Page 54 of Empire of Death
All I had were these moments with her. She’d be someone else’s wife someday. The mother of another man’s children. And I would be trapped in the darkness forevermore. She would spite my memory once she knew my part in all this. This was just a moment, a flicker in time for me, so I needed to savor it as long as it lasted.
I stood from my armchair and scooped her into my arms before I carried her to bed, her arms hooked around my neck and her eyes brilliant in the same yearning I felt in my heart. I laid her on the bed before I undressed. Her shirt and underwear were removed, but her knee-high socks remained before I moved over her, my hips sliding between her soft thighs, my mass making the mattress dip noticeably underneath us both.
She cupped my face, and she kissed me as she slid her fingers into my hair before they explored my shoulders and back, her fingertips pressing into the muscles to feel my strength. She was tall for a woman but felt so petite to me. Her arms were sculpted with muscle and I could see the strength in her legs, but she still felt as fragile as a twig on the forest floor. One wrong step and she would snap in half.
I hooked my arm behind one of her thighs, and I opened her wide so I could sink inside, feel the warm flesh of her paradise.My breath hitched as it always did when I felt her, immediately succumbing to the desire and the love I could never express verbally. I watched her gasp in silence as she felt me invade her, taking all of me even when it hurt, accepting me exactly as I was.
I gave her time to adjust to me, slowly thrusting inside her as the slickness started to rise to come to my aid. Then it was perfect, the connection between our bodies matching the one between our hearts, her petiteness ready to handle my thick girth.
I’d spent the last few hundred years finding a means to an end, fucking quickly and savagely, mostly from behind. After so much time, I needed a release, and I wasn’t picky about who wanted to accommodate that. But Lily had never been an itch I needed to scratch. The moment I laid eyes on her, I wanted all of her. I wanted our eyes to lock, wanted her heart to beat against my chest, wanted the chance to earn another night with her if she felt it too. I’d made love to her the first time I’d had her, and all I ever wanted to do was make love to her. I desired her body, loved the way she looked in nothing but those knee-high socks, but the love I had for her was so much deeper than the flesh.
“Callum.” She whispered my name, the name that would mark my headstone if I had one. But now, no living person knew me by that name except her. A name I’d almost forgotten because it’d been so long since I’d heard it.
I could see the way her eyes started to water again, either from the anticipation of the fall or because she felt exactly what I felt. I’d loved my wife with a pure heart and made the ultimate sacrifice for her. But the love I felt for Lily was so much deeper. She was the woman meant for me. I knew it from the start. And a part of me wondered if this had been part of Bahamut’s plan, another way to torture me. For me to find my soul mate, just to let her go.
“Callum.” She said my name again, her hand cupping my neck like she knew I’d drifted off again. She brought me back to the present, to live in the moment we still had rather than grieve for the time we wouldn’t have together.
I came back to her, eyes locked on hers, watching her take a breath every time I thrust inside her, the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on underneath me, looking at me like I was the stars and she was my sun.
Her thigh was hiked over my hip, and her fingers lightly grazed over my chest as she stared into my eyes. We spent most of our time this way, fully satisfied in comfortable silence, time passing by in a rush even when we did nothing to drive it forward.
“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.” Her fingers continued to brush over my hard chest as a softness entered her gaze. Her fingers eventually came back up my neck until they felt my hard chin. Her eyes moved down to examine my mouth. “All the hearts you must have broken in your time.”
The only heart I’d broken had been my wife’s. Because she’d thought I’d run off with someone else while she lay on her deathbed. Because she’d accepted the lie as easily as if it were truth. As if she didn’t know me at all. “I was never that kind of man.”
“I believe that.” Her fingers continued to graze my jawline.
I didn’t ask or comment about her past relationships. They seemed irrelevant to me. Without asking her about the intensity of her former lovers, I just knew I was the deepest relationshipshe’d ever had. I knew her heart beat for me in a way it never had with anyone else, even though she hadn’t explicitly stated it. It was in the air between us, in our lungs with every breath we took, an endless yearning.
Her fingers suddenly stopped against my chin, and she looked at me again. “You can take me anywhere?”
“I can.”
“So you could take me to distant lands to look for the platinum?”
I nodded. “But it’ll most likely be buried underground and will require miners to reach it. That’s not something you can do alone…at least not efficiently. But now that you know what the substance is, it should be much easier for you to ask your allies to search for it.”
“Yeah, true.”
“And yes, I can take you there and save you a trip on your dragon.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
Something else I wasn’t supposed to do, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
She was quiet as she contemplated to herself in silence. Her eyes were elsewhere, thinking. “Could you take me to the underworld?” She let her words hang between us for a while before she lifted her gaze and looked at me again.
A numbness spread throughout my body until the pain surfaced. “Why would you want to go there?”
“You’ve seen my world. I want to see yours.”
“It’s not my world.”
“But it’s where you are when we’re apart.”
My eyes flicked back and forth between hers. “Every moment we’re apart, my heart is here with you, Lily. There’s nothing for you to see there. Only darkness and despair. Only monsters and every nuance of evil.”
“But I still want to know your world.”
