Page 266 of Caelum

She huffed. “Not that insta stuff. I don’t get it. Why do people keep taking pictures of their coffees? It’s all the same!”

I grinned at her, but she couldn’t see it in the darkness. “Remember what I just said? A photo can replace a thousand words? Each picture can mean a few things. The poster could be showing off about where they’re drinking. Or, they could be just telling their people where they’re at—inviting them to come along too if they’re close.”

“You and I both know they’re showing off.”

My grin widened. “Sometimes.”

She huffed again then, in a small voice, whispered, “Eren?”

The change in tone surprised me, but what concerned me was how she’d tensed. “What,habibi?”

“I-I need to feed.”

My eyes flared wide in the dark. “Your Vampire?”

“Yes.” She shuddered. “I-I haven’t tasted anything not from a bag, and the Vampire doesn’t come out as much as the others and I sleep it off when she does, but…” Another shudder. “She’s insistent.”

It was easy to call the souls inside us ‘she’ and ‘he.’ Referring to them as though they didn’t belong to us. As though they were separate entities because, to some small degree, theywere.

But somehow, when Eve said it, it felt even more real than it did for regular creatures. Maybe it was. She wasJannah, after all. Who truly knew what the fuck they were capable of?

“My blood is yours, Eve,” I told her softly, meaning every word and trying not to be turned on. I’d kept a lid on my arousal, wanting to wait for the right moment, needing Eve to Claim me at her own pace.

The Lorelei had been chomping at the bit. So insistent now that he dominated the entirety of my being, since the other souls had been pushed aside the night of the McAllister attack.

“I might hurt you,” she whimpered, and I realized that was her concern.

She didn’t want to hurt me.

God, I couldn’t have loved her more if I tried.

Licking my lips, I whispered, “Would you think ill of me if I said I wanted the pain?”

She tensed. “Why?” Her horror was evident.

“Sometimes, it feels good.” I didn’t admit there’d been a time when the pain was the only thing that could get me through the days.

I didn’t need her to know that shit about me. Shit I’d buried in the past with my old life. One day, when she was more confident, she might ask me about the scars on my legs, the proof of how I’d sliced into my own skin to just stop the hurting, to replace my internal pain with one that could be externalized. How I’d used a broken shard from a mirror to escape the mental anguish that was burying me… But that was for another time. Another place. Not tonight. Not in this bed.

“It does?” Her confusion bled into her words, but she turned her face into my throat and murmured, “Are you sure?”

“Deadly.” My voice was low, a husky rasp as excitement filled me at the prospect of her feeding from my vein. For her first time.

When her blunt teeth butted against the thick skin at my throat, a strange kind of ecstasy swirled inside me. It hurt but it hurtgood. It was adelicious agony that had me closing my eyes, waiting on her to pierce my flesh.

Eventually, when she did, we both moaned simultaneously. Me because it felt good, her because she savored my taste. Her first taste of fresh blood.

Drinking from a bag was like tasting apple juice from a carton.

From the vein? It was like freshly squeezed juice from the fruit.

My lips would have twitched at the comparison, but I was too busy willing my cock to behave.

Jesus, why did everything she did have to be so potent?

With a shiver, I let her take her fill. I was capable of feeding two of my brothers if they happened to fall on a Vampire day at the same time, so I knew I could satisfy Eve.

What did surprise me was how she moved. With each suck and pull of blood, she writhed against me. Eve’s revulsion of feeding from the vein wasn’t unusual in female creatures. To the point that they would only feed from their own gender because it repulsed them, and they only did it because they needed the nourishment.

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