Page 422 of Shadowblood Souls
I work my hand up and down his length as I suck his softly musky flavor into my mouth. My head is spinning with bliss, and every nerve is on fire.
When Griffin’s body quivers and he moves to pull away, I lock my fingers tighter around him and propel his release into my waiting mouth. He sags toward me, mumbling curses and praise in a jumbled chorus.
Jacob lets out a groan of his own. I clutch his wrist, my claws slipping out to nick his skin, and he rakes his fingernails across my ass with a hiss.
His power tweaks my breasts and scalp with even more force, his thumb swivels over my clit, and the dam inside me bursts with his next slam home. I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood, muffling my moan of release.
“Love you, love you, love you,” Jake says in a breathless chant, bucking into me through the deluge of pleasure. He leans over me as he spills himself inside me, claiming my mouth, bleeding lip and all.
My muscles sag, my body wrung out. Jacob gazes down at me, a flicker of worry passing through his expression as the haze of desire clears from his eyes.
“I didn’t mean to—it wasn’t too much for?—”
I drag him down onto the bed with me before he can finish the question. “It was perfect. Fuckingperfect.”
As his expression relaxes, I think he might finally totally believe me.
But in the wake of the flood of bliss, it turns out the frustrations that gnawed at me before weren’t washed away. While I lie there between two of the men I love, my worries sprout up like weeds after a rainfall.
I don’t want this kind of escape to be the closest thing we have to freedom. I don’t want every moment of intimacy to exist under Balthazar’s watch.
There has to be a way to fight him.
Nine
Riva
Sully slumps into the chair across from me at the dining table, having just returned for lunch after a session with Matteo. He lets out a rough sigh. “I don’t know why he keeps making us go through that crap when it isn’t doing anything.”
Zian lifts his head from the roast beef sandwich he was polishing off a couple of seats down, his eyebrows lifting. “The procedures haven’t affected your powers at all?”
The younger boy shakes his head, his broad face gloomy. “Matt’s always asking me to make the illusions clearer and hold them longer. Or sometimes to draw them bigger. But it never works.”
He pauses, and the lines of his frown pull deeper. “Sometimes I think he’s hoping I’ll make something that’s not even an illusion—that I’ll conjure something that turns out to be real. That’s crazy, right?”
The six of us Firsts exchange a glance around the table. None of us can conjure objects out of thin air, but given the unearthly things wecando, it doesn’t seem impossible.
But from what we know, the younger shadowbloods were created from a weaker formula than our own genetic engineering, however exactly that worked.
Ursula Engel, one of the founding guardians and the scientist who worked out how to mingle human and shadowkind essence to create us, was scared when she saw how we Firsts were developing. She wanted us dead from when we were little kids.
The rest of the Guardianship refused, shut her out, and demanded her work so they could create more shadowbloods. The notes we found on her laptop indicated that she modified the instructions she sent them.
I suspect she was hoping her refined methods wouldn’t work at all. That wasn’t the case, but all of the younger shadowbloods we’ve met have powers much weaker than ours.
Balthazar must have been hoping that his staff’s “procedures” would wake up new potential in them. Between the injections Matteo has given me and the mental and physical exercises he’s insisted I perform, my own abilities have been steadily progressing.
Yesterday, I killed a rat in a second with a shriek that emitted almost no sound at all. Matteo was testing with a piece of tissue paper by my mouth that fluttered only a fraction with the hint of expelled breath.
I don’t know what makes me queasier: the thought of how many innocent animals I’ve slaughtered over the past week or the moment when I almostmissedClancy.
The man who presided over the island facility had sick ideas and was driven by greed, but he was also the only guardian who ever tried to teach me how my brutal power could be used to do thingsotherthan maim and kill. I’d much rather be practicinghow to hold a creature in place without doing any actual harm than how to snuff out its life as quickly as possible.
Of course, if anyone bothered to give us an actual choice like a human being should have, I wouldn’t be practicing at all. I’d be shoving down my hunger as far into the depths of my being as I could.
If we didn’t have guardians and whoever else hunting us, I’d never need to bring it out again.
Andreas, with typical easygoing diplomacy, side-steps Sully’s question of craziness altogether. “Maybe it’s working on us faster because our abilities have already had more time to expand before now. I don’t know how my talent with memories could develop much farther, but…”
