Page 15 of The Salvation

My hips rise to grind against his finger, and all my inner muscles clamp down, clenching around that bone handle to claim my orgasm. Tingling heat explodes through my body while Merikh jerks, his muscles trembling as he spills ropes of his seed down my throat while I fall over the edge, breaking apart beneath him. I swallow him all down.

“Fucking love your tears, little dove,” he growls as he pulls out, then rubs his thumb across my swollen lower lip. I shiver as he brushes his cool knuckles along my cheek. “And my marks on your skin. But they won’t be the last.”

After his profession, I couldn’t begin to know what to expect.

He didn’t uncuff me from the coffin. Here I am, still spread-eagle before him. My strength weakens because he’s opened a vein in my arm, leeching my blood into a small bowl. For the life of me, I can’t fathom why he didn’t simply bite me, why he used a needle, but I’m not about to ask.

Despite his release, Merikh’s tension has only increased. It seems to tighten and grow the more he spills my blood into the bowl. Oh, gods, why doesn’t he just bite me? Why doesn’t he drink? A howl echoes in my mind, splintering with a thousand questions. What the hell is this Blood Crest? What is he going to do tonight? Why does he look like he’s preparing for some sort of siege? How much danger will I be in?

What stupefies me more is how he hasn’t retrieved his robes. Nude as me, he sits on a chair next to the coffin with his heavy cock resting between his legs. Always so thick and strong.Nothing like Drago’s two cocks. Not as dynamic as Kyan’s vibrating member. Or as long as Mayce’s cock. But he doesn’t need to be. Not with those silver crosses and piercings adding a delirious friction. Or how he can bring me back-to-back orgasms by sheer will of his unfathomable god-power. He’s dark and sweet as sin torturing my bloodstream, transfusing an addiction in my veins.

The irony. I believed vampires were addicted to human blood. But I’m an addict for everything Merikh, including his torture. Hell, I’ve been an addict for all my monstrous boys since the moment I stabbed Drago in the Wailing Woods.

“Wh-when will the others arrive?” I wonder, my voice soft and curious.

A muscle bounces in his jaw, but the God of Blood doesn’t respond. Beyond the dark waves fracturing his face, his eyes still gleam with that crimson carnality, so I should know better than to ask questions. Or expect answers. Now and then, he cocks his head to the side, studying the blood in the bowl, swirling it gently. His tongue traces the seam of his lips while his fangs catch the firelight of the room. But he still doesn’t drink.

I grow a little tired, a little dizzy when he finally closes the vein with the aid of his vampire venom.

After placing the bowl on a small table next to the coffin, Merikh rises and turns, crossing the room while giving me a mouthwatering view of the tight steel of his ass. He makes his way to a large, obsidian desk on the opposite side of the room. I strain my neck, trying to see what he’s doing, but I can’t make it out.

When he returns, he’s holding something that resembles a quill feather pen, but it’s more of a brush, a flexible one. I furrow my brow, confusion rippling through me, but I can’t deny the pulsing thrill in my blood.

Sweeping my hair from my chest and beyond my back until the long silver tresses cascade into the air behind the coffin, Merikh lowers the feather brush into the blood. Oh, savage mercies! My breath catches in my chest as he dips the quill into the blood, tilts my chin up with his other hand, and draws the bloodied end along the base of my throat.

“Merikh...” I whisper my emotion because he sweeps that brush to mirror the exact patterns of my tattoos.

While I can’t see his action, his hand doesn’t betray one tremor. His body gives nothing away beyond the undeniable tension and his flaring nostrils. I study him the whole time, a deep ache growing within me because of how he looks at me as he follows the path of the artwork on my skin, turning the black lines to scarlet.

While Kyan looks at me like he’s ready to rip a storm through my body and pierce me with his wild shadow. But Merikh...he controls the shadows. He gazes at me like he’s tracking me, stalking me. Those eyes, like a nightmare sealed to my skin, haunting me for eternity.

Sometimes, he bows his head and brushes his lips along my brow. My nerves shiver every time. I can’t possibly control the mad heat stoking my blood from the whispering caress of that quill feather brush tracing my skin. Or the way he touches me with his other hand. Whether he squeezes my breast, tweaks my nipple, roves a hand along my belly, or rubs his fingers along my drenched nether lips, they are touches of agony, of torment—touches meant to sweep me away into his deep end.

His eyes are unblinking, resolute in their focus as he adorns my tattoos with my own blood. The feather quill brushes my ink, light strokes like bubbles tickling my skin.

“Beauty is not skin deep, little dove,” Merikh finally speaks when he’s halfway down my body, swirling the blood-coated brush around my navel. “Whoever coined the phrase was afucking fool who only cared for the physical form as it benefited his naked eye. True beauty lies beneath the surface. It lies within the soul. And blood is but an echo of the soul, a mirror into our deepest reflection.”

“What’s in your blood, Master Merikh?” I wonder, hoping the title will put him at ease.

He lowers his head and kisses me, folding my lips back and decorating the inside of my mouth with his tongue. A deep kiss, slow but brief. “Nothing, Quintessa. My blood is hollow as my Court’s name.”

“Unless...I’m the one filling it,” I say softly, noting the throbbing of veins in his neck, but he doesn’t respond. Instead, he returns to painting the tattoos along my belly. It’s enough of a confession as any. Still, I shake my head and heave a sigh. “It’s what you say, but you know it isn’t true.”

He pauses in his brush strokes and deadpans with me. Cocks his head. Brows drawn low. Waiting.

I arch my neck and flex my fingers, aching to touch him but knowing it would be a mistake. “You’re drowning in your darkness, your demons, your scars, Merikh. You feel nothing because of them. Only when you give yourself the greatest pain, or you inflict the greatest pain because you can only feel in the extremes. I know. Gods, how I know, Merikh.”

Emotion chokes my voice, seizes my lungs, and I seek him beyond the crimson carnality in his pupils dilating upon me. “You know more. Your scars outnumber mine. And they go deeper. Even if you’ve lived without a soul for centuries, I imagine, even if it were restored, all those scars would find it. They'd become it—become your soul. I can imagine, my poor sad, beautiful vampire. On the most infinitesimal scale, but I still can. Because I have a half-soul. So, I know those scars, and reliving them, is the only way you can feel. They’re youraddiction. It’s why you hate them so much, isn’t it? And why you hate yourself because of your scars...”

He blinks. Another muscle throbs in his jaw. But Merikh shifts his body, moving lower until he’s observing the place between my legs where no tattoos exist.

“It’s why you lo—why you need me—ahhh!” I corrected myself but was unprepared for his mouth kissing my folds, swollen and slick. I clench my fingers as he rubs his mouth, his nose to part the inner labia, opening his lips in tender, tortuous kisses.

“Mmm...” he groans against my pussy, vibrating that groan to trigger more cream to my slit and my hips to lift. “But you do not need me, little dove. And once you finally see my scars beyond the glimpses I’ve given you, you will never want them, need them, nor love them.”

“Gods-dammit, Merikh!” I cry out when he slides one finger into my slit, down to his knuckle, and presses down on my inner flesh. “I don’t have to love them. I just need to understand them, surrender to them, accept them, oh—bloody savage god!” I cry as he captures my clit in his teeth.

My heartbeat pumps faster, my blood rushing in a crazed surge for my pussy, ripping an intense orgasm through me until I’m squeezing all my inner muscles around his finger. In the barest moment of coming down from the climax-induced stupor, I lift my head to gaze down at him. He still hasn’t retrieved his finger. His tongue circles my clit with ruthless abandon, soothing the reddened flesh from his teeth.

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