Page 67 of Heir of Blood and Moonlight

“You didn’t have to do that,” I told him. “I’m just a little sore. It’s fine.”

Gavin relaxed behind me, one hand draped across my middle, the other arm propped up on the side of the tub, but his death grip on the washcloth expressed how much he disagreed with my assessment of the situation. It was as though he took my every discomfort as a personal affront.

I rested my head back on his shoulder once more. “The shower worked,” I said, watching his profile out of the corner of my eye. “I understand the dream now.”

“And?” he asked, drawing slow circles around my navel with a lone fingertip.

“They’re all there in the same dungeon—Javier, Thane, and the queens—just like I saw in the dream,” I said. “I don’t know how I know it, but it just feels right.”

Gavin’s hand stilled. “And the part about not being able to save everyone?”

I sighed. “If we rescue Javier and Thane, the queens will starve,” I said. “The shifters are too proud to feed the queens their own blood. They’ve been using Javier to sustain their captives’ blood needs, and now they’re using Thane as well. That’s why he’s even still alive.”

Gavin blew out a breath, and his finger continued making lazy circuits around my belly button. “So we have to leave an undead behind to feed the queens, or we rescue every one of our people Veris is holding prisoner.”

“I promised Ash we would rescue Thane,” I murmured, my voice small, “but I can’t leave Javier there, not when he’s been held prisoner for so long.” My chin trembled. “I don’t know what to do. Ican’tchoose one over the other.”

Gavin was quiet for a long moment. “You won’t have to.”

I turned partway, sloshing soapy pink water against the sides of the tub. “You want to try breaking them all out of there?”

“Something like that,” he said, his hand skimming lower on my belly until his fingers glided between my legs. “How do you feel now?” There was no hint of soreness as his fingertips skimmed the length of my lips, sliding back up to graze my clit.

“Fine,” I said, the word coming out breathy. I made a tiny whimper when he delved that fingertip under the hood of my clit and touched that raw bundle of nerves.

“Still a little tender, I see,” he said matter-of-factly.

He withdrew his hand and brought it up to his mouth once more, this time biting into the tip of his middle finger. His free hand ventured under the water, gliding down my belly to delve between my legs, one finger settling on either side of my clit.He pulled back on the hood, fully exposing my most sensitive of places, and reached between my legs with his other hand to press his bleeding finger against my unprotected clit.

I gasped, arching against him as his immortal blood seeped into raw, exposed nerves. “Holy shit,” I said, suddenly shivering despite the warm water. I grabbed Gavin’s wrist, but his arms were like iron bars, absolutely immovable.

“We have to make sure the blood soaks in,” he murmured, stroking his bitten fingertip back and forth over my exposed clit.

I squeezed my eyelids shut, feeling the pleasure rapidly coiling tighter and tighter within me.

“Just a little more,” he whispered, grazing his teeth over the sensitive, newly healed skin on my neck. “I won’t have anyone accusing me of neglecting my queen.”

“I’m going to come, Gavin,” I panted. “I’m going to come.”

He bit down on my neck, not enough to break the skin, but enough to remind me of the thrill I felt while he tasted my blood.

The pleasure snapped within me like a whip crack, and I groaned, my hips rising to press my clit more firmly against his fingertip. Waves of delicious ecstasy spread out from my core, not fueled by bloodlust or immortal blood, but pure and brief.

As the pleasure waned and Gavin withdrew his hands from between my legs, I melted back against him, my body going boneless. “That was unexpected,” I said, my tone wistful.

Gavin’s increasingly familiar chuckle vibrated through me, but it ended in a sigh. “We should get out and dry off,” he said. “The others are sure to be waiting.”

Resigning myself to the inevitable, I sat forward and let him stand and climb out of the tub first, then placed my hand in his and accepted his help in pulling me up to my feet.

Fun time was over. It was time to prepare for battle.

41

“We’ll portal in throughthe Forks gate,” Gavin said, leaning forward over the map on the coffee table in his sitting room. He pointed to the Washington town that had been made famous by a fictional story about sparkling vampires.

Little did the people of Forks—or the rest of the world, for that matter—know that beautiful, immortal, blood-drinking creatures were real, and regardless of an undead vampire’s morals or ethics, these immortals absolutely could not survive on animal blood. Only mortal human blood—or a vampire queen’s blood—would keep an undead vampire alive.

“That one won’t work,” Bastian said, and I twisted in my seat to see the lone shifter in my harem standing behind my armchair, his forearms crossed over his broad chest. “We—they—know about the Forks gate. The Sun Watch monitors it. They’ll know the second we step out of the portal.”

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