Page 52 of Song of the Abyss

Setting the smaller, more consumable fish to the side in the water to keep them cold, he flicked a few droplets of water at her.

They soared through the air, farther than he’d expected, and dropped onto the console itself. With a grunt, she immediately wiped away the flecks with her sleeve before realizing where they had come from.

Spinning in her chair, her eyes found his.

“Daios,” she said, breathy and far too excited to see someone like him.

But he was the monster who encouraged it.

Nodding at her, he pointed to the fish. He should go. He shouldn’t indulge himself like this because he wasn’t sure he would leave. He might even beg her to let him touch her, just this once. Just to know.

She took the choice away from him. Suddenly she was right there in front of him, like she always was. Crossing her legs and wrapping that blanket around her shoulders as she started babbling about someone he didn’t know and the idea that she had to get into Alpha. She was always working on figuring out a way to take her father down.

He admired her dedication, but right now he couldn’t follow a single word she was saying. Not while he was watching her twist her hair in her hands. She wove the strands together, looping and curving until it was in an intricate braid falling over her shoulder.

Then she kept talking, her hands flying, not with words, but with excitement as she rambled about some service entrance that wasn’t being as heavily watched as before. All they had to do was get someone on the inside who could attach yet another something into something, and he didn’t care about any of that.

Because the strands of her hair were falling out of that twisted braid. She hadn’t attached it with anything, so of course they were falling apart. He wanted to wrap it in his hand and drag her head back. He wanted to know what her throat tasted like and if he could feel the beat of her heart against his tongue.

“Daios?”

The sound of his name drew him out of those thoughts. He moved nothing other than his eyes to look at her. “Yes?”

“Do you want to brush it again?”

Surely he hadn’t heard her right. Those words were a figment of his imagination and his greatest hope that she would let him touch her. “What?”

Anya’s face burned with that red color, and he never knew what it meant. Her words were a little stammered as she said, “You did it before when it was tangled. I was sleeping, then. But it’s... Well, it’s tangled again and I haven’t found a brush in here. I thought, maybe, if you didn’t mind?”

He would do anything she asked. If she wanted him to lie flat in the muck while she used those strange tails to sink him deeper into it, he would gladly lay himself in the cold dirt.

With a slight nod, he felt his mouth go dry as she spun around. She used her hands to angle her body away from him, and then suddenly he had all the access he wanted to that hair that had captivated him from the start.

She started talking again, but he wasn’t listening. Not when his shaking claws were so close to her hair. He gently touched just the ends, feeling the softness slide through his fingers like water. He’d never seen hair this color, and perhaps that was what had captivated him from the start.

He didn’t want to hurt Anya. Not in any way. So he was careful as he started working through the knots. He tried very hard to listen to what she was saying, but he honestly didn’t care.

Her plan to take down Alpha wouldn’t work. He knew men like her father, because Daios was eerily similar to the man. The only thing that would stop people like them was blood or bartering.

And he held the General’s greatest treasure between his claws right now.

She kept talking until he’d gotten most of the tangles out. Now, he could run his claws through her hair with no snarls standing in the way between him and the luxurious texture.

Carefully, he scraped his claws along her scalp. She tilted back into his touch, her words stuttering as he did it again.

He grinned, even though she couldn’t see him. She liked it when he smiled, and he hoped she looked up at their reflection in the glass. He was a looming figure behind her, a monster with his hand on her, and she liked it.

He ignored the urges of his own body as he did it again. Running his fingers along her head and then pinching her strands between his knuckles a little harder, so there was the faintest tug as he continued down her hair. He did it again and again until she let out a little breathy moan that had both of them freezing.

But that sound. He wanted to hear it a hundred times. A thousand. He wanted to bathe in the sound until he could think of nothing other than that breathy moan of pleasure that had escaped from her lips without her realizing it. And he knew she hadn’t planned for that to come out.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “You can keep going, I just... No one has rubbed my head in a long time.”

Did she want to brush that away? Flick it with her tails like it hadn’t happened between them?

That sudden, dangerous anger rose in his chest. He didn’t like that she was trying to hide her reaction from him, even though he logically knew he had done the same only a few days ago when she’d chosen to brush her fingers along the membranes of his spine.

He had no right to demand more from her. No right at all to hear more of that sound, but damn it, he wanted it. He wanted to hear her pleasure, and he wanted... her.

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