Page 87 of A Heart Of Bitter Poison
He pushes the blade in further. I pant short breaths and dig my nails into his waist and I keep hold of the moment I want to show him. It’s the first time he gave me his blood in Saqqara, how I almost leaned forward to kiss him when he held my face in his hand with a look of warmth and pride. I want him to know what it meant to me. I want him to see it through my eyes.
He pushes the dagger in and finally I feel it touch my heart.
“Pull it out and drink,” I grit out as I let go of Ashen’s hand.
And he does. He presses his lips to my chest and takes a deep pull of blood from my heart. And then he leans back to drip his own into the wound, the same as I did for him.
Except this time, when his blood touches mine, the effect is shattering. It’s annihilation.
All my centuries of living twist open and Ashen is woven into the fabric of my history. And all the many directions the future could lead, he is part of me, in every possibility, in every success and failure. The fates have found our two threads and snipped us from the loom, tying them together to weave another picture. We are twined, shadow and light.
Darkness might still live within both of us, but I can love it as much as all the sparks of stars that suddenly surround us, rising from the floor, rushing from the hidden corners of the room, falling from the ceiling like glittering rain.
And those stars, they don’t just rain around us. They come alive beneath my skin. Every stroke that Ashen takes within me, I feel them in my flesh, filling me with light.
I lace my fingers with Ashen’s and hold our hands aloft, watching the tiny detonations of multicolored stars that consume us. We look from our joined fingers to one another and Ashen pulls my hand above my head as he leans down to kiss me with a warmth that burrows right into my soul.
With a gradual build of need, Ashen’s pace begins to quicken. His thrusts grow more powerful. He breaks our kiss to offer his free wrist. My fangs slide into his flesh as he presses his lips to the healing wound of my heart. We drink from one another and those sparks ignite even the tiniest veins and capillaries, spidering from my chest. Pleasure coils and knots around me as it steals my breath.
I moan into Ashen’s skin. He squeezes my hand, pressing it into the pillows above my head. He thrusts harder, and deeper, and I lift my hips to take him even deeper still, as far as he can go. My body grips his sex and I’m filled with his girth, stretching and forming around him.
I take a long pull of blood and the pleasure grips my center, clenching around Ashen as he pistons into me. He lets go of my chest and his moan of desire resonates through my lungs. The strain of holding back shapes Ashen’s face with a tortured kind of beauty that steals my breath. We crawl closer to the cliff edge, both of us grasping every second of pleasure and pain from this moment.
“More,” I whisper. I sound both desperate and demanding. Ashen meets my eyes as my blood-stained lips hover over his wrist. “Take more. Give more. I want everything. I want to be filled with you.”
A dark smile passes over Ashen’s bloodied face. I’ve never seen anything I’ve wanted more, and I have it. He is mine.
Ashen slides to the tip of his erection and thrusts into me hard. I cry out, so close to the edge of oblivion that I have to cling on. “My vampire. You know I will never deny you.”
He pushes his wrist to my lips and seals his mouth to the hole in my chest and we draw deeply from one another. And then he thrusts, again and again and again until ecstasy overtakes me, until sparks devour every inch of my flesh. The light of our bond consumes me, body and soul. It blankets every valve and chamber of my heart as I come apart. My muscles grip around Ashen as he thickens and spills into me. The orgasm sets off pinpoints of light at the edges of my vision, and it just keeps coming and coming in waves unlike anything I’ve felt before.
The sparks of transformation burn so brightly I can smell them before they fall away around us. The elements of life. Stardust, bursting into flame.
My elemental vampire, I hear from memory.
Time unravels around me. I understand now that the endless loops of it live within our every cell. We can sense the future. We can feel the brush of destiny against our skin. The past is an echo in our veins. And the present is the prism through which our histories and hopes collide.
I realize it now. Ashen and I both knew. We might not have beenaware, but we knew that our threads were tied.
Bianca was right.
Bloodfate is true. We were always meant to come together, even if it took decades of loneliness or centuries of suffering. We were meant to end up exactly where we are.
“Vampire,” Ashen whispers, his length still hard within me as he glides in and out with slow, gentle strokes. “Look at me.”
I open my eyes, not even aware I’d closed them. A blood red fire consumes Ashen’s pupils. But it’s different. The fire looks like liquid as much as it does flame. His eyes bound between mine as he hovers over me. The expression on his face is something I’ve never seen in him. It’s wonder. Awe.
“What do you see?” I ask as I lay my palm against Ashen’s cheek.
“Cinders, faint beneath the red light of your eyes.” He leans down and presses a lingering kiss on my cheekbone and then the other. “So beautiful.”
I say nothing about the change I see in him as I let my fingers trace the contours of Ashen’s face. My touch traces the line of his jaw, dropping down to follow his jugular, then the hard cliff of his collarbone. I sense the ridges of his sternum beneath ink and muscle as I make my way to the freshly healed scar above his heart.
“You don’t just have the marks of your house anymore. You have mine too,” I say, wiping the sticky blood from the entry wound. My brows draw together as the scar is revealed beneath my thumb.
“What is it?” Ashen asks, dipping his head to follow my gaze.
“I… I’ve never seen a mated mark like this.”
