds too deeply, takes too much, and accidentally creates a bond with their prey. It’s considered a weakness, a failure of control. The kind of thing that gets you killed in my world, because connections can be exploited, used against you. The only way to fix it is to kill it.
But looking at Rose, still glowing with the blissful after effects of her climax, I can’t bring myself to sever it. I don’twantto sever it.
Instead, I withdraw carefully, gently, easing out of her consciousness like pulling off a bandage slowly to minimize the pain. The dreamscape begins to fade around me.
When I open my eyes, I’m back in her room, in the chair, my body still buzzing with the aftermath of the feeding. Rose is still in her bed, but she’s moving now, soft sounds escaping her lipsas her body rides out the physical manifestation of her dream climax as she comes down from the orgasm she just experienced. The sheet has slipped further, and I can see the way her panties are soaked.
She’s incredible.
I should leave. The feeding is complete, more than complete. I’ve taken enough energy to last me weeks, maybe months if I’m careful. The right thing to do would be to slip out as quietly as I came in, leave her to wake naturally, pretend none of this happened.
But then I sense him. Lucien. Three doors down and closing in, his vampire senses probably picking up on Rose’s release, the smell of her sex. Or maybe he’s just doing his nightly stalking rounds, checking on his assignment like the good little soldier he pretends to be.
I could leave. Could dematerialize and be back in my own room before he gets here. It would be the smart play, the one that keeps things simple and clean.
But what fun would that be?
I settle back in the chair, adjusting my posture to something deliberately casual.
Rose’s breathing changes, becomes less deep. She’s surfacing from sleep, her body still trembling with small aftershocks. Her hand moves to between her thighs, pressing there like she’s trying to hold on to the sensation, and a small whimper escapes her lips.
The door handle turns. Vampire stealth means it doesn’t make a sound. He’ll step through that door in about three seconds, findme here, see Rose in her current state, and draw all the right conclusions.
The thought makes me smile, and it’s genuine and wicked.
Rose’s eyes flutter open just as the door swings inward. She’s disoriented, caught between dream and waking, her body still throbbing with pleasure she doesn’t quite understand. She sees me first, and the confusion in her eyes changes to recognition, then desire she can’t hide.
