Page 89 of The Reveal
But I don’t have it in me to worry about Augie right now, not when I amboundby blood to a vampire king and an ancient goddessleft her shitin meand I have no idea what any of this means or what it makes me—
I take a breath.
Part of me would prefer all of this to be one big mind game. That way, everything I’m feeling would be fake and I could happily move on, secure in the knowledge that he neverreallygot to me and I neverreallyfelt like I might—
I refuse to admit it, even to myself.
“The only thing I see is my paycheck disappearing if I don’t get to work,” I begin, because the coffee stand is just about the only normal thing I have left, the last relic remaining from life before monsters.
I need it.
But Ariel leans forward then and presses his hard, cruel, beautiful mouth to mine.
He kisses me like I am something precious to him.
And he sets the whole world on fire.
21.
Burning alive feels better than it should.
I can feel flame lick over every part of me, curling deep into my legs, igniting me inside and out.
Ariel keeps kissing me, slow and sure. When I try to make it more intense, when I try to go deeper and wilder, he doesn’t let me.
He cups his hands around my face and holds me there, making us both marinate in the way our mouths fuse together and the demands I try to make that he meets, parries, then ignores. He continues to do precisely as he pleases.
And what he pleases is this kiss.
Is it one kiss or is it a thousand? Is it one long, complicated, life-altering kiss—or one after the next, on and on into a raw, hot, dizzying infinity?
I don’t know when I let go of the blanket, but soon enough I’m pressing the whole of my body against his.
Needy. Insistent. Desperate.
My arms wrap around his back and my fingers press deep into his cold muscles as he moves, ripples, stretches. By now I could trace that phoenix tattoo of his from memory, and I do.
He pulls away, looking down at me with his silver eyes gleaming bright.
So bright it makes me shiver.
Or . . . shiver even more.
“A phoenix tattoo for a vampire is practically a cliché,” he says, and I realize that note I don’t recognize in his voice is warmth. Maybe evenamusement. “What about you, little seer? How many lives have you lived that you require a phoenix to mark them all?”
My mouth feels bruised, but it’s the kind of ache I want to lean into. I let my hands move down that sculpted back of his and run my palms over the marble flare of his buttocks, his powerful thighs.
“I think I’m on at least my third life,” I tell him, and there’s a teasing note in my voice, though I’m not kidding at all. I’m matching him. “There is the life I had before my mother and father left. There is the life we all had before the Reveal. And I don’t know what you did to me last night, but I don’t feel the same, so maybe this is a new life too.”
“I told you what I did.”
His voice sounds almost harsh now, but there’s something about the way he looks at me that makes me think it’s something more than that. That it’s that deep, unfathomable feeling that echoes in me, too. I just ... know it.
I have the strangest certainty that it works in me, too.
As if we feel the same, this immortal vampire and me.
Then again, what we do feels likethis.
