Page 92 of Antiletum
I remember why I’m not allowing myself to give in, gazing into my wife’s face. “How could I deliver? After you told me we wouldn’t stay in each other’s arms when our tension is eased.”
Can’t have that.
She’s speechless. Too overtaken by wanting and sensation. I know that it hurts. It’s hurting me too.
Regardless, it was nice to see her desire and for her to give in to it so fully. Hear her beg to have me inside of her, especially after the nightmare confrontation about Tabitha’s death last night. Shockingly, it was worse than Rainah. Another infuriating unforeseeable. Leave it to Tabitha to manage making my life a livinginfernumeven from the grave.
The unshakeable cunt.
Loath to admit, perhaps Tabitha’s transgressions weren’tquiteas grievous as some others.
Delaney’s willingness to let me pin her down, tie her up, and push needles through her body are a fantastic indicator that this is all about to implode. Her rejection is unsustainable. She can’t fight what we are. She was never going to be able to.
Delaney is breathing heavily, an expression of deepest torment written across her face. Stout enough to render her completely speechless. Pained. How terribly unsurprising that she’s not a fan of me playing her own tricks on her.
My own chest rises and falls rapidly, matching hers. Both heave with desire and the intensity of what we’re doing. This whole deranged scenario and the way it has us both raging and hot. The weight of it all hovers between us like an explosive.
There’s still another opportunity for a piercing left. Delaney knows it as well as I do. Her stare keeps cutting to that third and finalvinculumring. And I wonder if this is where she will draw the line. Tell me it’s too much. Finally utter that one little word that she hasn’t at all wanted to say.
Stop.
She’s never asked me to stop before. I pray to theNocturnethat she won’t start now; that this is what it will take; that this may finally be the moment that I can make hersee me.
“Some might think I shouldn’t have run with the technicality of you telling me if I came to the manor, you would slit your own throat. But I know you.I knowyou. As much as you hate it and don’t want to be understood—least of all by me and give each other power to really make things hurt. I know why you added that in. Because even though you can’t admit it, not even to yourself, you want me to fight for you like you believe that no one ever has before.”
But I have fought for her—to the extent that I have begun a personal fucking war with a might that stiflesdeos. And forever, I will.
Maybe she’ll still reject me. Maybe I should have given her more space. Maybe this is the most inopportune moment to push, but despite Mallin’s urging to not be so aggressive and extreme, it’s time to be honest: I am an aggressive person of extremes. There’s no point in hiding that.
It’s time that I make her understand, whether she wants to or not.
Keeping eye contact, enchanting hazel windows pierce down to the deepest recesses of my soul in the way that only Delaney can, those blue speckles placed throughout like the eyelets decorating a moth’s wings.
She sees me just as much as I see her. She always has. It terrifies her.
A tether pulls between our stares, these threads that bind us beyond ourvinculum, unbreakable even in my wife’s refusal to use her voice, to outwardly admit that she knows that I’m right.
We hold each other’s gaze as my hands come to her ribs, stroking her softly as I slide lower down her body, my intention written clear in my face. Waiting.Waiting. Waiting for just the right moment.
I come eye level with her cunt, so swollen and wanting and soaking wet.
Her clit is hard. Ready. Perfect.Mine.
I take my time, cleaning her off, Delaney giving off a soft moan as I touch her. I was right, it’s taking only a few lazy swipes for me to have her on the brink of shattering.
She’s breathing so very hard now, I can hear it loud.
Chaotic and messy, just like us.
Poised with my needle right at her clit, I look up to her again with absolute determination. Jaw set, I pull on a thread of the past, reaching deep down into myself to breathe life back into the mostselfish decision I have ever made. Praying to theNocturnewith a loud, pleading, scream in my head. A complete juxtaposition to how I speak, soft and gentle, demanding my wife, “Tell me to stop.”
Delaney sucks in a choked breath, brows drawn in, pupils dilated wide, mouth dropping with a gasp. Looking down at me as if she’s staring at a ghost.
There.There it is.
The moment I’ve been waiting for ever since she proved all of my assumptions wrong by leaving me to wake alone the morning after we wed.
A single tear slips from her eye and it’s almost enough for me to stop—right now—sit up and untie her. Clutch her close. Tell her I’m sorry for all the ways this went wrong. I’m about to do just that, stop this utter fucking madness, when she speaks. Another echo of the past, answering mine. “Don’t stop.”
