Page 92 of Blood Moon
“Do you mind?” he asked, his voice low and intense as he stared at where his hand had been. “I’d rather not leave a mark on your neck … to avoid theunexplainable.”
I followed his stare. “What were you thinking?”
Julian pointed to my chest, and then his finger dropped to the soft tissue at the start of my breast. I nodded, and when I did, his fangs extended.
He ripped the collar, tearing it until the neckline split into a V. The sound of the ripping made my heart race faster, and I gritted my teeth.
A cool air brushed my skin, small bumps rising in its presence. Something potent flashed in his eyes, and my thighs trembled in anticipation.
“Are you okay?” he mumbled.
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, but it was the waiting that terrified me. The suffering made me want to scream.
He inhaled, and I exhaled.
First, his lips touched the top of my breast with a kiss, patient and warm. Followed by another, and another, until that kiss turned into a bite.
There was a piercing, and I grimaced. A draining from me to him. The beating of my heart slowed into a steady thud in my ears. A heaviness in my lids, lashes fluttering. Before the blur, I saw him. Angelic face looking upward, toward mine, crimson filling the liquid in his eyes. A frenzy as he spiraled into me.
Euphoria came with my next breath, and I buckled against him. It was as if I were spinning into a perpetual bliss, as if I’d been carved into this moment by the maker of the universe, longing to return again and again. How concerning it was, the way I’d bleed for anything that held me the way he did.
My limbs acquiesced to gravity, head falling away as Julian pressed a palm to my shoulder blade, keeping me pressed to him. Only, the pressure growing in my body turned me into something violent and wanting, unable to breathe as he pulled away from me.
Mahogany dripped from his lips. Hungry, waiting eyes. I pressed my forehead to his, seeing how I’d transformed myself into a slaughter-house. For what? For another second, another moment of this.
“More,” I demanded, unable to visualize myself without, because when I closed my eyes, there was stardust glittering around me like confetti. A veil of happiness that was far superior to all that had come before.
He licked the wound on my chest before biting again, and I collapsed into him, seeing a dream behind my eyes. I was here with him, and then suddenly miles away in a cloudless sky, watching the earth rotate. The sun rose and fell, pulling us in like magnets until we were face-to-face, hands clasped together, falling deeply into an unfathomable feeling of absoluteness.
He stopped, whispered,“No more,”as he pressed a kiss to my chest, my neck, the side of my face.
“Yes,” I murmured.
“No.”He chuckled, the sound of his voice soothing in a way it’d never been before. “It’s the venom that’s making you like this.”
I pouted, huffed. “Stop being so wise and responsible. It’s sickening.”
He offered a smile that blistered, that set off a hum in my chest. Here, between earth and sky, was what it meant to live, to be content. “You can have me instead,” he promised, and I pursed my lips. “I mean it, Mira,” he said, looking at me with these fresh, scarlet eyes. What I saw in them wasn’t hunger. No, I sensed it was something deeper than that. “You can have me until every star in this galaxy has burned into nothingness.”
“That sounds like forever,” I said, touching him because it was impossible to keep away.
“Perhaps,” he whispered, and I pulled my hands through his hair, pressed my lips to his, my breathing catching all over again. This time, when we kissed, I felt his soul and my soul entangling into a fusion of pure white light, marking us with an infinity. And as he pulled me closer to him, tightening his arm around my waist, I knew it was magic. Pure magic.
We kissed like that until I grew into exhaustion, I found myself laying on the floor of the tent, and he lay beside me. “It’s the venom wearing off, Bells,” he said as I rested my head on his chest. “It’s making you sleepy.” And I wanted to respond to him, but I was too weak to speak.
He whispered something, a secret slipping with heavy breath as I plummeted into a slumber, and the rain didn’t subside as my head rose and fell with his beating heart.
It was strange, and devouring, and wonderful.
CHAPTER45
For millennia, we were steeped in divine violence.
Article I, Lost Letters from Aadan the First
A flutter, and I awoke to Julian shaking my arms. Only, the weight of sleep was so immense, it was difficult to pull myself to consciousness.
