Page 56 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“He didn’t listen to my queen?” Sylas asked archly, in a whisper by the side of my face. I felt him against my cheek, not like a kiss, but a caress, and on my jaw and neck, too. “For that, I will cut off his ears and feed them to him.”

I was taking bigger and bigger breaths now, and I supposed I ought to be worried about inhaling him in, but I figured he could manage that—and—maybe that was what I wanted besides. To take some of him inside of me, so that I could make it through my rest of my days, relying on his strength instead of mine.

Because if I’d been like Sylas, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt me in the first place—or ever get to Ella.

“Ella—” I said, squeaking her name.

“I will go back to torturing him for answers soon,” Sylas purred, “but not until you finish sharing with me.”

I closed my eyes and sank back some—and found myself caught, like I was in an embrace. After so long alone it felt so—so—good—to have someone else be therefor me.

And I did trust him, whether I wanted to or not.

So I grabbed his wrist away from where his fingertips were still kissing my mark and pulled it behind me enough that he would get the idea. “He hurt me here, too,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper.

“Oh, my queen,” Sylas whispered back. “Turn around and put your elbows on the ground.”

41

SYLAS

Mina gasped,but then she did as I asked—it felt like her trust was just as much an object as the sand in my hourglass, and every moment we spent together she poured more of it into my hand.

I would endeavor not to spill any.

“I would like to kiss more of you now, Mina,” I warned her, as she looked back cautiously.

“Where?” she asked, her eyes dark.

“Everywhere. But I suspect if you close your eyes, this will be easier on you.”

She bit her lips, but then shut her eyes tight, and I sank part of myself up as a shadow to run across her lips. Her brow rose with surprise, but then her lips parted and moved as I did gently—so I used more of me to kiss her. Her shoulder, her waist, her ribcage, the space behind her knees—slowly and fervently, with deep and unending desire. She threw her arms out in front of herself, like a stretching cat, and then rose up, and I could taste her nipples,sucking on them as I ran a tongue across the space beneath her breasts.

“Sylas,” she whispered, her closed eyes squinting.

“Don’t look. Just feel.”

She made a whining sound, and then gave a nod.

I grabbed hold of her ass so she would know where I was going, and lowered my face so that if she did open her eyes to look, she would see me, using the tongue from my mouth, to rim her.

She squirmed the second I did, but it was surprise, nothing more. “Sylas—no one’s ever kissed—” she started, and so I stopped, but the second I did she panted “keep going” and trembled.

I loved it when she shook. I couldn’t help it—it was the predator in me. And there was something in the moment, of this little broken doll of a human, allowing me into her most intimate space, so that I could lick away all her past memories of harm and replace them with new ones, of her, here, like this, completely open and safe—I soared in the power she was granting me over her, pleased to be taking it back from all who had wronged her.

She wriggled again, making another small sound beneath me.

“What do you need?” I lifted my head to ask her.

“If I can’t look . . . tell me what you see?”

She momentarily disarmed me again, but then I took her in, largely cradled by me in her reality—and looking like a creature of light being engulfed by darkness in my own. Streamers of light kept bursting through my darkness where it thinned as I swirled over her, making the space where we met look like a battleground where no one was winning, or fireworks in a cloudy sky.

Then I pushed myself back to join her time again, and looked down, at her slick folds dripping and—I longed to cover her with all of me.

In this world, and the next.

“I see a creature of light, being mounted by a creature of darkness,” I told her. “Do you want that, Mina?”

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