Page 39 of Kingmakers, Graduation

No one remarks upon my choice of escort, though I catch the twitch of my aunt’s lips that tells me she understands perfectly well what I’m up to.

You have to be pretty fucking sly to get anything past Sloane.

My aunt has always been my favorite relative because she’s blunt and unsentimental, as ruthless as a man and as calculated as myself. She taught me how to shoot in the woods behind the monastery.

“Marksmanship is meditation,” she told me. “You have to clear your mind of everything but the shot. A sniper is a monk. He separates his mind from his body. Cold can’t touch him, nor wind, nor time. He’ll wait three days with no food or water if that’s how long it takes for the target to enter the kill zone. When you pull the trigger, it’s your mind that moves, not your finger.”

“Ivan’s lucky you chose poison and not a rifle when you came for his head.”

Even at ten years old, I already knew the story of how my uncle and aunt first met.

Sloane looked at me, no trace of amusement on her face.

“I would have destroyed all my happiness in moment, without ever knowing what I’d done.”

“Maybe you would have been happy either way.”

“No,” she said, still unsmiling. “I would have been nothing at all.”

I didn’t quite understand her. I didn’t understand what “nothing” meant.

Sabrina leads me up the stairs to Rafe’s room.

I’m close enough to touch her, though I haven’t yet—I’m simply admiring the way her bare calves flex as she ascends the stairs and the pleasing tension in the arches of her bare feet. She bounds up like she’s made of springs, full of restless energy.

I follow after her, the suitcase weightless in my hand.

The moment we’re inside Rafe’s room, I toss it aside and push the door shut.

Sabrina turns to face me, cheeks glowing, lips parted.

Before she can speak, before she can even take a breath, I seize her face in both hands and kiss her like I haven’t seen her in a hundred years. My hands are all over her body, ripping open her shirt, yanking down her shorts, lifting her up and slamming her against the wall without one thought for the noise that might be overheard by the people downstairs.

She’s clawing at me just as eagerly, pulling up my shirt so she can put her bare chest against mine, shoving her hand down the front of my shorts to grip my cock. She lets out a groan when she touches it, desperate to have it inside her.

“Hurry,” she pants in my ear, “I’m fucking dying for you …”

Clothes half on and half off, I thrust inside of her, burying my cock eight inches deep in that soaking wet pussy, already warm, already throbbing for me.

I’m fucking her hard and it’s still not enough. She wraps her arms around my neck, slamming herself up and down on my cock, biting at the side of my neck, panting into my mouth, kissing me so roughly that I taste blood—mine or hers, I really couldn’t give a shit.

There’s no thought of foreplay or drawing this out as long as possible. We’re hurtling headlong toward climax, each of us desperate for relief.

It’s not a race—more like a free-fall. We’re plummeting toward an inevitable conclusion, no more able to stop than we could sprout wings and fly.

Whether she hits it first or I do, I can’t tell. All I know is I’m bursting inside of her, a creature splitting its skin. What will emerge from the carapace I have no idea—I can’t possibly be the same person before and after this.

The pleasure is blinding, the room less than nothing around me. All that exists is Sabrina and whatever I become when I’m with her.

It’s all over in minutes. She collapses against me, no longer able to hold herself up. I have to set her down because I’m shaking, but I won’t let go of her, not for a second.

We look at each other, frightened of this thing between us, over which neither of us has any control.

When she can speak again, Sabrina says, “I needed that.”

“Me too. I thought I knew how bad I wanted it. But it was … more.”

We’re staring at each other, still breathing heavily.

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