Page 208 of Anathema

The rational side of my brain urged me to scramble away or risk burning alive, but I was too intoxicated, too far gone to care. Whatever magic Zevander wielded between my thighs right then left me both pliant and weak with pleasure.

The frail and tired wood of the bed’s frame remained intact, sturdy, as it quietly squealed with his movements, the flame merely dancing across its surface as though reveling in the sight of us. One jolting curve of Zevander’s finger hit a sensitive ball of nerves deep inside of me and I mindlessly rolled my head against thepillow,the pleasure burning low in my belly. Winding and tightening as he toyed with it,mercilessly rubbing and tickling me to a fevered state.Before I could release the scream cocked at the back of my throat, he covered my mouth with his hand, trapping the sound against his palm.

The torment fizzled when he removed his fingers from inside me, and as he lifted the tunic’s hem, baring my flesh, he sat back, releasing a long exhale, his gaze never wavering from between my thighs. “Fuck,” he said, the awe in his voice lessening the anxious thoughts swirling in my head. He ran his hand through his hair and down his face. “A thousand times I’ve fantasized this moment, and still, I failed to imagine you’d be this perfect.”

With little effort, he banded his arms around my thighs and lifted my sex to his face, hiking my legs over his shoulders as he sat back on his heels. My body slid closer, the back of my head pressed into the mattress. From that angle, I could see up the length of my torso to where he stared down at me. Eyes on me, he dipped his head, and when he dragged the broad width of his tongue across my flesh, my stomach and toes curled. A coppery taste prickled my tongue as I bit my lip hard, fighting the urge to cry out while watching him watch me, as he voraciously devoured me. I didn’t need experience to know the man was a master at his skill. Every drag and flick of his tongue arrived in perfect timing and cadence, building and climbing.

He moaned and grunted, fingers digging into my thighs as he held me to his face, feasting on me like a starved animal. The sight of him made me ravenous, as he’d said, and I clutched the blankets, desperate to dig my nails into something as the tension heightened inside of me.

“Oh, god please,” I whispered and I grabbed the pillow from beneath me, smashing it over my face to smother a long, droning moan that I breathed into the damp cotton.

Ribbons of heat weaved through my muscles, and eyes shuttered, I surrendered to the chaos that burrowed into my bones. Weightlessness settled over me, and lowering the pillow away, I opened my eyes. The ceiling above was closer than before and craning my neck showed the bed below where I hovered. I gasped with a jolt on realizing I was suspended in the air, the flickering black flames crackling around me. When I swung my undoubtedly shocked gaze back to Zevander, a smirk curved his lips, those knowing, devilish eyes studying my reaction.

He held his palms up and with one flick of his fingers, my body floated toward him until I was straddling his face in the air. “Erigorisz,” he said and swept his tongue across his lips. “Perhaps one of the more useful glyphs.” Strong hands gripped my thighs, as he resumed his torment and my preoccupations, every silent speculation, burned and fizzled away with the delicious sweep of his unforgiving tongue. His mouth consumed my mind with the same voracious appetite that he devoured my swollen flesh.

Writhing and moaning, I hugged the pillow against my chest, my body stiffening, tightening as the heat intensified and my muscles twisted in pleasure. Winding tighter and tighter. My thighs shook around him, my toes curled, digging into his muscled shoulders, while a need that bordered on pain throbbed with each lazy stroke of his tongue.

Every thought in my head spiraled into focus—the unyielding grip of his palms, the stubble on his cheek and wet fullness of his lips when he sucked at my tender folds.

The world faded around me, the quiet sounds of sucking and moaning and kissing drawing me into a dark hypnotic space where only he and I existed.

Tension beating through my veins heightened, then snapped inside of me, and holding the pillow to my face, I jerked my hips forward on a scream that drowned in the plush, feathery barrier.

A distant cracking sound, like a fracture, hardly registered over the pulsing waves of pleasure that burst across my thighs and shot to my limbs in warm tingles, and I circled my hips in the air, grinding out the last bits of release.

As my body settled, he lowered me to the bed and tore the pillow from my face, staring down at me with a reverent gleam in his eyes, a glint of adoration that knotted my stomach.

“I dare you to look her in the eyes!” Unbidden voices bubbled from the darkest corner of my memories. “Look the lorn in the eye and every one you love will die!” The taunting rhymes from other children, and the scorn of their parents who quietly laughed along with them. Years of rejection and ostracism carved into my thoughts with sharp-edged tongues.

Zevander looked at me as if I were something more than the disparaging word that’d been hammered into me since I was found by the edge of the woods: unwanted. Lorn. He looked at me as if I was worthy of being seen.

The emotion sank its teeth into me, and I turned away from him, willing myself to hold back the tears that would surely destroy this moment between us.

“You look like a goddess right now,” he whispered, burying his face in my neck, kissing me. He ghosted his mouth over my jaw, my cheek, until he finally crushed his lips to mine. “And you taste as divine.”

Poisonous thoughts stabbed my mind, urging me not to trust his words. He’s lying. A quiet fear crawled beneath my skin, winding itself in my bones. Zevander had somehow managed to dig his fingers past sharp ribs and into the stoniest corner of my heart. A place so few had ever tenanted. I didn’t trust its walls, nor its strength. Not when every person I’d grown to love had been torn away from me. What would having breached that fragile boundary into something more intimate mean for us?

Eyes screwed shut, I pushed those thoughts away. Because even if he was lying, even if this was nothing more than temporary, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in this place where death loomed beyond the walls. We were sketching an illusion of normalcy in a world too dark to imagine. A place that longed to devour us. Here, in this little hovel, with our bodies entwined and our hearts beating in sync, we transcended death, existing on our own plane.

Our own uncharted terrain.

The magic and heat between us warned of something explosive. Something I’d never find in another so long as I lived. A sensation that would inevitably consume me like those wicked black flames he wielded. Better to have experienced that passion and watched it fade like a dying star than to have never known it at all.

“You are destructive in the throes of climax.”

Still ruminating in the aftermath, I smiled through my preoccupations. “How so?”

He jerked his head back, and I pushed up onto my elbows to find the flames had retreated, allowing a perfect view of a long crack in the window’s pane across the room.

“I did that?”

“When you screamed.” He pulled me into him and kissed my forehead. “Not that I’m complaining. That is a sound I’ll never tire of hearing.”

“You’ve heard it before, have you?” I teased.

To my horror, he said, “I have.” An unflinching gaze met mine. “The night you drank too much Ambrozhyr,” he added with a shameless air of amusement. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, as though recalling that night held some humor, the thought, once again, stirring an unsettling mortification in the pit of my gut.

“Did we …”

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