Page 59 of A Heart Of Bitter Poison
With his palms still pressed across my spine, Ashen kisses his way to the center of my chest, then starts a slow path down the center of my body. He follows the line that traces down my stomach. He kisses my belly button as he unzips my jeans and pulls them down. He slows as he goes lower and then stops at the soft ridge of flesh just above the line of my panties.
And then he goes preternaturally still.
The tempo of his thumping heart picks up speed. His shoulders feel hot beneath my hands. Smoke coats the floor as the whole world seems to still.
Ashen presses his forehead to my stomach. When he wraps his arms across the back of my legs and holds me close, his grip hardens like hot stone.
“Reaper?..”
His grip tightens. Smoke erupts behind him like a pyroclastic cloud. Sparks crackle within the billowing shadows.
Something’s not right.
“Ashen?..”
Ashen inhales slowly, and exhales even slower. It’s as though he’s trying to pull the demon back beneath the surface of the man. “I am so sorry, my Lu. I am.” His voice is so thin and strained. I’ve never heard him like this.
I know there’s a lot to be sorry for. Part of me still wants to find a place to put all my blame for everything I’ve suffered, and he’s an easy target. But maybe not everything was his fault. Sometimes, I wonder if just knowing one another is all it took to suck us both into a whirlpool of scalding water. It was never going to be enough to swim for our lives. We were both fated to burn.
“For what?”
Ashen doesn’t answer me with words. He just grips me tighter, pressing his forehead to my flesh. I smell hints of sulfur and salt. A note of sour citrus. These are fear, and rage. This is sorrow.
He stays locked to me for a long, immobile moment. His breathing is off. His body is too hot, his grip too tight. I don’t know what to make of him. He doesn’t let up. And then something wet glides down my skin.Oh my God. “Ashen?”
I lay my hands on his face and sweep my thumbs beneath his eyes, streaking a hot tear across his cheek. “Ashen.”
I push him away enough that I can drop to my knees and hold his face between my palms. He keeps his gaze trained on the shadows beneath us. “What is it?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
Ashen shakes his head.
“Don’t hide from me now,” I whisper. “Look at me.”
He drags his gaze from the floor and his glassy eyes meet mine. The heartbreak in their depths is the kind of grief that never lets go.
“Talk to me, Ashen.”
“You said Gallus…” Ashen takes a strained breath as rage surges against the sorrow and sparks rain across the floor. “You said he cut you open. To see if you could carry a child.”
The memory of that torture is as multifaceted as light fracturing in a prism. The pain of the scalpel. The tang of my blood in the air, burning my own throat with hunger. The feeling of every layer as it was stripped away. Not just skin and muscle and organs, but time and hope and dreams that had long abandoned me. The pain of memory, of how desperately I wanted a child in my early years that I tried everything,everythingto force my body to comply. There was the pain of epiphany, that maybe if they were bothering to look, something might have changed. And then the desperate hope that nothing had.
I swallow a thick knot that tightens in my throat. “Yes.”
“You said they stole. Stole from you,” Ashen says, his rage so burning hot that I almost have to lift my palms from his skin.
I nod as a tear slips from the corner of my eye. I feel like there’s not enough air in the room. I can barely manage a single word, but it finally comes in a stretched whisper. “Yes.”
“Stolewhat, Lu? Were you pregnant?”
I shake my head. It’s with a deep sense of both gratitude and fury to the fates when I tell him, “No, I was not pregnant.”
Maybe it was a chance that might have been, if I’m changing in the most fundamental ways. The curse all vampires suffer, to never conceive, not even a half-breed. Maybe it could have been lifted. But the Shadow Realm stole even that chance from me.
“I never will be pregnant, even if I become something new. Gallus and Ember…”
My chest feels tight and my tongue too thick. Pulsing heartbeats echo in my ears. A line of sweat beads across my hairline. Ashen looks at me with fear in his eyes, real fear, either for what I’ve already told him or what I’ve left unsaid. I swallow and try again.
“They took… they stole from me...”
